I have always disliked the way OCD is portrayed in media, and I even dislike the way it’s named. People with OCD suffer from intrusive thoughts, these thoughts are so unpleasant that people with OCD usually take extra precautions to avoid the trigger for their intrusive thoughts. They’re so concerned about even accidentally causing harm that they make irrational choices to avoid the possibility. For example a person with OCD afraid of causing a fire might unplug appliances before leaving home. If the idea of losing control of a vehicle and killing another person bothers them, they might choose to not drive or to exercise extra vigilance while driving.
Obsessions are just recurring intrusive thoughts, something probably everyone has and is disturbed by less than a person with OCD. Compulsions are just ways the person mitigates the intrusive thought, something most people who experience intrusive thoughts probably don’t do.
The way an OCD brain works is different than that of how normal people function, but it’s not that different. In some ways my experience appears to be more heightened than that of other people. I have high levels of vigilance and awareness, above average pattern recognition, even for complex patterns, but the increased awareness / vigilance is often directed inward and that’s what makes existence more intense for an OCD mind. Most people have intrusive thoughts but don’t feel compelled to look at them, but for the OCD mind, we notice them and they become something that makes us doubt ourselves, despite the fact that we know they’re a normal occurrence for most people, and even though we know we then take extra precautions to avoid even accidentally doing something that we find abhorrent.
It’s my lived experience that the OCD mind is just hyper aware to a frequency most people don’t amplify. It’s small and subtle things others don’t notice that we find peculiar, interesting, or deeply troubling. It isn’t just intrusive thoughts, but that is the part medicine, psychology, and people with OCD focus on. I’ll give an example, I have emotional hyper vigilance – I pay attention to micro expressions on other people’s faces when talking to them. I know what’s happening in their mind as it unfolds in real time, or at least I think I do, and I let these micro expressions guide the conversation. If I detect fatigue, disdain, or anything else I don’t like, I exit.
I used this skill a lot in banking. I was known as a human fraud detector. Someone asked me how I knew someone was a fraud operator so accurately and I said it boiled down to a gut feeling. One of my co-workers said for them they noticed a pattern, one I had noticed as well but one that didn’t immediately come to mind. For me, the primary clue was the way the person’s face changed when they were lying to me, but my colleague noticed other things – the way the person always pulled out a perfectly folded $20 bill to open the account, the constant text messaging while opening the account, the escort who often came with to guide the transaction. Both models work, but mine was more plastic, I could see detect fraud even when the pattern didn’t match my colleagues template.
When I listen to music, I detect the mood and the lyrical meaning and emotional context, but I don’t pay attention to the structure of the song or the way the music is played. To my wife these are the parts that she listens to and finds the most obvious.
When I make photographs I am hyperfocused on the expression, the mood, and the feeling of the photograph but I sometimes miss the technical aspect and the rest of the scene. I’m only looking at the person, and really not even at their physical appearance but at their mood. I have learned to break a photo into chunks, and to first find a place to compose an image without the person in it, and then to place the person into the scene. I have learned to check over the person for stray hairs, wrinkled fabric, and other imperfections but to this day my favorite way to photograph someone is imperfectly. To just have them perform while I show appreciation by clicking the shutter. I like photos that are “blurry” if that’s how it felt to me.
Throughout my life I’ve come to see OCD as a blessing and as a curse. I have learned how to harness the way my mind works, but there are always some aspects of it that remain uncontrollable. I can’t control how intensely I feel things for example. I can control how I react to it externally but not internally.
Over time, my OCD became what is described as Pure O. I don’t have compulsions, at least they are minimized to the point that I don’t notice them and others don’t notice them either. However there are just some quirks of my personality that are driven by OCD that I have to battle from time to time.
The worst part of OCD is the internal experience. Certain things are amplified to the point that it interferes with my day to day life. While these things don’t create a compulsion in me, over time I’ve learned that compulsions can be a great way to release the internal pressure valve. The way to handle OCD is to use meta-cognition. To think about thinking. For example, intrusive thoughts can be dismissed as a warning. However when an OCD death spiral occurs that I cannot dismiss, I can choose a compulsion and direct the internal energy there.
For example during Covid when I was hyperfocused on the perceived danger, I channeled the energy into learning more about the immune system, viruses, vaccinations, lab leaks, psychology, and other relevant topics that guided my path through the pandemic response. I survived it unscathed and routinely meet people who once they find out I’m unvaccinated tell me all about the issues they’ve had after receiving the vaccine. I believe 100% that OCD gave me the ability to think rationally when reality became irrational. It allowed me to focus for hours at a time on understanding the factors at play, and to make sense of them. Many skeptical people without OCD became fatigued and defaulted to letting others think for them.
Learning to choose a compulsion has been a game changer for me. Recently, daily anxieties have left me without any other outlet than physical exercise. I’ve been cranking out reps for 16 days straight, and I now know that this compulsion is a healthy outlet for all of my stress and anxiety. It is impossible to feel anything other than fatigue or to think about anything else but counting and breathing on the third set of heavy kettle bell swings.
Another healthy compulsion is writing, creating art, and reading the Bible. These healthy outlets give me a way to distract from the looping and racing thoughts, rumination and disordered thinking that comes along with OCD, but are common to other kinds of mental health situations like ADHD, anxiety and depression.
People with OCD experience anxiety, depression, and other forms of mental health malfunction that are common to everyone but we experience this through the lens of OCD which amplifies the awareness and discomfort of it as we are aware that it is occurring and we are aware that it is unusual which creates additional troubling feelings or thoughts about the experience.
While OCD is something I wouldn’t wish on anyone, for me, I have learned how to live with it, and. I am grateful for the way my mind works even though it comes with a trade off of being extremely uncomfortable from time to time.
Doctors have told me the only way to deal with it is CBT, (cognitive behavioral therapy), antidepressants, or exposure therapy.
In practice I believe I have discovered CBT strategies such as reframing, using meta-cognition, and re-direction, but I’ve never been to a therapist.
I have tried some drugs — never antidepressants, but alcohol, Xanex, Adderall, and even nicotine lozenges to try to shift my brain from internal awareness to external focus. All of them change the experience to the point that I either cannot function (xanex, alcohol), or numb the experience (Adderall, nicotine), that I just don’t enjoy the other aspects of being alive. I’d rather feel it all at the level I experience it than feel nothing at all.
So that’s OCD, that’s how I live with it, that’s how I use it, and that is how I suffer from it.