11 Hidden Compulsions That Will Make OCD Worse

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Welcome back. My name is Danielle Thornton. I'm an anxiety and OCD recovery coach, helping others recover from OCD and anxiety, just like I have for life. So you can live happy and healthy with healthy and loving relationships. Today we're going to talk about some of the hidden compulsions that people experience. Now, these are going to be very general. These can come across in a lot of different OCD subsets. And if you have a specific OCD subset, there may be some more specific compulsions, but these are often compulsions that people are unaware of. Now, my experience Working with ERP specialists was great. They got me to about 80% recovery. But it wasn't until I started coaching and I had a big relapse that I learned what was missing from working with those four therapists that helped me fully recover and actually helped me to help other people recover more quickly. And that is, I didn't learn for quite a long time that my compulsions needed to be at zero. And that was very eye opening. I knew I wasn't supposed to do them, but don't do compulsions, and they all need to be at zero or two very different things. And no one also helped me identify all of my compulsions. So when I had a big relapse, I realized that self help became very compulsive for me, and I went down the rabbit hole for about six months. And ever since I have learned this tool, along with another tool, I have gotten to 100% recovery. OCD doesn't bother me anymore. I'm able to keep myself in the recovery stage, which has been awesome. So today I want to share with you some hidden compulsions that you may not be aware of. Okay, I'm going to go through this list. We'll talk a little bit about them. The first one is talking about your thoughts, your thoughts or doubts to other people, to anybody who will listen. A lot of us know about the confessing compulsion, right, when we confess our thoughts to our friends and family. But I know for me, I was talking to anybody who would listen about my doubts and intrusive thoughts, at least most of them. And it's really important to understand that whenever you're giving your intrusive thoughts or doubts attention, you are feeding them, and that is feeding the ocd. So it's very important that you stop talking about them. And your brain's going to give you excuses as to why you should. I know mine did, but I had to stop. So that's an important one. The next one is people having to be a Certain way. Now, essentially, OCD wants certainty and perfection. And, and what I typically mean by perfection, of course, some people feel like their house has to be perfect, their hair has to be perfect. But perfection doesn't always look that way. OCD wants things to look a certain way. It wants our life to look a certain way. Our partners, our friends, our family, our job. Right? It's that perfection that it thinks that safety is at, but perfection does not exist. So trying to get people to be who you want them to be can be an OCD compulsion and is feeding the OCD Next, repeating yourself or asking others to repeat themselves to gain certainty of understanding. Now, of course, sometimes we do this, right? But when I was in the OCD cycle, I was doing this quite a bit, especially with an ex partner. I always felt like I needed to say it again to make sure he understood me. And I always had to ask to make sure we were on the same page. Right. Again, this was my brain wanting certainty and perfection in that moment. The next one is testing people, testing people to see if they react in a certain way. Again, this shows up a lot in our close relationships. But if we're testing people because we want them to react in a certain way and then they don't react the way that we want to them to, of course we're going to be upset and if they do, we're super excited. But what's going to happen if this is an OCD compulsion is you're going to test them more and more and more and you're not always going to get the answer that you want. In fact, I don't even know if you'll get it 50% of the time. But either way, it's not a very helpful coping mechanism and can be an OCD compulsion. Next, is people pleasing. Now, a lot of us are people pleasers, but a lot of us with ocd, especially because you have a tendency to, to not want to rock the boat. You're uncomfortable with uncomfortable feelings and situations. So you may tend to people, please. You're basically putting your own self aside so that you don't upset somebody else, make them unhappy or rock the boat in some way. And that's going to be a problem because then you're always putting yourself aside for somebody else and you're going to experience the consequences of that. The next one is over learning. I mentioned that self help got very compulsive for me. So people always used to tell me, you really do read a lot and you're always doing some sort of self Help workshop or conference or reading a book. And at the time, I thought that was just me and my personality. The reality is I was looking for answers. I was looking to fix myself. And part of this was somewhat natural at the time because I had OCD and I didn't know I had had it. So I was looking for how to work through some of the issues that I was having. But even once I found out I had ocd.

Researching and courses and reading got very compulsive for me. I was trying to find this one answer that would cure my ocd, and it got very, very compulsive. And so even something good can become a compulsion. And if it's a compulsion, it you're going down that downward spiral in the rabbit hole, and it's going to make your OCD worse, which it did, like mine. So you want to make sure that you're not seeking perfection or certainty. And one way that you can tell if something is compulsive or not, ask yourself, could I not do this thing right now? Could I not do it for a week, a month? And if there's a little or a lot discomfort there, it probably is a compulsion.

The next one is checking your feelings. This one's super common. You may check your feelings in a certain situation. In relationships, you may be checking your anxiety every day. Okay? And this is not going to be helpful at all. Just like the general checking compulsion, checking our feelings all the time is not going to be helpful. Our feelings are sometimes great, sometimes not, and oftentimes quite neutral. Right? So if we think about it, sometimes great, sometimes not, a lot neutral. When we check our feelings, we're going to find that they're a lot of times neutral and sometimes bad and sometimes good. But people who are typically checking their compulsions are looking for perfection and how they feel. OCD is telling them they should feel a certain way, and that is a problem, Right? So we want to make sure that we're not checking our feelings. The next one is looking for signs, things like, well, this number means that something good is going to happen, or this is a bad number, or because this happened, then this is going to happen. Right? There's a lot of different signs that could be an example here. But if you find yourself looking for signs a lot and creating meaning from those that could be an OCD compulsion, the next one is frustration that the thoughts are there. So with ocd, we want to make sure with intrusive thoughts, the more we try to push thoughts away, the more power we give them. And the more we tell them that we're afraid of them, which reinforces the fear. And the brain just continues to search for these types of feelings and give them to us. So it's very important that we're allowing the thoughts and feelings to be there with either applying exposure or not giving them attention at all, which is a form of exposure. Now, being frustrated that the thoughts are there is a very subtle form of pushing it away, right? We need to allow them, so we need to be okay if they are there and then choose how to react to them. That's how we eliminate OCD from our lives. Not being frustrated that they're there. The next one is trying to get to the root of the problem, going back into your past, trying to figure out what happened in your past as to why you have this particular OCD subset. What happened? What did my parents do? Again, just trying to find the root of the problem. When it comes to anxiety and ocd, the reality is finding the root isn't going to help. And let me use this example of the fear of heights. If I was afraid of heights and I determined that I fell off something really high when I was five, that's going to do nothing for my fear today of heights, right? So while knowing some information in the past can be helpful for some things, for this, it is not. The other thing is, scientifically, we do not know why some of us got OCD and some of us didn't. So scientifically, there is no answer yet. They think it's partially learned behavior, partially genetic, but the root is unknown. And you're just going to spend time analyzing and going over the past, which keeps you stuck in these past issues and negativities, which isn't going to make you feel any better. What you need to do is learn what to do with it today.

And learn those techniques and apply those techniques today, and OCD will fade away. And lastly, trying to fix yourself 100% or fix yourself quickly again, this goes back to the perfection and the urgency of compulsions. We are never going to be exactly where we want to be in life. We're never going to be exactly who we want to be. We're never going to be perfect. And OCD does not go away quickly most of the time. So it's important to allow the journey to be what it is. Allow the journey to flow as it will for you, because it is individual to everybody. And the more you try to get rid of it urgently or quickly, you're actually engaging in a compulsion, and it's going to make OCD worse. So trying to do it quickly is actually going to have the opposite effect, right? If you just let the journey play out and flow. As long as you're getting the right recovery help, which is mostly exposure and response prevention with some acceptance work and self compassion work, then it will flow a lot easier and happen a lot quicker if you are allowing it to be what it is, allowing it to have ups and downs. But the more you learn and use the skills, you can't take back that recovery and you're going to feel better more and more and more. I hope this was helpful. Please comment. Subscribe Like Let me know that this material was helpful for you and we will talk to you.