In a previous article, I introduced the idea that responding to OCD thoughts is a mistake. As I am unable to reliably tell which thoughts are caused by my OCD, and which thoughts are ‘natural’, this means that any of my thoughts could be an OCD thought, and should be treated as such.
In the first part, I will talk about how I was reacting to OCD thoughts, what is and isn’t a response, and what was driving me to engage in compulsions. Then in the second part I will talk about what I have learnt about alternative ways in which I can react to these thoughts.
Before this though, I will give an example of a thought that I have had, so I can then follow that thought, and the way in which I reacted to it, through this article.
An Example of a Thought:
Truth be told, I really struggle to think of a thought that I feel comfortable sharing. Some I am too ashamed to share. Others I worry are too minor and that using those may give the impression that my experiences of OCD are too minor to apply to other people’s situations, because they are different and actually did do something awful (a very common thing to think for those with OCD). Then there are those thoughts that are simply too stupid to be worth talking about. Perhaps I can cover some of the stupid ones (or at least those that are most overtly stupid) another time.
On top of these issues there is also my fear of triggering someone, or of supplying their brain with new and exciting ways to make themselves miserable. Plus as soon as I try to think of thoughts my mind goes blank. The one time I actually want to think about them!
My worries about what to share are an example of the delicate balancing act between not validating my OCD, whilst also not ignoring valid concerns. A major part of my OCD recovery has been due to learning to accept uncertainty. That includes accepting that by choosing not to respond to my thoughts, I may at times ignore valid concerns.
I do still want to ensure that I am doing as good a job of writing this as possible, and to ensure that I am not being careless. However, I don’t want to let these worries take over. I therefore want to be careful and responsible, whilst also having conviction and not becoming paralysed with indecision. That means that while I do sometimes listen to my worries, I do my best not to agonise over them. So I will try to make a decision on what thought to share, and then stick with it, without further deliberation.
Let’s go with this though then: Sometimes, the thought appears in my head that I could have caused someone to commit suicide due to something I did. Perhaps I was mean, or thoughtless, or did something ‘selfish’, like buying the last item of something in a shop and depriving someone else of it. Could this have been the final straw for someone?
More specifically, a thought I had was this: ‘This mean comment I made could have caused someone to commit suicide. If so, I am responsible for that. If that is indeed the case, then I am an awful person. I am undeserving of any happiness, and I can never make up for this. My life is therefore a lie and everyone would hate me if they knew the truth. Any possibility that it is true is the same as it being true. My life will therefore be over unless I can prove that this is not the case.’
Reacting to OCD Thoughts vs Responding to them:
My initial reaction to these thoughts is how they cause me to feel. This is usually some mixture of uncertainty, anxiety, and panic. In the example I gave for instance, I suspect I mainly felt anxious and guilty. I felt scared that I would be arrested (looking back perhaps not a particularly rational response), and a sickly panic and sense of loss at the idea that my life was now over because of what I had (potentially) done, or because I would never be able to know for sure whether they had killed themself or not.
This reaction is certainly not pleasant, but it is not the response that perpetuates the cycle of my OCD and these thoughts. Having a negative emotional response to negative thoughts is completely natural, nor am I able to control it (at least not directly).
I am therefore able to sympathise with myself, without validating the thought itself. I can allow myself to think ‘well that was an unpleasant thought, I can understand why I feel upset’. That is fine. It is anything more than this where problems arise. For instance, when I allow these feelings to provoke me into responding.
So while I cannot control my immediate emotional response, I don’t need to (although I will say that it would be nice if I could). What I can control is how I respond to the thought, and these feelings.
Is Responding to a Thought the same as a Compulsion?
Yes. When I talk about responses, I mean things that I do due to having had the thought. For example, if when I fear that I have done something awful, I check, or try to disprove or downplay this fear, that is a compulsion.
I may respond because I feel compelled to do so, or because it seems like the right thing to do, or for some other reason. Whatever the reason though, they are still compulsions.
What was Causing me to Respond to these Thoughts?
As I have previously mentioned, these thoughts are negative and unpleasant, and if I could control whether or not I have them, I certainly wouldn’t choose to have them. Despite this though, once I have had the thought, it is very difficult not to engage with them. So why do I respond to them?
Primarily, it is because the thought and the emotions it provokes, feel so overwhelmingly awful, that I feel like I have to prove that it isn’t true/that bad. I feel like I cannot live with the uncertainty. The idea that I could not respond, and accept that this thought could be true, felt impossible. I have come to understand that it is in fact possible, albeit I still struggle to do this consistently.
The other reason why I would tell myself I was responding, was due to a sense of moral duty to establish ‘the truth’. My mind told me that even if I could choose not to respond, and let the thought and emotions fade, it would be wrong to do so. I felt that was unacceptable to live a happy life as if I were a good person, if in fact I was not. Therefore I had to discover the truth to be able to move on and live my life.
Beyond this though, responding was simply what I did. It was a habit that I had formed, that happened automatically without me questioning it.
Finally, my OCD demanded that I respond to my thoughts. As much as my OCD might profess to there being a good reason for me to respond, this was a facade to cover for the underlying urge.
Why else do I feel the need to go over old worries again, when I know I have gone over them before, and that the best way to make the negative feelings go away is to not respond? My OCD may tell me that it’s because my previous checks may have been wrong, so I should do it again. That feels weak though, even to me.
What Compulsions did I engage in?
Anything can be, or become, a compulsion if it is routinely done in response to a thought.
Whether it is done as a coping mechanism to alleviate the negative feelings, because it feels like the logical thing to do in response to a thought, or for any other reason, when it becomes an urge, there is a good chance that it is a compulsion.
Examples of compulsions that I engaged in in response to this thought are:
- Checking to see whether I could see any signs of activity, that would prove they were still alive.
- Ruminating over the thought again and again, to try and come up with a suitable moral framework with which to judge different potential outcomes and their meanings. In this case, trying to prove that even if they had committed suicide, that my actions were not bad enough to make me morally responsible for it.
- Reassurance seeking: telling myself that they almost certainly didn’t kill themselves, and that I am worrying over nothing.
- Promises of atonement. Telling myself that I deserve a second chance, because I feel really bad about what I did and that I will do whatever it takes to make up for it.
What does this actually look like?
I may respond with individual thoughts such as ‘They almost certainly didn’t kill themselves’. Or ‘if they did it wasn’t really my fault, I was just unlucky, and what I actually did wasn’t that bad’.
If any particular thought doesn’t do the trick, I would end up using a combination of measures. For instance, ‘They probably didn’t kill themselves, I certainly didn’t mean to cause it if they did, and wouldn’t have done it had I known what would happen, and actually what I did wasn’t that bad, and even if it was I was ignorant and I feel really bad about it now and I will do whatever it takes to make it right, just please can this overwhelming, unbearable weight of guilt on my mind please go away’.
I can go over and over these thoughts, in order to reassure my mind, until I am satisfied enough to stop. This can also involve times where I go over the thought ‘successfully’, only to then feel the urge to go through it all over again soon, due to my anxiety spiking again for whatever reason. It can also involve unsuccessful attempts, that can set me back, and can lead to me going over it all over again just to get back to where I was.
What I am ultimately doing is going through the thought, until it feels ‘right’. Eventually, I will be able to go through the thought without triggering too much anxiety. When this happens and everything seems to be in order, then I may be in the clear. That or I will feel the need to go over it all over again later for no particular reason other than the fact that the anxiety has returned, and my mind demands that I do so.
That is to say that performing compulsions does sort of work in the short-term. It is exhausting and deeply unpleasant, but eventually I will be able to move on. The problem is though, that I am moving on straight into the path of the next thought, like something out of a cartoon involving rakes and possibly an anvil. Which is to say that more accurately speaking, it doesn’t work. The idea that eventually I would end up in the clear, if only the stars would align, was not the answer.
Who is the judge? And by whose standards was I judging myself?
Now, the first thing to make clear is that I should not have been doing this at all. The urge to analyse these worries and come to a conclusion about their consequences in order to satisfy my anxieties is clearly a compulsion. Seeing as I have already done it though, it’s interesting to reflect on what I was doing.
What I came to realise was that I was not judging myself according to my own beliefs and values, but instead according to how I believed other people would think of me if they knew ‘the truth’.
To a degree, this makes sense. Being a good person is very important to me (which is what makes it so easy for my OCD to exploit), so I don’t want to let myself off the hook if I have in fact done something wrong. The idea that I did something awful, but that some people don’t care about morality, is not a comfort to me. I therefore want to judge myself by high standards.
However, this is not what I was actually doing. Instead, I was allowing my OCD to exploit the uncertainty created by not knowing how this hypothetical person would think, to push its own worst-case scenario. It also allowed my OCD to keep shifting the goalposts, by changing what this hypothetical person would think, so I ‘had to’ go over the thought all over again.
So how did it actually play out?
If you were wondering, I made the comment to someone who had insulted me a couple of times online for no reason. I was also feeling low at the time (a fact which is both somewhat relevant and also a form of justification/reassurance).
I responded something along the lines of ‘your life must be pretty pathetic for you to bully people for fun’. I regretted it immediately and apologised profusely (and from a judgemental perspective, pathetically).
I then spent several days trying to check whether or not they were still online in order to reassure myself that they hadn’t killed themself (I couldn’t be 100% sure). After some worrying, leaving the platform, some worries that the police would come around to arrest me (because as we all know that’s their standard operating procedure for mean comments online), and plenty of compulsions, eventually the worry faded away.
Mainly this was because I did manage to reassure myself. Perhaps it was also because there was nothing new left to do or think on the topic, so my mind moved on to newer, fresher worries.
The worry did reoccur a few times, but not nearly as badly. Eventually I even plucked up the courage to return to the platform (‘the scene of the crime’), which, in case you were wondering, didn’t provoke a police response.
Did they commit suicide? I highly doubt it, but I guess I will never know for sure. I don’t like that thought, but I can live with it. Do I think that my actions should spell the end of my life or my chance of happiness? No (at least not at the moment, although I am sure given the chance to work at it, my OCD could present an alternative point of view).
Is even asking those questions a compulsion? Probably, although I have an excuse in that I am writing this.
Overall I did not handle this thought properly at all. I responded to the thought, and in so doing served to legitimise and validate it. As such, while the thought did go away, it wasn’t for the right reasons, and responding to the thought both prolonged it, and served to encourage future thoughts.
So where am I now?
I have made progress, but I am still not reacting to all of my thoughts in the correct way.
For this particular thought, I can live with the uncertainty of not knowing, and even if my brain is feeling a bit itchy when I think about it now, and wants to go through the thought again, I am not going to do so. I can accept that this worry exists, and not need to go over it. This is a far better way of reacting to it, and before writing this, it was probably months since it last crossed my mind.
There are other thoughts though where this is much harder to do. Some thoughts I do still respond to sometimes.
There are also thoughts that I don’t go through fully but I still rely on previous compulsions at times, for instance, by saying ‘I have been through this before, it was fine then, so I don’t need to go through it again now’.
On the plus side this is quicker and easier, and means that I am spending far less time stuck with these thoughts, have more energy, and am generally happier. Despite this though, it is not the correct way to deal with them. This is both because it only works on reoccurring thoughts, and validates the idea that I have to know that the thought is not an issue in order to get on with my life.
Overall then, I have made a lot of progress. I can avoid responding to many of my thoughts entirely, and even when I do respond, it is generally a much ‘shallower’ response, without really having to get right into the depths of it. I do still have further to go however, and I am confident that I will get there.
In the next part, I will start to talk about what a different reaction to these thoughts could have looked like.
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