Mental OCD compulsions are hard for many people, even some with OCD to understand. Instead of a physical compulsion, such as washing your hands, these compulsions happen entirely in your mind. They may be invisible, but they’re ruthless. And they’re associated with reviewing, analyzing, and seeking mental reassurance.
I feel as if mental compulsions are sometimes left out of the broader OCD conversation due to them not being as obvious as physical compulsions, but they can be just as crippling for those that suffer from this disorder.
For the majority of my life, mental compulsions have made up most of my experience with OCD, and they’ve made those memories painful to revisit.
I remember when I first started treating my OCD in the winter of 2021, the anxiety and response I was having from the obsessive thoughts I was getting were so bad that I’d sleep 12 hours a day because it was causing physical pain. It felt like a million needles were stabbing my brain at every waking moment unless I found some sort of short-lived distraction.
These compulsions were a cycle. The intrusive thought would come, I’d push it away, seek reassurance whether it be dissecting the thought or telling myself they aren’t real, and just repeat that process to no avail. Everyone knows the saying “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result,” and this was a textbook case of that.
Now I’m not calling myself insane, nobody who has OCD and feels lost like this is, but I just had no idea how to deal with this issue.
I thought if I just denied these thoughts enough, reassured myself enough, analyzed enough, I’d finally feel okay and I’d go back to what my life before this seemingly takeover by the disorder was. I didn’t realize I was doing the very thing that kept me stuck.
These compulsions don’t come across as rituals, they feel like an uncontrollable false truth, denial even. And at every moment those who suffer from this are trying to escape, not realizing they’re digging themselves deeper into a hole.
Simply put, the more you try to control mental compulsions, the more power you give them. This will take over your life, I know from first hand experience.
I remember exactly where I was when I took my first step towards freedom. I was with my friends at an amusement park and was struggling to enjoy anything. On the rides all I could think about was how much better this would be without the thoughts, just wishing I had a normal life and wondering why this had to be me. A few hours into our trip, I decided to split from the group and sit by myself in the food court. Here, I opened my phone and continued to read a book by the Buddhist monk Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche.
I took on Buddhism to try to rid myself of the OCD, misundertsanding what the religion truly is, which I won’t get into right now, but this book did begin to change my life. This was quite a few years ago and I admittedly forget which book it was, but he spoke about monkey mind, which put simply is when you allow yourself to follow your brain chattering about nonsense. This was one of the first moments where I said to myself “I don’t care if this ever stops, I’m torturing myself,” and suddenly I had a minute or so of clarity. The thoughts and anxiety dimmed, I was able to take in the moment, I saw people run around laughing, the music playing from afar, watched the sun setting, and for the first time in months I felt at peace.
This didn’t last due to it being my first exposure to true freedom, but I felt a taste of what was to come. Even though the anxiety came back, I was able to enjoy the rest of the day more than I was before.
It was a taste of normalcy I’d been craving since the OCD took over my life. I wasn’t cured, as there is no cure for OCD. The anxiety stayed gone. But it was proof that an inner peace could exist. I didn’t know exaclty what I did, or if it was even the right thing to do, but I knew there was hope.
Mental compulsions are hard for anyone, those suffering and professionals alike, to narrow down when it comes to exposures. Therapy is incredibly important and I think everyone experiencing OCD should go to one, it can be hard for them to get into the head of someone with just mental compulsions.
I won’t say it’s easier, but it’s more obvious how to address physical compulsions when they’re so observable. Those experiencing mental compulsions may have a hard time explaining to others what exactly they’re experiencing. They may be the only one who truly knows what it is and can’t really put it into words, or they could be too afraid to say what the thoughts are due to a fear of them being true.
This is hard to address if you don’t have personal experience with it, and all I can offer is my advice.
What I’m about to say is the scariest thing someone who’s deep into mental compulsions can hear, but you have to accept and sit with every single thought, and there’s a fine line between acceptance and pushing them away while paying attention to them.
It took me quite a while to find this difference, but eventually I learned that pretending to like the thoughts silenced them. That letting them flow while I was doing things instead of fighting them and wishing them away was freeing me.
After almost a year of this, the thoughts finally melted away, and all I had to do was let them in.
Leave a Reply