This is a brief guide – if you suspect you have an issue of this kind you should seek local professional diagnosis and support.Here we look at:
- Typical Symptoms of Obsessions and OCD
- Development of Obsessions and OCD
- What Drives Obsessions and OCD
- Removing Obsessions and OCD Using Exposure Therapy.
Typical Symptoms of Obsessions and OCD
The sufferers of obsessions and OCD are stuck in a self-perpetuating sensory feedback loop.
The Conscious Mind of a sufferer is repeatedly bombarded with imagery of an imagined horrific event happening accompanied by an emotional reaction so intense it stimulates the Unconscious Mind into believing the event actually is happening – right now; repeatedly.
Knowing the event is not real the Conscious Mind refuses to allow the loop to complete and develops thoughts, imagery and beliefs to fight the initial reaction to the imagined event. ‘Why should I allow this experience to affect me when I know it is not real? Something is wrong with my emotional system!’.
These secondary thoughts, images and beliefs also feed into the Unconscious Mind making the condition more intense while the Conscious Mind loses direct control of both Primary and Secondary responses. The inner fight becomes an automated experience maintained by the area of our brain designed to control repeating behavioural habits – the Basal Ganglia.
This is how obsessions and OCD are born and maintained.
OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) occurs when a sufferer finds performing a certain type of physical action reduces the tension associated with their obsession, or any other unwanted emotional response, as it partially completes the emotional loop and offers temporary cathartic release of emotional energy while also showing the Unconscious Mind some kind of reassuring preventative measure has been taken.
However, this action also reinforces the Unconsciously held belief there is a genuine threat – otherwise why would we need to do anything to reduce the risk of it?
When the relieving, preventative action is not taken the sufferer becomes increasingly tense, eventually feeling compelled to perform the preventative action again.
Typical symptoms of Obsessions:
Repeating imagery appears in the Conscious accompanied by unusually intense negative emotional responses that remain for long periods of time. There is no pretending this is not happening. The only way to stop the mind being overwhelmed is to find more pleasant distractions to focus on. The sufferer is unable to ‘relax’ as this clears the way for the unwanted imagery and attached emotional responses to move in.
Obsessions are based around imagery such as:
- your harming, or others harming, those you care about and this happening due to your lack of awareness or alleged self-control
- of lashing out for no good reason at complete strangers or people you love
- of inappropriate sexual behaviour and of being shunned or shamed because you did something or because your lack of alertness failed to prevent others treating those you care about this way
- of your accidentally poisoning others or failing to prevent others from being poisoned
- of you or others being harmed with inanimate objects and these now allegedly dangerous inanimate objects (even just their basic shape) repeatedly appearing in your conscious mind accompanied by intense negative emotions (you may go on to develop phobias in regards to these objects)
- of death caused by contamination, germs and disease in situations that you could have prevented
- fear of burglary; death; earthquakes; not coping with the death of loved ones; incurring the wrath of God because we are thinking something evil
- of impulsively or accidentally dropping children out of windows; accidentally suffocating someone; causing someone we care about to choke because we were not alert enough; causing someone to be killed in a car accident because we did not advise them to be careful on the roads often enough.
The same images appear over and over again in the Conscious Mind alongside intense emotional responses such as feelings of intense disgust; fear; anger and grief. The person may also suffer with depression and panic attacks. In the Unconscious intense emotions drive imagined scenarios as if they were real events needing to be dealt with.
Typical Symptoms of OCD
With OCD the sufferer feels compelled to perform stress-reducing reassurance acts such as:
- continual washing; cleaning; grooming; checking light switches; water taps; cookers; door locks; brakes; clocks; bathroom pipes and showers for leaks; organising household objects for no reason (eg cups and cutlery in the houses of other people when they visit) and also
- hoarding things for protective purposes (which they never use); checking waste bins repeatedly; feeling you walked through something ‘the wrong way’ and doing it again just in case; needing to constantly avoid or touch something; re-reading something you have written over and over again; re-opening things you have sealed just to make sure what you put in there is in there and also sometimes
- avoiding certain colours because they produce negative emotional responses; associating names; numbers or certain situations with repeating negative emotions; needing constant reassurance from others that you did something the right way; repeatedly checking your body for signs of disease; thinking about life-threatening conditions over and over again; a constant feeling of not being as good, as sensible, or as attractive as others (this being done to such an extent it is much more intense than having normal occasional self-doubts).
You do not need to be struggling with all of these conditions – just a few of them could mean you may have or be developing the symptoms of obsessions or OCD. To the sufferer it may seem these images are warnings of personal faults but the truth is obsessions and OCD are based on a determination to prevent these things from happening – all anxiety disorders are concerned with prevention and protection.
Behind these immediate symptoms is a powerful, attention grabbing emotional drive to keep ‘looking’ at the symptoms themselves with a view to undoing them and then undoing them some more and then undoing them again.
Development of Obsessions and OCD
Occasionally I come across someone explaining how they cannot stop thinking about or doing something they enjoy, such as planning for their wedding despite not yet having a partner or collecting garden gnomes.
They worry they have an obsession because they do not want to stop this habit and feel a bit down when they do. They ask ‘anyone got any advice?’.
My advice is: this is probably ‘a hobby’, not OCD or an anxiety-related obsession you need to be concerned about.
The only time a hobby should be a concern is if it is being used as a distraction device to keep mental attention away from the affects of an intense, emotionally overwhelming response.
Distraction devices are a typical method sufferers of OCD and obsessions use to reduce and avoid the stressful nature of their condition. Once they stop the more pleasant distracting action the internal tension caused by their condition returns to conscious awareness.
Anxiety Disorders
OCD and obsessions are members of the anxiety disorder family. Anxiety disorders are caused by our having a secondary emotional response to a primary emotional response.
Our primary response is our perfectly normal response to our natural interpretation of an external real-life event or a given way of thinking in regards to an imagined event.
The defining question is whether or not our logical mind accepts the primary response as valid and is willing to find an appropriate method of releasing the emotional energy produced by the response.
If, for whatever reason, we decide a primary response is unacceptable and do not wish to feel it we may then produce a secondary response intending to hold it back from affecting us any further (that is the intention, anyway, but in reality it causes an anxiety disorder and we end up feeling both the unwanted primary and secondary feelings repeatedly).
When we produce a Secondary response it may be the same emotional response as the Primary response and so it ‘blends’ in our conscious when we look at the situation. For example:
- panic attacks and phobias are caused by fear of situations we associate with fear responses
- depression is caused by anger at the fact there are situations in which we feel anger.
In regards to obsessions and OCD it may be we have two different emotions fighting each other such as:
- fear of disgust.
This can then become fear of the fear of a disgust response and so we have panic attacks when consciously approaching mental imagery at the centre of our disgust-creating obsessions.
It is possible to develop some anxiety disorders, such as phobias, following a single fearful response in a single given situation, regardless of what our baseline emotional state is. This is how our fear-response mechanism is designed – see a lion in your back garden and you will automatically nervously look for signs of the lion two weeks later when venturing outside (can I suggest it would be stupid not to?).
Repeatedly going out into the garden and finding no lion present will eventually re-train and remove the fear response in your Unconscious – but only after your Unconscious is convinced there definitely is no lion.
This is not an irrational process – this is your unconscious survival mechanism at work. This is not an anxiety disorder developing but you can turn it into one if you refuse to accept the fear adjustment process itself and tell yourself your reaction was abnormal.
Judging the process abnormal you then refuse to go outside and experience it at all because you do not agree with the fear adjustment mechanism, sometimes referred to as ‘extinction’ or ‘habituation. In this particular situation your non-acceptance of the fear adjustment process triggers the phobia called ‘agoraphobia’ – fear of experiencing fear in the outside world.
Conditions such as OCD and obsessions tend to develop following a series of negative life events in an area of deep concern and our continued efforts to suppress our emotional reactions when those areas of life are threatened. It is sometimes difficult to identify what the root external causes of OCD and obsessions are.
As you can see from the ‘fear of fear of disgust’ model above the layers can be quite difficult to unravel.
Medical professionals sometimes refer to obsessions and OCD as ‘complex’ because the journey back to wellness involves the unravelling and acceptance and adjustment of and to multiple belief systems and anxiety-creating memories.
Negative feelings, at the earlier initial worrying stage leading up to the development of obsessions, may be so mild in comparison to the later intense emotional responses they do not readily stand out in our awareness – we have to go searching for these worries in order to make sense of their overall long-term affect on us and then undo the worrying habit in order to prevent a return of the more intense obsessions/OCD once removed.
On a positive note: if you have the courage and determination to remove an obsession or OCD you will more than likely have the courage to remove the lower level emotional issues that led to them.
Example: Your Family in Danger?
Let us say you have a young family and you worry about their safety. Your six and seven year old children seem to have no road awareness and you live near a busy city road.
When you do try to raise their awareness you are labelled as a worrier or you are humiliated in front of the children by your partner. Not just on one occasion, but every occasion for months.
In a bid to ‘protect everyone’, despite their apparently deliberate ignorance, you put yourself on a state of emotional ‘high alert’ creating a kind of imaginary ‘awareness umbrella’ to ensure you respond quickly enough should the threat occur. You imagine yourself diving out in front of cars and lorries to protect your children as they dash into the road and so on.
You focus conversations on road safety at every opportunity and because no-one is listening to you become annoyed by the lack of respect coming your way – your alleged worrying has become the family joke. When you go out with your children you insist they hold your hands when crossing the road but your partner does not do this.
To avoid being repeatedly humiliated you may start looking for evidence of the threat to prove your ‘rightness’. You stick pictures of children killed in traffic accidents up on the walls. Your partner takes them down and your critics keep criticising and you now start to criticise yourself because you see your worrying as the cause of a rift in the relationship with your partner and children. How are you going to protect them if they up and move away from you even further? So you start to suppress and repress the feelings and try to hide your worrying. You also hide the fact you have started having fantasies about hitting your partner over the head with something heavy.
You believe you are over-reacting – but are you? If you let your guard down the feared bad thing might happen.
Then you read in a local newspaper the story of a gang deliberately targeting young children in your local area. Because you are already on high alert this story ‘takes off’ in your mind; but you cannot share the information with your partner; you know what the response will be.
You now believe you must remain constantly alert to this new threat or it could happen. Your mind fills with imagery and multiple negative emotions such as disgust and anger based around the feared scenario but you are also self-critical of your higher alertness level.
You produce emotional responses but then refuse to release and experience them as they rise up into your brain because logically you know the scenarios they are attached to are not real – they are imagined.
Unwanted images attached to the imagined issues now repeatedly appear in your mind automatically, accompanied by intense emotional responses you do not wish to experience.
Driving all of this is that seed of worry: in your imagination you are creating grief scenarios in which you miss your children; guilt scenarios that say their death by whatever means was your fault because you did not find the method to convince them of the dangers. You did not protect them.
You believe you would not cope with the grief; you would not cope with the guilt. You would die a living death. Then you step back and tell yourself ‘eh, this is not real, what are you doing to yourself? Look how emotional you are!’. But because the management of this process has now transferred into your Limbic Brain you do not have direct control of your reactions.
Mixed in with all these fearful feelings is your rage at your partner for putting you in this position and you start to believe you are not a very nice person.
You have an obsession; or if you complete some repetitive physical task to calm yourself temporarily when the negative emotions start to come up, you have OCD.
Self-Criticism Plays a Critical Part
Having a certain level of concern for a valued life area is a good thing – but it is best to manage these concerns in the thinking, logical mind if possible. Unfortunately we value some areas of life to such an extent our reaction is automatically emotional when we see them repeatedly threatened.
The more intensely emotional we are about a valued threatened life area the greater the chance that management of the issues at the centre of our concern will move into the emotional brain; our lower Limbic Brain.
Once this happens we become automatic worriers against our conscious will – the Limbic brain does not think – it just automatically ‘emotes’ in relation to imagery and other sensory information at the centre of the worrying process.
Your Social Environment Plays a Part
If you are in or have experienced a social environment in which you have seen and experienced the safe acceptance and release of emotional responses, and feel confident with how you work at this level, you may heal problems such as this almost as quickly as they develop.
For example if you were raised a Buddhist you would have been trained to go through the release of negative emotions and the issues to which they are attached over and over again as a standard approach to living.
If, however, you were raised in a social environment in which not only was such training absent but your feelings were criticised and you were told you would only be ‘acceptable to others’ if you suppressed your unwanted emotions you now have an increased risk of developing obsessions and OCD.
In order to reverse and undo the process it helps if you first see what drives it.
What Drives Obsessions and OCD
There are two main drives behind these conditions:
- Emotional blocking
- Thought or image stopping.
Emotional Blocking
The most serious form of emotional blocking has already been discussed above: secondary emotional responses, the process by which we try to stop a primary emotional response affecting us by fighting it with a secondary one.
There are two other, less intense, forms of blocking also briefly mentioned above which we often use before we get to the secondary emotional response stage: suppression and repression.
Using Suppression we keep an emotional response under wraps while still having conscious knowledge of the related triggering situation. We might do this to prevent social damage; for example being angry at our boss but not wanting to display our anger because of the potential consequences.
This is a valid and useful approach – as long as we find a ‘safe’, appropriate place to release our negative feelings later. Suppress for long enough, though, and it becomes ‘repression’.
Repression is a situation in which we have the feelings still coming up but have lost the understanding of why they were created, the memories are hidden, yet still keep affecting us. In repression we and others label these troubling and unwanted reactions as ‘our personality’ and make the mistake of identifying them as ‘us’. We start to hate ‘us’ and how we work (actually what we hate is the emotional system life has equipped us with).
One day we have one negative response too many and we start to fight it using our own emotional responses with the intention of forcing the unwanted thoughts and feelings ‘out of existence’. Paradoxically we now have two sets of feelings to work through, primary and secondary responses, fighting each other and producing a ‘pressure-cooker’ intensity in our emotional system.
Emotional blocking creates an electrically overcharged mind and body through the repeated release of high-alert hormones and neurotransmitters in much the same way building a dam across a river causes water to rise.
A Seemingly Out-of-Control Attention Mechanism
Although the brain does not ‘feel’ in the same physical way the body does we do produce an emotional, feeling-based reaction in the Limbic Brain, our emotional brain, which acts as if it were a spark-plug to the rest of the body.
When the Limbic Brain sparks it forces our Conscious to pay attention to the unwanted thoughts, images and feelings contained in our obsessions. We may sense the backs of our mental eyeballs being grabbed and forced to ‘look’ at the imagery and the emotional response concerned.
There is a moment of panic at the start of an obsession where the sufferer wonders what on Earth has just happened to them and they fight its apparent hold on their mind – they cannot pull their attention away.
In reality, however, this is not an abnormal event – this is exactly how our attention mechanism works when we find ourselves in the presence of a predator or a threatening situation.
In the case of an obsession or OCD we have convinced our Unconscious the unwanted thought or image is a real-life threat, and have activated the attention mechanism in the same way we would if a hungry lion were approaching.
Your logical thinking mind knows this is a harmless image in reality and wants you to look at other things, but it is forced to keep focusing on the image or external object of concern again and again; because your emotional brain has registered the image as a serious threat.
Any time you enter a new place, if there is anything present that reminds you of your obsession or OCD, you keep looking at it or focusing on it against conscious will.
Thought or Image Stopping
Image stopping is exactly what it sounds like – we deliberately try to stop an image, thought or sound pattern from appearing in our minds because what it represents is unacceptable to us.
When we have an obsession or OCD the Unconscious Mind is making the mistake of believing the representative pattern is itself the real event. It believes this because the strength of the emotional response attached to it is the same as if it were real.
Your brain contains hundreds, if not thousands, of thoughts and images related to horrible things that can happen to you and others in life – so why do they not all become an emotional problem for you?
Normally these horrible images float into conscious awareness and then go right on by and out of it. Air accidents; news on the latest soldier killed in battle; stabbings – we think about these things; we feel a temporary negative emotional response about them; then we let them go.
This is because we are in ‘objective’ viewpoint. But there are some thoughts and images that hit closer to home because they are ‘subjective’. It may be we feel a valued personal life area has been threatened for some time and we are concerned about there being an actual risk to ourselves or those we care about. When our brain receives or creates thoughts and images related to that more sensitive area of life we are therefore more prone to react with intense emotions.
The problem with using thought-stopping as an obsession or OCD removal process is it requires the unwanted thoughts to be recreated.
People with obsessions and OCD see the thoughts and images attached to their unwanted emotional responses as an enemy to be hunted and ejected from the mind.
They believe if they can get rid of the horrible thoughts they can remove the emotional responses that come with them – but it works the other way round. Emotional problems are an emotional energy issue – not a thinking issue; they require an emotional release solution.
The logical thinking mind searches itself for the solution to what it believes to be a thinking problem and in doing so makes the imagery appear even more significant building additional neural networks to work on the alleged mental problem.
These networks have a ‘search and destroy mechanism’, spreading their influence to other parts of the brain. As a result the sufferer finds additional horrible thoughts, imagery and emotional responses being produced.
Sufferers may develop phobias in regards to external objects and situations reminding them of their internal imagery.
Thought-stopping is not the answer to removing anxiety disorders. The answer is to tune into, accept and then work with the natural emotional energy cycle life has provided us with.
What keeps driving a horrible thought to keep reappearing in our minds or driving us to perform a stress-relieving action is not the imagery but the emotional energy attached to it. The energy keeps ‘grabbing’ the image, bringing it to conscious attention, because it is telling you this is the target it needs to be discharged at.
In order to remove any emotional disorder caused by emotional blocking we have to allow the emotional process, the same process used to protect ourselves against hungry lions, to complete. We must gradually stop blocking it.
We have to allow ourselves to temporarily pretend the unwanted thoughts and images are valid and move towards them in order to trigger full release (or as near full as we can get) so the emotional attachment to the imagery is discharged and the Unconscious can see that the image is just that – an unpleasant, representative image we can let go.
Just like all those other horrible thoughts in our mind we do not pay much attention to.
Removing Obsessions and OCD Using Exposure Therapy
Exposure Therapy (also sometimes referred to as De-Sensitisation) is effective in treating most anxiety disorders – of any type - but it is painful and can be slow. For this reason you may want to try other methods first and should approach your doctor for their support if you intend to use it.
Although the symptoms are no more than the affects of your own natural body discharging emotional energy those affects are powerful during the healing process.
Inducing full emotional overwhelm can result in symptoms such as the ‘mammalian freeze response’ – which is something that comes as quite a shock in itself when first experienced (this is also referred to as the ‘disassociation response’). Having a medical professional who has seen this kind of thing before explain this to you makes quite a difference to your progress.
Success rates using Exposure Therapy are higher for the healing of phobias than they are for obsessions or OCD and I will explain why further down.
Exposure Therapy comes in two flavours:
- Systematic and
- Non-systematic.
Both achieve the same outcome when the process is complete: the Unconscious is retrained to no longer see the imagery as threatening and the intense emotional response attached to it is discharged and detached (or at least discharged to a point it no longer gets the attention of the Conscious).
Systematic Exposure
Systematic Exposure is:
- planned and the plan is
- graduated.
The sufferer creates a ‘risk list’, for example based on a scale of 1 to 10, starting with what situation creates least anxiety to that which creates most. They then start exposing themselves at regular intervals to the least anxiety-creating situation and once the anxiety response has stopped in that situation they move on to the next, more intense anxiety creating situation. Quite often the anxiety about the next situation has already been reduced due to the removal of the previous one.
Let us say you were terrified of public speaking and started by speaking in short bursts in small groups gradually moving up to actually teaching a class or taking part in a stage play with a large audience. Terror would turn to nervousness to a state of enthusiasm and excitement (believe it or not).
Non-Systematic Exposure
Non-systematic exposure is a more intense approach.
With this approach you identify the most intense anxiety-creating situation and go straight into it. Full throttle; come what may. And you stay there to exhaustion – then start again, repeating until the emotional energy is discharged and the triggering situation becomes neutral, no longer pestering the Conscious.
The problem with Non-systematic exposure is the intensity of the experience can cause the Unconscious and Conscious minds to slam the neuronal doors shut again; rejecting the experience due to the pain involved.
Systematic Exposure Therapy, the graduated type, is much more difficult to use with obsessions or OCD than with phobias because the images and memories triggering these conditions are perceived by the brain to be inside the brain. Phobias are ‘out there’ and so we only become afraid when we know we are approaching external territory in which the phobia trigger is found.
You open the neuronal doors to an obsession and it is full throttle exposure whether you want it to be or not – but still it takes quite a while to reach the main trigger of this type of emotional problem because we have built internal mental and emotional barriers.
In a bid to keep the obsession or OCD from completely dominating the mind and body the Conscious and Unconscious have made an attempt to close down and block access to the imagery and emotional energy and when you finally decide to face it and ‘go in’ these arguments and blocks will rise up in to Conscious awareness to fight the decision. They are based around the two drives I mentioned earlier:
- Emotional blocking
- Thought or image stopping.
To reverse emotional blocking you must begin to set aside private time and be willing to endure the affects of ‘emotional opening and releasing’ – that is, sensing what emotional responses are pushing up for release from within your body then Consciously taking your thinking mind in to meet those feelings.
To reverse thought and image stopping you must force the mind to deliberately focus on and move towards the unwanted, unacceptable imagery.
Both your Conscious and Unconscious will naturally fight this new ‘going in’ decision because both believe it will kill you – the intense emotional effect mimics suffocation by a predator.
You may have to lay down; you will at some point have to allow your thinking to shut down so you can be emotionally ‘flooded’. This flooding takes the form of full hormonal release in the body and flooding of the brain with neurotransmitter chemicals causing the issue at the centre of the response to be transmitted on a mass scale across the brain (as opposed to the normal way in which it transmits signals through specific neural pathways).
Eventually the emotional energy is both fully released and the emotional production triggering mechanism is switched off.
But you will not believe this can be achieved until you experience it for the first time.
Regards
Carl
