Ego-dystonic Thoughts - an internal struggle
Ego-dystonic thoughts refer to thoughts, impulses, or ideas that are inconsistent or in conflict with a person's fundamental beliefs, attitudes, values, and self-image. They are unwanted and when meaning is attached to the occurrence of these thoughts, they cause significant distress and discomfort for the individual and can result in what feels like an internal tug of war. This internal struggle and resultant difficult emotions and distress is exhausting because it's like a battle between your true self, values, intent, desire, and beliefs, and how our very complex thinking machine can be very creative and inventive with the random thoughts it produces. When you really think about it, we need the ability to have spontaneous thoughts in order to be creative and solve problems because this is how we can imagine new ideas and invent. Without this capacity we would have no movies or fiction writing portraying terrifying stories etc. The brain needs to generate thousands of thoughts every day and not all of those thoughts will even come into our awareness or be aligned with our values, intentions, or desires.