Lynne S. Gots, Ph.D.
Licensed Psychologist
Five Common Myths about OCD
By Lynne Gots, posted on July 9th, 2017.
The people I treat for OCD hate it when someone says, “I’m so OCD!,” usually as a way of explaining pickiness or excessive neatness. I do, too. Not only does the comment minimize the severe suffering a person with actual OCD experiences; it also perpetuates a number of prevalent misconceptions about the disorder.
- OCD isn’t a personality quirk. It’s a neuropsychiatric illness involving persistant, intrusive mental images or thoughts (obsessions) that create extreme emotional distress–typically anxiety, but sometimes disgust. Compulsions develop as a way of alleviating the intolerable feelings.
- OCD isn’t perfectionism. Perfectionism is one thinking style commonly, but not always, seen with OCD. Other cognitive patterns, such as an excessive sense of responsibility, a tendency to overestimate danger, and an intolerance of uncertainty also frequently accompany OCD.
- Not everyone with OCD is a neat freak. Neatness may be characteristic of people with OCD who have a compulsion to create order and symmetry to feel “just right.” Or the need to clean and wash may be a response to contamination obsessions. But other forms of OCD involve primarily mental images and rituals often invisible to the casual observer.
- OCD is easy to spot. Washing and checking compulsions may be obvious to family and friends. But many other obsessions and compulsions occur strictly in the sufferer’s mind, making them hard to detect even for mental health professionals. Given the shameful nature of these mental intrusions, such as thoughts of committing a violent act, people afflicted with this type of OCD may suffer in silence for years–seventeen, on average–before obtaining the proper diagnosis and treatment.
- OCD is hard to treat. Many traditional mental health practitioners hold this view. In fact, with the correct, evidence-based treatments (Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy and medication, if needed), people with OCD can feel relief within a few months.
These myths do a disservice to those in the grips of OCD. Let’s set the record straight.
Tags: OCD, OCD treatment
Posted in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder |
Don’t Bow Down to OCD
By Lynne Gots, posted on November 14th, 2016.
OCD is a tyrant. It will control you with threats of the most horrific consequences if you don’t follow its commands.
“Don’t touch that or you’ll get sick and die.”
“Go back and check the stove five…no, ten…no, fifteen times or the apartment building will burn down and it will be your fault.”
“Don’t hug your niece. If you put your hand in the wrong place, she’ll be scarred for life.”
“That bump you felt while you were driving was a body. The police will arrest you for a hit-and-run and you’ll go to jail for the rest of your life.”
“You had a bad thought while you were in church. If you don’t repeat the prayer the right way, you’ll go to hell for eternity.”
Who wouldn’t be terrified by such thoughts? They may seem preposterous to people who don’t suffer from OCD, but to those who do, they’re grimly familiar.
To break free from OCD, you have to refuse to follow its orders. Its demands are unreasonable. You may think you can appease it to arrive at an uneasy truce. But unless you say no to the rituals, OCD will keep escalating its requirements and make you its prisoner.
So you have to stand firm. Push back. Do the opposite.
Terrifying? Yes! But it’s a tactic—called “response prevention”—that works.
In his book, Stopping the Noise in Your Head: the New Way to Overcome Anxiety and Worry, psychologist Reid Wilson outlines specific steps you can take to break free from the tyranny of anxiety. One of the messages he drives home is that OCD worries are NOT ABOUT THE CONTENT despite what OCD is brainwashing you into believing.
So if you’re doing rituals to protect yourself from contamination, repugnant or blasphemous thoughts, or the risk of being responsible for harming others, you can shift your perspective instead of blindly following OCD’s orders. Don’t try to convince yourself you’re protecting yourself from the content of your fears; instead, remind yourself you’re doing compulsive behaviors to eliminate doubt about something that feels threatening.
Practice moving towards those feelings of uncertainty, and you’ll be on your way to freeing yourself from the stranglehold of OCD.
Tags: exposure and response prevention, obsessional thoughts, OCD, Reid Wilson
Posted in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder |
Why You Shouldn’t Look to the Internet to Answer Your Questions about Distressing Thoughts
By Lynne Gots, posted on April 17th, 2016.
If you struggle with OCD, you’ve probably searched online for answers to the questions that consume you. Finding virtual communities of like-minded sufferers can make you feel less isolated, especially if your worries involve the very common but shameful-to-admit obsessions such as doubts about sexuality and thoughts about violence. But extensive researching and comparing yourself to others with similar symptoms—even if your efforts seem to give you some relief—can make your OCD much worse in the long run.
Here’s why the Internet can be problematic for someone with OCD:
1) Much of the information you’ll find is wrong.
This is hardly groundbreaking news, but I can’t emphasize it too much. One of my patients recently told me about a blog (which I won’t name) written by someone with OCD. Even under my careful professional scrutiny, it looked pretty helpful at first glance. There were some informative discussions about the symptoms of OCD and the importance of seeking treatment from an experienced cognitive-behavioral therapist.
But then I scrolled to a post the author had clearly meant to be reassuring (if you’ve been under my tutelage for any time at all, you’ll know where I’m going with this) but was completely off base in its message.
She had done an “informal survey” of 4 of her friends, two identified as gay and two as straight but with the type of OCD causing them to wonder if they really might be gay. She proceeded to list the differences she found between them: how certain they were about their attraction to individuals of the same/opposite sex, when they first “knew” (in the case of the two gay respondents), whether they sometimes found individuals of the same/opposite sex attractive in the absence of sexual feelings towards them, and so on. And then she went on to draw some conclusions clearly designed to be comforting to people with OCD doubting their sexual identity.
2) Advice, however well intended, can reinforce compulsions.
Aside from the obviously unscientific nature of her “study” (a comically small and biased sample, for starters), her attempt to ease the suffering of OCD doubters was misguided. It provided some with relief and had exactly the opposite effect for others, as evidenced by the varied responses to the post. Many even questioned whether they actually had OCD because they weren’t exactly like the people she described.
That’s what OCD does! It makes you wonder and doubt, dragging you down the rabbit hole of uncertainty. And the well-meaning blogger (who claims to be “cured” of her own OCD) unwittingly served as its accomplice by encouraging others to seek reassurance with “facts” and comparisons—thereby perpetuating the “checking compulsions” her followers had certainly already been relying on to make themselves feel less anxious.
So if you’re struggling with distressing thoughts and find yourself tempted to Google for answers, I recommend you consult one site and one site only (or none at all, if you won’t be able to keep yourself from looking further): the International OCD Foundation (iocdf.org). You’ll find credible information and a referral database of reputable professionals skilled in treating OCD.
Tags: OCD, OCD checking Internet, OCD doubts, reassurance seeking compulsion in OCD, sexual and violent thoughts in OCD
Posted in Anxiety, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder |
