Skip to main content

What If?

If you have OCD, the question of 'what if?' pops up in your brain quite a bit. So often that we become unaware of the chatter it's creating in the background. The last post, 'The Other OCD', briefly mentioned some of the thoughts that people with OCD experience. The list is far from comprehensive.

A common reaction to the intrusive thoughts (obsessions) mentioned in the previous post is, "what if I'm the exception and I'm really a bad person?", "what if I'm one of the few people that feels horrible about these thoughts but I don't really have OCD?", "what if I secretly like having the thoughts?", "what if I seek help and the therapist reports me to the police?" 

An example of a very common intrusive thought is "what if I were to harm someone?". It's an intrusive thought that isn't an OCD thought, it's a human thought. All people, those with OCD and those without OCD, have intrusive thoughts even that thought. The difference is that this thought typically doesn't get more than an, "oh, that was strange...what was I going to get for lunch" response from the brain of a person without OCD. For those of us with OCD what can happen is the thought will get stuck in our head (thus the reason it's called an obsession) because of the anxiety, fear, and/or guilt that it produces.

The presence of the bad feelings that you experience would, for most people, be a strong indication that the bad thought goes against what you value; your internal moral compass. However OCD will trick you into trying to think your way out of the 'problem' created by the existence of the bad thought. Well, there is no problem and there's no need to think your way out of anything; that method only feeds OCD and makes the thought more intense and occur more frequently. It's so easy to buy into the pattern of trying to think your way out of the 'problem' because of the bad feelings that you are experiencing because of the thought. OCD wants you to believe that this thought represents a real 'problem' and that you need to do something about it. The irony is that not responding to the thought takes away OCD's power.

Intrusive thoughts don't belong to OCD. They are part of being a human being with a working brain. Intrusive thoughts turn into obsessions when they occur again and again and again in the brain. You can't control what you think but you can control how you respond to the thoughts.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

ROCD (Relationship OCD)

Relationship OCD is the term given to obsessions that focus on: fear of getting in a romantic relationship, fear that you are in the wrong relationship, fear that you don't love the person that you are with, fear that having romantic feelings for someone other than your significant other means that there's something wrong with the relationship you are in. By no means is this a complete list of fears but I hope you get the idea. Relationship OCD is something that really bothered me at one time. It still bubbles up from time to time but not with the intensity or frequency that it used to. I remember experiencing a lot of sadness and pain with this obsession. When it first started bothering me, my fiance meant everything to me and I felt so alone and helpless because I had been able to talk to her about what was bothering me. This was so different than other OCD obsessions because I could at least talk to her about them or let her know what was bothering me. With ROCD I felt that ...

Feeding an Obsession

Which comes first? Factually speaking the obsession comes first and is followed by compulsions. It's easy to know this to be true when not caught in an ocd loop, but when in the loop it can be hard to remember. What's in our control is not the obsession but the action, mental or physical, to act on a compulsion. We can't stop thoughts, and that's exactly what an obsession is. The compulsion may appear to be a thought, but it's a thought masquerading as a mental behavior. You may likely know all of this already - I'm writing this more to remind myself than anything else. So if the obsession comes first, is beyond our control, and is followed by compulsions what's a person to do? The answer is to stop doing the compulsion - often much easier said than done, but still very much possible. The perfectionist in those of us with ocd may attempt or try to stop all compulsions but I think this ends up putting more pressure on us than anything else. Do your best ...