This morning, the CNN site cleared up a misunderstanding that many people probably share with me. Ruminating and fretting about real experiences and worries, it may feel intrusive but that isn’t what is thought by that, says CNN’s Kristen Rogers.

When I was a youngster, I would sometimes have this fleeting fear that an invisible hand would push me into traffic and that I couldn’t stop it, as if a hurricane-force wind was blowing. That’s an example of an intrusive thought. At the time, I thought that I must have had a nightmare and that that is where it came from. I wasn’t living in an area that was known for strong winds. My mother was very concerned about the busy traffic on the road we lived on. Maybe that was the source of these irrational thoughts.

After I moved from Southampton to Portsmouth, where I became subjected to a lot of sadism and violations of my boundaries, including lock-picking, it happened to me once or twice that I was walking behind someone on crutches and the following sudden thought would pop up. “What if I kicked the crutches away?” I was appalled. It was not something that I would ever do in real life but I found it very unpleasant. That’s another example of an intrusive thought.

Mine are mostly about fretting whether I have accidentally upset or hurt someone, I think. They aren’t necessarily as irrational as they might seem. A few months ago, I said something to a woman behind a counter, one of the two owners of a shop. After I walked out of the shop, it hit me that what I had said could have been interpreted in two different ways. I walked back into the shop and said “hey, I didn’t mean this, I meant that.” She was amazed. You see, she had taken it the wrong way and she was feeling a little hurt.

I think I will happily continue to have a few intrusive thoughts about whether I have accidentally hurt someone, even though it makes me feel silly because nobody’s ever said something like that to me or even apologized for something truly hurtful they did. Some people believe that caring means that you signal that it is okay for others to walk all over you. It’s merely a matter of how big an ego you have, or of how secure you feel in yourself, irrespective of what others do to you.

But don’t callously violate my boundaries and think you can walk all over me.