OCD compulsions
This topic is really near and dear to my heart at the moment. I have OCD, and for those that don’t know, it’s a mental health disorder that causes extreme anxiety and fear. Part of OCD is doing compulsions which is when you do something to combat the anxiety and fear that you feel. These compulsions almost always promise your brain that whatever you’re scared of won’t happen if you do them even though the compulsion doesn’t have any effect on the outcome. When you do a compulsion, there is a temporary relief from the anxiety and fear, but it always comes back, and then your brain tells you to do the compulsion again. That’s the cycle. And it’s crippling. So, let me try to explain it to you and the effect it’s had on my life.
Compulsions are repetitive behaviors or mental acts a person feels driven to do in response to emotions or obsessive thoughts or according to rigid rules. Obsessions are unwanted, intrusive thoughts, images, or urges that cause fear and anxiety. Compulsions are the response to those feelings. For an act to be considered a compulsion, it normally interferes with your life or job, forces you to do it even though you don’t want to, and you only feel temporary relief from doing it. Compulsions keep happening in a continuous cycle: 1) an intrusive thought occurs; 2) a person performs a compulsion; 3) anxiety reduces temporarily; 4) the brain learns that the compulsion “worked”, making it more likely to happen again. Once in this loop, it feels impossible to get out of it. Even if you know it is OCD.
There are physical and mental compulsions. Physical compulsions can include washing or cleaning hands repetitively, checking locks or doors over and over, arranging items until they feel “just right”, repeating actions like walking through a doorway multiple times, and seeking reassurance from others repeatedly. These compulsions are different from mental compulsions because they can be seen by the naked eye. This is the type of OCD that is better understood. Mental compulsions can include repeating words, phrases, or prayers repeatedly, counting in a specific way, mentally reviewing for mistakes, trying to cancel “good thoughts” with “bad thoughts”, constantly analyzing if something is dangerous, and “checking” on your mental state repeatedly. These compulsions are what I experience more.
In my experience, obsessions can completely consume you. I fall into these “thought loops” where I cannot think about anything except for the obsession. Sometimes, I can literally be shaking because it is so intense. My mind will play the same thing over and over in a thought loop until I do a compulsion and even then, it can decide it isn’t enough and I’ll be consumed by compulsions for hours. One of my most frequent compulsions is mental checking. I will spend the day constantly “checking” to see if I’m okay. It’s like I’m waiting for something bad to happen which I know is trauma related and OCD is a response. It is genuinely hard to get things done.
I know that performing compulsions makes things worse, but sometimes I cannot even breathe until I’ve done the compulsion. When anxiety starts to rise again, I will repeatedly remind myself that I did the compulsion so it’s okay, and I will continue to do this until I perform the compulsion again. It can make you psychotic. At one point, I was so convinced that I had a cyst in my throat that I literally cut it open to “drain it”. I had to go on antibiotics to heal the wound. Recently, my obsessions have been about my mental health and time. I have been forcing myself to do things at certain times for “it to be okay”, and I have panic attacks if I miss a set time. My routines have turned into crack but disrupting them is torture. My brain has fully convinced me that my mental health will get bad again if I don’t perform certain compulsions, and again, I know it is rooted in trauma, and OCD is the response.
The thing about OCD is that I have had it my whole life. At times, it honestly just feels normal, and that brings me comfort because I know I can get through it. I have done a partial hospitalization program for OCD, and I have done exposure therapy for some OCD themes, but I have developed new ones since leaving the program. Even so, I do have the right tools that I learned in therapy to deal with the OCD. BUT even so, it can all get quite overwhelming. I could go on and on about OCD, but I hope this is a good run down about what OCD compulsions are.
