You're not a bad person

Hi everyone! Right, so I'm going to try to post twice a week from now on. I've been having a bit of a hard time as some of you may know but things are slowly calming down. Please feel free to send me a message or contact me through any of the social media if you're also going through a tough time and want to talk (or if you just want to talk!).

I wanted to talk about this because I know a lot of people who struggle with many different mental illnesses, from depression to BPD and many others, have these sort of thoughts. I know I do. It is the idea that our thoughts and the content of them define whether we are a good person or not. So I wanted to raise this topic as food for thought (very appropriate phrase in this case).

We all have thoughts of every sort and feelings of every sort. And we need to stop categorising feelings and thoughts into either 'good' or 'bad'.

There are not good or bad feelings, they are just feelings – they may be more or less welcomed or more or less positive.

Thoughts may have a more or less positive nature but they should not be labeled as good or bad since they are simply thoughts.

In many mental illnesses  you can sometimes feel as if what you are thinking defines what you are. So if you have thoughts related to for example wishing something bad for a person you may feel as if that makes you a bad person for thinking that sort of stuff. Whereas the truth is everyone has those thoughts, but they just may not give them much importance.

I remember during my grandmother's last year of life, she was a very manipulative person (and had always been). We were all concerned about her and went visit her and just ignored it when she said mean things. But I remember at times thinking that she didn't deserve everyone visiting her because she had done horrible things (which she had). But then I felt as a bad person for thinking those things. I'm sure my mother and my uncles all thought the same thing at times. But the difference was that I gave power to this thought, I gave it power by thinking that it defined me, that it defined who I was. But it doesn't.

In BPD this sort of thinking might be exacerbated because of the white/black thinking and the tendency we have to categorize things as either good or bad.

I have heard people struggling with depression claiming that they are bad people because they have very 'bad thoughts'. But these thoughts don't make you the person that you are. It is your actions that define you, not your thoughts.