You can test the assumption that thoughts are yours instead of arguing about it. A short experiment in watching a thought arrive, and noticing when the word mine gets attached.
The question usually arrives in a bad moment. A cruel thought, an intrusive one, something you would never say aloud shows up fully formed, and the obvious follow-up is: does this mean something about me?
You can argue about that, or you can look at how thoughts actually behave.
Sit for a moment and wait for a thought. Not a topic you take up deliberately, just the next one that shows up on its own. It will not take long.
When it appears, ask a narrow question: did you choose it?
Not whether you agree with it, or whether you would act on it. Whether you selected it before it arrived. Whether there was a moment where you considered the options and picked this one.
For nearly everyone, honestly examined, the answer is no. The thought was already there when you noticed it. There was no experience of choosing, no preview, no menu. It appeared the way a sound appears.
Now watch the next part, which is faster and easier to miss.
A thought appears. A fraction of a second later, something adds a label: this is my thought. Sometimes with a verdict attached, this is my thought and it is a bad one.
Watch for the seam. Does the sense of ownership arrive with the thought, built in, or does it get added afterward? Most people, looking carefully, find it is added. The thought comes first. The claim comes second.
This matters practically. If ownership is a second event rather than a property of the first, then the distress that follows a disturbing thought is largely produced by the claiming, not by the thought.
If you did not choose your thoughts, are you responsible for anything?
The experiment does not say that. It says something narrower: the arrival of a thought is not chosen. What happens next often is. You can notice a thought and not act. You can notice it and act. The gap between arrival and action is where anything resembling agency lives, and it is easier to find that gap when you are not busy defending yourself against the arrival.
People who look at this carefully do not generally become passive. They tend to become slightly less reactive, because a thought that is merely appearing is less urgent than a thought that indicts you.
The standard cognitive account is that intrusive thoughts are common, roughly universal, and become a problem mainly through the meaning assigned to them. The content is unremarkable. The interpretation, this thought reveals what I secretly am, is what generates the distress and the compulsive checking.
Direct observation gets to the same place by another route. If you can watch the ownership label being applied, you can see that it is applied to everything indiscriminately, the trivial and the terrible alike. It is not a verdict about content. It is a reflex.
None of this is a substitute for treatment. If intrusive thoughts are dominating your life, the thing that reliably helps is therapy with someone trained in it, not contemplative practice.
There is a tidy ending available here: I am not my thoughts, I am the awareness in which they appear. It is satisfying and it is available cheaply, as a belief, without any looking.
If you find yourself repeating it, check it. Where is that awareness? Look for it the same way you looked for the chooser. If you find something, it is an object like the thought was. If you find nothing, notice that you have not gained a new identity, you have lost track of an old one. Those are different, and the difference is easy to paper over with a phrase.
Three of the experiments on this site take this apart step by step:
If the broader question interests you, how to do self-inquiry covers the general method.
Try it guided