Ocd Thoughts Quotes

Thoughts are only thoughts. They are not you. You do belong to yourself, even when your thoughts don't.

Carrying all of these thoughts is downright heavy.

People who live with OCD drag a metal sea anchor around. Obsession is a break, a source of drag, not a badge of creativity, a mark of genius or an inconvenient side effect of some greater function.

OCD focuses on the negative. I didn't think to myself, My praying will save my grandma. Instead, I thought, If I don't pray, my grandma will die for sure.

The return of the voices would end in a migraine that made my whole body throb. I could do nothing except lie in a blacked-out room waiting for the voices to get infected by the pains in my head and clear off. Knowing I was different with my OCD, anorexia and the voices that no one else seemed to hear made me feel isolated, disconnected. I took everything too seriously. I analysed things to death. I turned every word, and the intonation of every word over in my mind trying to decide exactly what it meant, whether there was a subtext or an implied criticism. I tried to recall the expressions on people’s faces, how those expressions changed, what they meant, whether what they said and the look on their faces matched and were therefore genuine or whether it was a sham, the kind word touched by irony or sarcasm, the smile that means pity. When people looked at me closely could they see the little girl in my head, being abused in those pornographic clips projected behind my eyes? That is what I would often be thinking and such thoughts ate away at the façade of self-confidence I was constantly raising and repairing. (describing dissociative identity disorder/mpd symptoms)

It would've been the perfect time to tell her. To tell anyone. To say, 'I'm drowning and I need someone, anyone, to be my life raft.' To say, 'I thought it had gone, and it hasn't and I'm so scared by what that means.' To say, 'I just want to be normal, why won't my head let me be normal?

In job interviews they’d ask me, What’s your greatest weakness? and I’d explain that I’ll probably spend a good portion of the workday terrorized by thoughts I’m forced to think, possessed by a nameless and formless demon, so if that’s going to be an issue, you might not want to hire me.

how very, very tired I am with this hidden battle for my own thoughts, the burden of counting, the work it takes to hide it.

An average person can have four thousand thoughts a day, and not all of them are useful or rational.

The real problem with his type of OCD--chronic fear of hurting other people--was that you thought so much about not running over children, not sideswiping pedestrians, not poisoning strangers with germs on your hands--essentially not killing a world full of strangers--that you ended up hurting the people you loved most. He saw that now.

Statistics say that a range of mental disorders affects more than one in four Americans in any given year. That means millions of Americans are totally batshit. but having perused the various tests available that they use to determine whether you're manic depressive. OCD, schizo-affective, schizophrenic, or whatever, I'm surprised the number is that low. So I have gone through a bunch of the available tests, and I've taken questions from each of them, and assembled my own psychological evaluation screening which I thought I'd share with you. So, here are some of the things that they ask to determine if you're mentally disordered 1. In the last week, have you been feeling irritable? 2. In the last week, have you gained a little weight? 3. In the last week, have you felt like not talking to people? 4. Do you no longer get as much pleasure doing certain things as you used to? 5. In the last week, have you felt fatigued? 6. Do you think about sex a lot? If you don't say yes to any of these questions either you're lying, or you don't speak English, or you're illiterate, in which case, I have the distinct impression that I may have lost you a few chapters ago.

The baby was warm against my chest. I knew I was broken too. I wasn't like other people. I was scared and weird and anxious and sad lots of the time, and I didn't know why. My parents thought I was abnormal, I was pretty sure. They said I wasn't, but you don't get sent to a therapist if you're normal. Sometimes we really aren't supposed to be the way we are. It's not good for us. And people don't like it. You've got to change. You've got to try harder and do deep breathing and maybe one day take pills and learn tricks so you can pretend to be more like other people. Normal people. But maybe Vanessa was right, and all those other people were broken too in their own ways. Maybe we all spent too much time pretending we weren't.

People who live with OCD drag a mental sea anchor around. Obsession is a brake, a source of drag, not a badge of creativity, a mark of genius or an inconvenient side effect of some greater function.

Mind over matter represents the triumph of will over physical hindrance. Our thoughts are our weapon against the world.

Don’t attach significance to it. If it loses its power to be scary, it won’t hurt you anymore.

My compulsive thoughts aren't even thoughts, they're absolute certainties and obeying them isn't a choice.

I am better. I don't know whether it's for good, or if one day something might make me abnormal again. But that's the funny thing about living. If you do it properly, you don't know how the next sentence will begin.

I try Dr. Pat's breathing exercises but they're not working because my entire mind is focused on keeping myself glued to the couch. I don't want to move any closer to the bathroom just in case. But I hate myself for the thought. I know it's not right or normal. I know I'm not simply some cute quirky girl like Beck says, and every moment I can't get off the couch is a moment that makes me one level crazier. That heavy, pre-crying feeling floods my sinuses and I drop my head from the weight of it. Cover my face with my hands long enough to get out a cry or two. Because there is nothing, nothing worse than not being able to undo the crazy thoughts. I ask them to leave, but they won't. I try to ignore them, but the only thing that works is giving in to them. Torture: knowing something makes no sense, doing it anyway.

Because facts are information we can learn from to adjust or inform our behavior in the future. Thoughts, on the other hand, hold the same weight as dreams. They’re in our brain, so they seem real, but they’re not. They’re quite literally figments of our imagination.

I have existed for twenty-one years. I didn’t live them all, but from now on I am hoping to.

I really didn’t want to see a horror flick, even a stupid one. I didn’t need any more fodder for my already gory imagination.

I’d love to return my brain to factory settings.

Reassurance, like offence, is taken not given.

I realized that I was okay with myself. I was quirky and withdrawn and loud, but I liked that. I smiled at strangers without thinking they were going to attack me and drag me into their cars. I went to doctors’ offices and touched magazines that had been touched by sick people.

Happiness to me isn't a presence, it's an absence. The absence of worry, of fear of sadness, the thoughts and compulsions that led my life for so long. I'd worked hard to get myself to where I was right now. I'd pulled myself out of the chaos of my own mind - and routine is what got me there.

Some people with OCD are compelled to pick up pieces of broken glass from the street. They worry that, if they don’t, then someone else might cut themselves on the glass. If the person with OCD fails to prevent that happening, they think, well I may as well have walked up to the stranger and deliberately hurt them. So they take

I can’t believe he’s going along with this.” She flops on her bed, then wrinkles her forehead and stares at the mattress. “Did you make my bed?” “Yes,” I say sheepishly, but she doesn’t seem pissed. I’d already warned her that my OCD might rear its incredibly tidy head every now and then, and so far she hasn’t batted an eye when it happens. The only items on her don’t-touch-or-I’ll-fuck-you-up list are her shoes and her iTunes music library. “Wait, but you didn’t fold my laundry?” She mock gasps. “What the hell, Grace? I thought we were friends.” I stick out my tongue. “I’m not your maid. Fold your own damn laundry.” Daisy’s eyes gleam. “So you’re telling me you can look at that basket overflowing with fresh-from-the-dryer clothes—” she gestures to the basket in question “—and you aren’t the teensiest bit tempted to fold them? All those shirts…forming wrinkles as we speak. Lonely socks…longing for their pairs—” “Let’s fold your laundry,” I blurt out. A gale of laughter overtakes her small body. “That’s what I thought.

She tells me that over time doing these lists will make us perfect, but it’s little consolation. Every day feels like an unrelenting slog of words generated, letters compiled, actions reviewed—with nothing to show for it but exhaustion and despair.

My room’s a mess. I scurry around, scooping up piles of clothes and stuffing them into the laundry hamper. “I thought people with OCD were supposed to be neat,” she says. “Popular misconception,” I say as I kick all the textbooks strewn across the floor into a haphazard pile.

Sometimes my thoughts were hard to digest. Sometimes my brain would get stuck on a concept that troubled me and would create endless rabbit holes in my head. It seemed like the more I tried to find an answer, the more complicated it would become. And sometimes unsettling images would randomly flash into my head. I didn’t want to describe what they were. I knew the images weren’t true, but they often made me feel uneasy.

It's a thousand tiny impulses, building on one another. First you decide it's a good idea to check the oatmeal bin for bugs. Next you're going through all the canisters, and before you know it, you're wearing a hazmat suit and examining the frosted flakes for ground-up glass. Each action further enforces the obsessive-compulsive circuit. When the disease is full-blown, sufferers are firmly entrenched in the neural loops that make them repeat thoughts and actions over and over. In other words, your brain keeps getting back in line for the same carnival ride it didn't enjoy in the first place. You lose your sunglasses, you throw up on your shirt, and two minutes later you're back on the Whizzer. Wheeee.

Someone asked me recently, what it is like to live with OCD. I paused for a while and said, imagine watching your sibling getting run over by a truck in front of your eyes, not once, not twice, but repeatedly like in a looped video, or your child getting beaten up at school, or your partner getting abused by strangers on the street - and the only way you can stop that event from happening is to keep on repeating the task that you were carrying out when the vision first appeared in your mind, until some other less emotionally agonizing thought breaks the loop of that particular vision and replaces it - and though you know, it's just a thought and not the destiny of the people you love, you feel it excruciatingly necessary to keep repeating the task until the thought passes, so that nothing bad happens to your loved ones - and that's what it is like inside the head of a person with OCD, every moment of their life.

One day, I just decided to see how long I could go without eating. I never thought I was fat; if anything, my lack of boobs and scrawny legs told me that I was actually too skinny, but being extra-OCD about food soon became my thing. It gave me something to think about all day and it was a secret that I could obsess over without anyone else knowing.

There must be a way of dealing with worries that doesn’t involve checking with everyone whether you have done something wrong. What could it be?

But she hasn’t done us a favour, because it is Classic FM, and they are playing fucking Vivaldi.

There’s me, finally seen as I should be, twisted into something as monstrous as I feel.

What I experience is so unlike the OCD people have on TV. Have they got it right?

takes a lot of energy to be a good person all the time and never show a trace of annoyance, and there are times, like just now, when my mask slips.

I suppose I should be thankful that if I have to go mad, at least I get to do it in a fashionable, aristocratic way.

I’d love to learn everything all over again, but learn it right this time. I’d love to return my brain to factory settings.

...Even though mental health is still the elephant in this room, the room is trying to accommodate the elephant, which is more than I expected.

I have existed for 21 years. I didn't live them all, but from now on I am hoping to.

I couldn’t escape the spiral of my thoughts, and I felt like they were coming from the outside.

When I spend uninterrupted time with other people, a dam builds in my head. It can hold the words back for a while, but at some point they’ll surge free and overflow, and there will be chaos.

[I]f he had to guess, he would say that the reason he doesn't want to loan the book out, to Ethan or anyone else, is because of the part of his personality that is one gigantic record-keeping system, a complex sifting and filing scheme that dictates what goes here and what goes there, turning his life into so many marks on a tablet. His mind would busy itself with the book's whereabouts every second it was away. He knows it would.

By [anticipatory anxiety] I mean that the patient reacts to an event with a fearful expectation of its recurrence. However, fear tends to make happen precisely that which one fears, and so does anticipatory anxiety. Thus a vicious circle is established. A symptom evokes a phobia and the phobia provokes the symptom. The recurrence of the symptom then reinforces the phobia. The patient is caught in a cocoon. […] [Obsessive-compulsives] fear the potential effects or the potential cause of the strange thoughts. The phobic pattern of flight from fear is paralleled by the obsessive-compulsive pattern. Obsessive-compulsive neurotics also display fear. But theirs is not 'fear of fear' but rather fear of themselves, and their response is to fight against obsessions and compulsions. But the more the patients fight, the stronger their symptoms become. In other words, alongside the circle formation built up by anticipatory anxiety in phobic cases, there is another feedback mechanism which we encounter in the obsessive-compulsive neurotic. Pressure induces counter-pressure, and counter-pressure, in turn, increases pressure. If one succeeds in making the patient stop fighting his obsessions and compulsions -- and this may well be accomplished by paradoxical intention -- these symptoms soon diminish and finally atrophy.

I feel so terrible.” “Why?” “For not noticing.” “You couldn’t have. I live my life trying to come across as normal. All my energy seems to go into making sure no one does notice anything at all. If you knew, that would have meant I’d failed.

These choices are part of the butterfly effect of my life, whether I like it or not. If I make the wrong decision, it will affect the rest of my day. It sounds crazy, but I know from experience the complete and utter devastation caused by one misplaced judgement.

If I'd been the author, I would've stopped thinking about my microbiome. I would've told Daisy how much I liked her idea for Mychal's art project, and I would've told her that I did remember Davis Pickett, that I remembered being eleven and carrying a vague but constant fear. I would've told her that I remembered once at camp lying next to Davis on the edge of a dock, our legs dangling over, our backs against the rough-hewn planks of wood, staring together up at a cloudless summer sky. I wouldv'e told her that Davis and I never talked much, or even looked at each other, but it didn't mater, because we were looking at the same sky together, which is maybe more intimate than eye contact anyway. Anybody can look at you. It's quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you see.

How can I stop it?” “When the thought comes,” says Dr. Finch, “don’t push it away. That will make it worse. Just think ‘Oh look. It’s that thought again. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s not me.’ Don’t attach significance to it. If it loses its power to be scary, it won’t hurt you anymore.

I will miss Frankie. She was constant and unavoidable in a way even my routines couldn’t destroy. She fizzed with life and a lust for fun. She stretched her hand out to a version of myself I thought I’d lost forever, held me tight, and then, when I least expected it, pulled me back from the brink.

Do you think that I wake up in the morning and say, ‘You know what would be really fun, let’s spend hours and hours locked in my head, let’s not leave my room, and hey, while we’re at it, let’s cut out all the people who care, because there really is nothing better, no, I cannot think of anything I would like to do more,

Years later, a different therapist asked her exactly what she was afraid of. Varya was initially stumped, not because she didn’t know what she was afraid of but because it was harder to think of what she wasn’t. “So give me some examples,” said the therapist, and that night Varya made a list. Cancer. Climate change. Being the victim of a car crash. Being the cause of a car crash. (There was a period when the thought of killing a bicyclist while making a right turn caused Vaya to follow any bicyclist for blocks, checking again and again to make sure she hadn’t.) Gunmen, Plane crashes – sudden doom! People wearing Band-Aids. AIDS ¬¬- really, all types of viruses and bacteria and disease. Infecting someone else. Dirty surfaces, soiled linens, bodily secretions. Drugstores and pharmacies. Ticks and bedbugs and lice. Chemicals. The homeless. Crowds. Uncertainty and risk and open-ended endings. Responsibility and guilt. She is even afraid of her own mind. She is afraid of its power, of what it does to her.

TOILET: We came out the toilet, and Ellie was waiting outside the door to use it. We’d only done a pee, but suddenly we felt like we had done a huge shit and it was all over the whole toilet, the walls and the floor. We needed to go back and check. We couldn’t do that because that would look weird. We froze. Ellie raised an eyebrow. Did this whole interaction look odd? Was there actually shit everywhere?

Beliefs about overimportance of thoughts and thought control are more frequent in highly religious people and mediate the observed association between religiosity and OCD. Thought-action fusion overlaps with magical thinking and is associated with religiosity, paranormal beliefs, and positive schizotypy. most likely, thought-action fusion plays a significant role in the etiology of autogenous obsessions.

…sometimes my thoughts were hard to digest. Sometimes my brain would get stuck on a concept that troubled me and would create endless rabbit holes in my head. It seemed like the more I tried to find an answer, the more complicated it would become. And sometimes unsettling images would randomly flash into my head. I didn’t want to describe what they were. I knew the images weren’t true, but they often made me feel uneasy.

No way," I tell her. "Once was enough for me." And I mean it, though it has nothing to do with Paul and his blue eyes, and everything to do with how very, very tired I am with this hidden battle for my own thoughts, the burden of counting, the work it takes to hide it. The Djinn hates it when I'm adrift in the world, trying to live my life; he prefers me anchored to my home, where I can feed his need for numbers without fear of discovery.

Having OCD, and tending to see things as either black or white and in perfectionistic terms, as well as being overconscientious, he was extremely hard on himself and insisted that he somehow be guaranteed that he would not one day snap and act on his thoughts. At one point, Frank told me that he was now concerned that he was feeling too little anxiety, which made him think that perhaps he was a sociopath without a conscience after all and would end up like Jeffrey Dahmer!

Addiction, OCD, and mood disorders like depression and anxiety share a central feature: a narrow self-focus and intrusive rumination. For addiction, that rumination is cyclical, quieted only temporarily by the object of the given addiction—whether it is a substance or a behavior—and then it is set in motion again as soon as the object fades from focus. For OCD and eating disorders, that rumination manifests in uncontrollable compulsive behavior. For depression, it manifests as a sense of failing, catastrophization, and guilt. Hendricks sees this short-circuiting of rumination as the most significant potential benefit of psychedelics. “You think of somebody who’s addicted to a drug, and they’re almost spinning their wheels, thinking about how am I going to get it next? And if you can have an experience in which you’re suddenly thinking outside of yourself, you break from these self-nagging thoughts. Suddenly, you’re not even thinking about your desire, your craving, for that

He explained that many if not most people have thoughts like hers, but the OCD brain takes intrusive thoughts seriously. He said OCD sufferers often believe they are responsible for things they can’t control, which is probably why she thought she alone controlled her cat’s destiny. Even if she rationally knew this couldn’t be true (because if it were, why not tell people what a good job she was doing, keeping the stupid ungrateful cat alive by laboriously reciting those tables), it felt true.

I can actually follow the plot of TV programs now, and I no longer use books as masks—I read them like a normal person, just like you have read this. Which assumes you are normal; maybe you’re not. Maybe none of us are. Maybe none of us would want to be anyway. But, for the sake of argument, let’s call me normal now. I am better. I don’t know whether it’s for good, or if one day something might make me abnormal again. But that’s the funny thing about living. If you do it properly, you don’t know how the next sentence will begin.

The specific psychiatric disorders in which mitochrondrial dysfunction has been identified include the following: schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder, major depression, autism, anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, anorexia nervosa, alcohol use disorder (aka alcoholism), marijuana use disorder, opioid use disorder, and borderline personality disorder. Dementia and delirium, often thought of an neurological illnesses, also included.

Most people say "I'd do anything for my child," but the Harm OCD sufferer has to do more than just show up for the job. You have to show up to this amazing beautiful being even knowing that it aggravates your disorder. You have to do exposure to the darkest, most terrifying corners of the mind. You have to cope with extreme love, often reminding you of extreme fear. You have to tolerate the uncertainty that your child may have a short or painful life in order to maximize the possibility that she has a happy one. To love your children is to be vulnerable to them and to see their vulnerability. You have to risk being harmed and you have to risk harming in order to be close to anyone. OCD can make you think you're too crazy to deserve this closeness with a child. But you're not crazy. You got this.

So what came first, do you reckon, the horrible thoughts forcing you to carry out rituals like a junkie, or the need to make people laugh? Or maybe they’re two sides of the same coin. The vivid imagination causing thoughts which make you want to cry is the same imagination that can find humour in situations other people would call ‘mundane’…” “It’s occurred to me, yes.” “Oh, it’s more than occurred to you, Nicky boy. You’re an intelligent man who has an affliction which affects your mind, so you’ve definitely thought about it. A lot, I bet. I’d like to tell you something Nicky, but I want to make sure I’ve got your full attention. Do I?” “Yes,” I replied in spite of myself. He leaned even closer, as if we were either co-conspirators in some scheme or lovers about to kiss. “We’re all victims. All of us. Victims of our own minds...

I sure do like this sculpture.” Jolene smiled at the newcomer. “Well, hello, Lou.” The Devil sent her a narrow-eyed look. “Hello, vile woman.” “You buttoned up your shirt wrong,” Jolene told him. “What?” he squeaked, peeking down at the shirt. Realizing she was kidding, he flattened his lips. “See, vile.” Jolene rolled her eyes. “Let it go, Lou.” Sensing there was more to this than the shirt comment, Harper asked, “Let what go? What did you do, Grams?” Jolene tipped her chin at Lou. “He was in a bad mood, so thought I’d take him to a nice, calming atmosphere to cheer him up. Only there is no cheering him up.” Harper wasn’t buying that innocent act for a single second. “Where did you take him?” “To a poetry recital.” Lou’s face hardened. “The words hardly ever rhymed! How is that poetry?” And it clearly drove his OCD streak crazy.

I began the process of cutting up my random fabrics into strips. Of course, I chose easy things first, items that didn't' hurt me very much to cut up: torn sheets. A flannel nightgown so tattered it could never be worn again, one of Steve's worn-out t-shirts, couch upholstery. The resulting balls of fabric yarn that I wound together after cutting astounded me. They were gorgeous--each one prettier than the last, which made me braver. I took some photographs. And I heaved a sigh. Things in me were changing, I could feel it...so many months focusing on Stuff, Stuff, STUFF had made me bolder. What's the worst that could happen? I thought to myself. It reminded me of the day I finally, after ten years of kicking and screaming, took that first half pill [for OCD]. To someone else it might be no big deal, but to me? It felt like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute.

That summer when I was feeling very much like Juliet holding the potion, the therapist would tell me, “Just know that those thoughts aren’t you. That’s the OCD, it’s not you.” It was a kind gesture—she was offering me the illness narrative that reigns now, the one that constructs very, very firm boundaries between brain and self, illness and consciousness, self and other. I clung to that for a while, the notion that the maelstrom happening in my brain was not of me but outside me, happening to me. That there was a tidy line dividing “me” from “disease,” and the disease was classifiable as “other.” But then it became difficult to tell whether certain thoughts should go in the me box or the disease box—where did “I want to throw a rock through the kitchen window” belong? Eventually I could no longer avoid the fact that mental illness is not like infection; there’s no outside invader. And if a disease is produced in your body, in your mind, then what is it if not you?

At the same time, the deeper I get with my OCD and treatment, the more I realize that it is also a part of me. It is the part of me I try so hard to repress, the part of me I don't believe is worthy of love, the part of me I judge in other people. It has to be fought, but to some extent, it also has to be placated. I also have to say, I'm not as smart as I thought I was, I'm not as in control, I better not judge these people because whoo-ee look at me. It can't simply be exorcised. It illuminates the brittleness and arrogance of my own precious assumptions about myself: that I am smart, that I am in control because I am smart, that I can do everything just so, that I can do it better. But it also attacks the parts of myself I want to keep: the gritty traveler, the artist who bucks conventions, the bold experimenter. Fine, it says, my thoughts are random, my thoughts are constructed, my thoughts are only thoughts, but then so are yours: all of it is a fantasy, dark and light.

I should acknowledge, I guess, that one reason I'm interested in TB is that I have obsessive-compulsive disorder, and my particular obsessive worries tend to circle around microbes and illness. Before the germ theory of disease, we did not know that around half the cells in my body do not, in fact, belong to my body - they are bacteria and other microscopic organisms colonizing me. And to one degree or another, these microorganisms can also control the body - shaping the body's contours by making it gain or lose weight, sickening the body, killing the body. There's even emerging evidence that one's microbiome may have a relationship with thought itself through the gut-brain information axis, meaning that at least some of my thoughts may belong not to me, but to the microorganisms in my digestive tract. Research indicates that certain gut microbiomes are associated with major depression and anxiety disorders; in fact, it's possible that my particular microbiome is at least partly responsible for my OCD, meaning that the microbes are the reason I am so deeply afraid of microbes.

Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD) is unhelpfully named, since it is not particularly closely related to the better known obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). It does not tend to co-occur with obsessive-compulsive disorder, or even run in the same families. Obsessive-compulsive disorder is an anxiety disorder, in which the sufferer feels compelled to repeat particular thoughts or actions, such as checking or hand-washing. As an anxious condition, it belongs to the same family as depression and generalized anxiety disorder, and thus is related to high Neuroticism and responds to some extent to serotonergic antidepressant medications. Some people have even seen obsessive-compulsive disorder as a low Conscientiousness problem, since the affected individual cannot inhibit the checking or washing response in rather the same manner as the alcoholic cannot inhibit his desire to drink. Whether this is the right characterization or not, it is clear that OCPD is a very different type of problem.16 What, then, does OCPD entail? Psychiatrists define it as ‘a pervasive pattern of preoccupation with orderliness, perfectionism, and mental and interpersonal control, at the expense of flexibility, openness and efficiency, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts’.

This is very positive. Just thinking a good thought is a bad Refocus strategy. For example, someone with a fear of dying might Refocus on assuring herself that she’s healthy. Why is that bad? Because it’s so easy for that thought to become an avoidance, merely a way of pushing aside the thought about death that is causing the OCD symptoms. It is an attempt to neutralize an obsessive thought, and that is a compulsion. Your Wise Advocate will tell you that the thought is just an obsessive thought; you then accept the thought and focus on a good behavior.

Fourth, along these same lines, some diagnoses remind us of a more central role of the body in a person’s struggle. Psychiatric diagnoses remind us that we are embodied souls. We know this clearly from Scripture! But functionally speaking, we sometimes over-spiritualize troubles with emotions and thoughts. When you consider the spectrum of psychiatric diagnoses, it is clear that years of research demonstrate that some diagnoses may have a stronger genetic (inherited) component of causation than others. These include schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autistic spectrum disorder, and perhaps more severe and recalcitrant forms of depression (melancholia), anxiety, and OCD.2 Another way of saying this is that although psychiatric diagnoses are descriptions and not full-fledged explanations, it doesn’t mean that a given diagnosis or symptom holds no explanatory clues at all. Not all psychiatric diagnoses should be viewed equally. Some do indeed have long-standing recognition in medical and psychiatric history, occur transculturally, and therefore are not merely modern, Western “creations” that highlight patterns of deviant or sinful behavior, as critics would say. Observations that have held up among various

CAUDATE NUCLEUS. That’s the part of the brain that’s not filtering out the OCD thoughts properly.

Parts of the brain that are related to OCD symptoms include areas of the frontal lobes in the cortex, the basal ganglia, and connections between the frontal lobes and the amygdala (Fullana et al. 2017;

OCD distracts with things that aren’t real. It tells me life will unravel if I forget my memories.† That I will lose my core essence if my mom’s mood is different than mine.†* That God is angry at me for misspeaking.†** That a passing thought might be lust. What seems so real and so terrifying—that I might kill someone†*** or commit suicide,§ that I might be a pedophile or change my sexual orientation§*—is just a shimmering phantom.

No one tries to talk me out of a migraine aura. I never try to interpret the shimmering geometric shapes or figure out the scintillating stairways crawling in the corners of my vision. No matter how hard I stare, I’ll never see my friend’s eye. I just navigate by what I can see. I’m gentle with myself, and my friends care for me while I wait for it to go away. This same gentle patience is the treatment for OCD. I needed the patience to remember that OCD is a broken record, thoughts endlessly looping between the thalamus, cortex, and cingulate gyrus. The scratch that connected the record grooves was only deepened by researching, ruminating on, and then carefully avoiding things that scared me. I had to find a new way of knowing—so I could move on with the music.

the OCD approach was weirdly liberating. I could acknowledge these fears, then wave the wand of “maybe, maybe not,” the gold standard treatment for OCD. Those words robbed my thoughts of their power and value. I could live by what I did know and value. I could wait to move forward until the mirage eased. I could take care of myself and watch the anxiety fade away.

Having OCD is like being trapped your entire life with relentless piranha-like thoughts that sabotage your sanity.

Throughout life we tend to believe our thoughts much more than the signals of the body.

I knew I could get help and, more importantly, get better. Because suddenly I wasn’t bad, it was bad. It was no longer me, it was something else. I wasn’t schizophrenic, or psychotic, or any of the other things I thought I was. I had Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, or OCD. In that unforgettable moment, I took back some of my power – chunks of it flooding into my psyche, called in from afar, returning home to me.

I am relieved to discover that I can still feel sadness.

Mental health problems don’t define who you are. They are something you experience. You walk in the rain and you feel the rain, but, importantly, YOU ARE NOT THE RAIN.

Dean laughs. “He’s so cute! He’s walking between us like a little child!” I start to worry fervently that Dean might think I’ve trained Rocky to walk like this to convince him how nice it would be if we had children of our own, even though we’ve only met twice. I add MANIPULATIVE DOG OWNER to BITCH.

10:00 p.m.: the only person in the whole building who hasn’t gone bonkers kills themself. The other patients cheer . . .

I built an idea in my head of the hero I wanted to be, a grab bag of traits from heroes, villains, and side characters. I did not have book role models, I had book blueprints. But there remained a huge gap between the person I wanted to be and the person who I was. This was because no matter how many book blueprints I had, as much as I wanted to make myself the hero of my own life, it didn’t matter as long as I kept telling the story wrong. Nowadays, as a storyteller, I know what the problem was. I had all the elements I needed to tell a good story. But I was telling it the wrong way, so I could never get to the ending I wanted. If you tell yourself you’re a winner, you know what kind of story you’re telling, and you will march toward that... Likewise, if you tell yourself you’re a loser, you’ve made that your story, and you will march toward that instead. The same setbacks could happen in the loser’s story as in the winner’s story, but the self-defined loser would let them be proof that they were never going to be anything. Here’s the story I was telling myself back when I was little edible child waiting to be carried away by hawks and making OCD rituals for herself: once upon a time, there was a girl who was afraid of everything. When I was 16, I realized that I knew what this story looked like and how it ended, and it wasn’t the life I wanted for myself. If I wanted my ending to look different, I needed to change the kind of story I was telling about myself. I needed to shape my events into a different genre: once upon a time, there was a woman who was afraid of nothing. At age 16, I legally changed my name from my birthname — Heidi — to one I thought sounded like the hero I wanted to be: Maggie. And I vowed that I would never be afraid of anything ever again. Did it work? No, of course not. Not right away. But it became a mission statement, my hero’s journey.

Let’s all agree to not hurt our partners for no real reason. We only need to share the content of our thoughts if something good can come from it.

This new preface serves to refine, and further clarify, the Four Steps to self-directed therapy: Relabel, Reattribute, Refocus and Revalue. When OCD patients Relabel, they are calling their disturbing thoughts and urges what they really are: obsessions and compulsions. When they Reattribute, they recognize that the bothersome thoughts won’t go away because they are symptoms of a disease, OCD. When they Refocus, they work around the intrusive thoughts by doing a constructive, enjoyable behavior. When they Revalue, they learn to ignore those thoughts and view them as worthless distractions.

Chet found another way to best the OCD: Every time he had an OCD thought, he would do something nice for his fiancée—buy her roses, perhaps, or cook her dinner. Whenever the OCD wanted to make him miserable, he would make himself happy by making his fiancée happy.

You’re not insane,” he says again. “Then what’s wrong with me?” I ask. “Why do I have these . . . these thoughts?” The word doesn’t feel like enough; it’s too airy, and implies I am capable of telling them apart from reality. “Is it fear?” Felicity asks. “Though I suppose fear is elicited by an immediate threat, and it sounds as though often there isn’t one. Except those created inside your mind. So it’s fear looking for a source? Does that sound right?” I press my fists against my forehead. “It feels like someone is shouting at me all the time, all these lies that I know are lies but I’m so terrified of what will happen if I don’t listen, and then it just gets louder and louder so that I can’t hear anything else over it all and I can’t make them stop.” I look up at Monty. “Does everyone feel this way?

a few words on something that I believe affects both Obsessional Jealousy sufferers and ROCD sufferers alike--the fear of losing the marriage. Often, what hides behind the intrusive thoughts is a deep-seated fear of the relationship not working out. In my case, I saw my parents go through a painful and messy divorce after twenty-five years of marriage. In Hugh’s case, his self esteem had taken a heavy blow a few years before meeting me, when his girlfriend at the time left him for another guy. He began having ROCD thoughts shortly after that relationship ended. The fear of commitment that ROCD sufferers experience might stem from trauma, and the wish to avoid feeling vulnerable again. Commitment to a relationship means trust and trust means vulnerability. The fear of being vulnerable is at the heart of OCD.

For all of you who might be experiencing this, or something similar, I want you to know that it doesn’t go on forever and that ROCD has in fact a very good prognosis. Treatment with CBT and ERP is very favorable and has shown to produce effective results within a short period of time. In our case, after Hugh began practicing ERP with the help of his therapist (to whom I am eternally grateful), his attitude changed overnight. It was a revelation. He had been cold and distant and I had in turn reacted defensively. But then he made an effort to do ERP and in a matter of days he was completely different around me. He treated me with more kindness and he didn’t shy away from showing affection. Of course, there were still moments when he would be afraid and engage in his OCD. But those were nothing compared to the barrage of intrusive thoughts that harassed him and the compulsions he was giving into before. I felt like we might make it through to the other side. Now I understand that there isn’t really another side. We have needed to learn to keep going with the intrusive thoughts, but doing our best to ditch the compulsions. You might wonder that I speak in the plural here. Well, we both interact with Hugh’s OCD. I make the mistake of offering him reassurance more often than I would like to admit, and I sometimes ask him about the thoughts, both things I should never do. But even though OCD is incredibly tough, one can learn to live with it. And that has been one of the greatest lessons we have learned so far. We live with the OCD not as our companion, but as a condition, like so many others, in our lives (don’t forget that I also have OCD, although it doesn’t manifest as ROCD).

Ginny told me that, like Dr. Wisner's patients, her problem was not so much that she had an urge to kill her grandchildren, but rather a fear that she might somehow lose control of her senses. She put it this way: "The fear is not that in my current state I could do these things, but that I might slip into a state where I could do it. Right now, when I am thinking about it, I know it won't happen. But still it festers, it festers and lingers, and it keeps beating on you and beating on - like it's the villain, the enemy, the monster, the demon - it's a faceless devil." With my encouragement, Ginny told her husband about the thoughts. She was relieved that his reaction was "he just couldn't even believe what he was hearing - he knew I'd never do these things, they were just bad thoughts." When I asked Ginny why she thought he has so much faith in her, she replied, "Because he sees me with people daily. He said he fell in love with me because I am kind. For example, he reminded me of a time when we were together in a cabin, and I noticed a bee trapped behind a screen and I told him I didn't want the bee to die, so he spent the first hour of our first weekend together undoing the screen to free the bee. He asked me, does that sound like someone who would kill her grandchildren? He also reminded me that I am soft and warm and very loving, and he would never worry about me doing the awful things I was thinking of." Needless to say, Ginny was relieved by her husband's reaction, since she had feared he would think she was crazy.

Self-harm OCD can come at you from multiple angles at the same time. It says that you will hurt yourself when you don't want to. But thinking about hurting yourself all day is likely to make you unhappy. It doesn't have to if you can view thoughts as meaningless objects of attention, but we're not born naturally adept at this. We're born to seek out threats to ourselves and eliminate them, perhaps even if the so-called threats are just our thoughts. Never forget how brave you are for living with OCD and trying to cope with someone in your head that keeps threatening to kill you. This means that to be self-compassionate about self-harm obsessions, you have to start by understanding that this really just is hard. You may think of yourself as weak or foolish for worrying about your intrusive harm thoughts. Or maybe you think you're crazy or going to lose it. The truth is the opposite. You're not crazy. By recognizing how much of you there is to love, you simultaneously create an environment where your OCD is just OCD, your thoughts are just thoughts, and your ability to overcome your challenges is without limits. Interacting compassionately with your mind means talking to yourself as you would to a good friend. Teasing is allowed as long as it isn't mean-spirited. If you can use humor to relate to the darkest of thoughts, you can help yourself through the darkest of times.

When my first child was born, I thought it quite hilarious that within seconds of her arrival, she was placed before me on a tray and a doctor put a sharp pair of scissors in my hand. It was to cut the umbilical cord. I had an advantage over potential Harm OCD with my children, which is that I always knew full well that I would have intrusive violent thoughts about them. Because I always assumed I'd have thoughts of cutting, smothering, strangling, microwaving them, and so on, I never responded to any individual thought of that nature like it was particularly interesting. If anything, I welcomed such thoughts as useful reminders of why I became a therapist.

Being a parent is hard. It's way harder than people assume it will be before it happens to them. It causes stress, overstimulation, sleep-deprivation, and worst of all, the sense that people are watching to see how good you are at it and how good a person you are in general. It may seem as if people care about you more, focus on you more, now that you are responsible for children. And children will press your buttons and try to make you frustrated, because making you /anything/ is fascinating to them. But what your children can't understand yet is that if you have OCD and you're stressed, exhausted, frustrated and over-stimulated, your disorder flares up. And when your disorder flares up, it targets everything you care about the most and tries to bind it to a living nightmare. This disorder can trick you into thinking you're the worst of the worst. But you are not the best or worst parent who ever lived. You are just a person with thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Remember, being self-compassionate mostly just means being honest. When you make a mindful statement about fearing harming your children, you are being honest about your experience. When you criticize yourself for having thoughts and for being afraid, you are essentially lying to yourself about what is evident. You have OCD. Commentary about how good a person you are is a distraction from the important work of keeping your OCD from commandeering your family. Similarly, it's important to remember that all healthy parents have "unhealthy" thoughts about their kids and have doubts about their abilities to raise them. They're supposed to. Treating yourself fairly and compassionately is the only rational way to navigate parenthood, with or without having OCD.

You're not crazy. I'm going to remind you of this throughout the book. "Crazy" is a nonsense word we use to put ourselves down when we don't like what we see in the mind. You have a common, diagnosable, treatable disorder.

When you have Harm OCD, it can often feel like you're repeatedly being accused of a terrible crime. OCD is your accuser, but it also acts like a high-powered defense attorney who says, "Look, I can get you a not-guilty plea, guaranteed. I'm going to get all the witnesses and all the evidence and bring it all up in your trial and if you stick with me, the jury will acquit you. 100%." You hear this and think, Great, let's do this. I know I'm not guilty. Let's make sure it's official. Then the OCD says, "Sure thing. By the way, I cost $1000/hour, I bill 24 hours a day, and the case will take a few years, maybe more. In the end, you'll get your not-guilty verdict, probably, but I should tell you, the long trial will decimate you and the verdict might not make that much of a difference. But never mind that, let's get to that evidence of your innocence." An OCD therapist like me is no high-powered attorney. I'm more like a public defender and my advice is simple: Plead the fifth. In an American court, when you plead the fifth amendment to the U.S. constitution, you are saying that you will not answer a question that could incriminate you. In other words, no matter what OCD asks, just don't answer. You're probably thinking, "No, that makes me look really guilty." Then I explain, "If you don't take the bait and answer OCD's questions, this thing will go to mistrial in a week. No one will remember it. It might as well have been just a forgettable fluke." This approach is what it means to accept uncertainty, and it is indeed scary. It doesn't come with that shiny promise of complete vindication. But it also doesn't cost you a lifetime of obsessing. Accepting uncertainty about your violent thoughts means allowing the possibility that they could be true by not trying to prove otherwise.

Not only can you not predict the future, you can never be certain what your intentions were in the past. We only ever know what our intentions are right now in this exact moment.

OCD is a shape-shifter, and as one of our favorite authors, Katie d’Ath, has said it has a way of convincing you that it’s not really OCD. So, often, when dealing with an intrusive thought, one might be tempted to treat it as if it wasn’t just that--an obsession, a thought, but instead as something of paramount importance. When the intrusive thought is of a new character or content, it’s easy for the OCD to disguise itself and one of its many disguises is the question, What if I don’t actually have OCD and I’m just lying to myself?

Other common obsessions are a fear of hurting others (this is usually known as harm OCD), which might manifest themselves as intrusive thoughts depicting violence inflicted on oneself or others; or perhaps, the fear of running someone over while driving and not having noticed it; or the worry that one might commit a criminal act against somebody who is vulnerable, such as sexual assault of a minor, or abusing, or stealing from an elderly person, etc. Compulsions vary depending on the individual.