Thinking

You may notice that I don't capitalize ocd; there's a reason for that.  I don't believe it deserves the respect of being typed grammatically correct.  A therapist once told me that it's OK to get mad at ocd.  I have mixed feelings about using anger as a motivating factor but there may be some truth to what the therapist said.

One of the great traps of ocd is to get you to think and think about what's bothering you; ocd is damn good at that.  My dad recently said to me, "you cannot rationally reason with ocd for it's not rational".  A good comparison is expecting a toddler to drive you to work and getting really upset at the child when they are not able to.  You could talk and talk to that toddler but nothing would change and you'd end up getting yourself even more worked up.

I woke up this morning with an ocd obsession and started to try to think my way out of it.  We are thinking creatures so it's only natural that I'd do this.  I had to stop myself and remind myself that I can't reason with ocd.  You can overcome ocd and I'm not trying to say that you should just give up when an ocd obsession bothers you, rather don't try to reason with it as you would a non-ocd concern.  I'd suggest being very clinical about how you reason with it and not to become emotionally attached to the ocd obsession (easier said than done).  The feelings and emotions that an obsession evokes are felt just as much if not more than a non-ocd concern so it can become very difficult to not become emotionally attached to the obsession.  I often find that it's best to not think about the ocd obsession that's bothering me and to let the answer on how to deal with it come to me.  This too can be much easier said than done.  If an obsession is causing you a great deal of stress and anxiety you don't want to wait for the emotions to pass you want to make them go away and thinking is our default method of doing this.