Are you struggling with intrusive thoughts and you spend a lot of time figuring out their meaning? Do you often engage in rituals and compulsive behaviours such as hand washing, checking the door is locked, compulsive cleaning?
Obsessive compulsive disorder known as OCD can affect your life significantly. You can feel like you lost control over your thoughts and you can spend most of your time engaging in rituals or mental acts such as counting which may be preventing you from living your life the way you would like to.
What is important to remember is that we all experience intrusive thoughts and it is actually more common than you think. Just because people do not share them, does not mean they do not experience them. The difference is, that most people can recognise their intrusive thoughts and move on, while people experiencing symptoms consistent with OCD can spend hours worrying about the meaning behind those thoughts and what their presence means about them as human beings. Also, due to the discomfort those intrusive thoughts cause, people experiencing such symptoms can try their hardest to get rid of them. Unfortunately, just as with the quicksand, where the more you move the more you sink – the same may apply to our thoughts – the more one tries to suppress their thoughts, the more power they receive and they come back with even more persistence causing the opposite effect to what one might want to achieve.
What we can usually observe in terms of behaviour are rituals or compulsive behaviours such as constant hand washing or double checking whether the door is locked, hob is turned off etc. What is also common is magical thinking, so for example following certain acts for good luck or to avoid bad luck.
The longer those symptoms are not being addressed, the more they can increase in intensity and frequency. Therefore, it is important to use therapy or access self-help resources to understand your symptoms and break the maintenance cycle.
For example, the way I would work with my clients would be to learn together how to accept intrusive thoughts and treat them like a wave in the stormy sea or the passing cloud in the sky rather than something they need to get rid of using mental force. We might also come up with behavioural experiments which will help us to take significant steps forward to overcome the urges to engage in compulsive behaviour.
But most importantly – no matter the content of your thoughts you are struggling with or the lack of logic behind behaviours you engage in, there is nothing to be ashamed of. Therapy or other resources can help you understand thoughts are just thoughts and through behavioural experiments appropriate for your needs and challenges you can break free from OCD.