Dear Lea:

“I need to understand, to solve the puzzle. Maybe it’s a flaw”- if it is a flaw, then you and I share the same flaw. I like what you shared in your second paragraph, valuing people as the complex beings that we are, being driven to understand, to dig into the human’s mind.. yes, we do have this drive in common.

From what you shared I didn’t see clearly that he suffers from OCD: I didn’t notice definite obsessions and you didn’t indicate any Compulsions on his part (the C in OCD), ex: moving an object to the right, then to the left; touching an object a certain number of times.

I did  notice that thoughts scares him, which is the hallmark of OCD: a thought occurs to us, OCD-people, and we get scared, as if the thought in itself is powerful and poses danger. He told you: “I automatically think about wedding and I panic”- you didn’t tell him that you want to marry him, you didn’t pressure him- it is not you/ a real life wedding situation that scared him,- it was a thought that scared him.

You told him that you would like to take things easy. You didn’t mention commitment to him, and yet he brought up the topic of commitment and wedding himself- because the thoughts occurred to him and the thoughts scared him, and he rushed to expel those thoughts out of his brain through words, so that they don’t stay in his brain to torture him.

I’ve thought of OCD, for quite some time,  as a step toward psychosis, but not being quite there- a person in a psychotic episode “hears” a voice (his own thoughts), believing it is someone outside himself who just talked (another person, a god, some entity)  and gets scared. An OCD person hears his own thoughts, knows these are his own thoughts, but gets scared of them nonetheless.

When you, Lea, think about X, a dangerous situation: imagining the situation scares you, right? An OCD person thinks about X and believes that having thought about X  will make X happen. Believing this intensifies his fear may times over. It took me decades to finally understand and believe that what I think stays in between my two ears- thoughts don’t leave my brain and make terrible things happen in the real world.

Your other examples show me that he tends to see danger in situations. No wonder, since he sees danger in thoughts by themselves. If only he could understand, like I finally did, that thoughts by themselves have no  power and cannot hurt anyone.

I think I pretty much touched on the key elements of OCD and how I think he indeed shows the hallmarks of OCD: being scared of his own thoughts, believing (without necessarily being aware of this belief) that thinking X (a bad situation) will make X happen in real life, and rushing to expel the thoughts via words, talking or typing away (sometimes a whole lot),  so to not be left alone with those thoughts, so to get rid of the thoughts by .. sort of, spitting them out as words.

anita

• This reply was modified 4 years, 4 months ago by .