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OCD with no cognitive meaning


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I’ve spoken about this before, so apologies for repeating myself, but I just don’t understand this type of OCD at all.

I understand most OCD. Why people do compulsions as they are afraid of something. I do this too. But I also have weird OCD where I have to touch something with both hands or feet or whatever, or sometimes it drives me mad if a line isn’t completed or a figure isn’t coloured in or something. I have a memory from years ago as a teenager of going to look round a flat at Uni and having to go back into a room as I needed to touch a poster. But I don’t understand why I do these. There doesn’t seem to be an obvious cognitive meaning behind them. I don’t feel like something bad will happen if I don’t do them, it just feels uncomfortable. And it doesn’t seem like a big problem- it doesn’t take hours of my time or anything. If I go and talk to someone at work and accidentally touch their computer screen with one hand, I then have to touch it with the other hand. No big deal, right? 

It seems different from my other OCD, it’s not a worry, it’s just a feeling. I get that needing to feel balanced is the ‘obsession’ and there are compulsions, but why? I can’t work out what’s behind it and whether I should care about resisting it. It’s not ruining my life or anything. 

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It seems like you have a pretty good understanding of your problem. Your compulsions get rid of the feelings of unease. If you look at OCD compulsions in general, they are nearly all in response to some emotion, even if they are done because of a worry about something bad happening, it's still to get rid of a feeling. It might be feeling responsible, uncertain, anxious, uneasy, contaminated, they all result in compulsions. 

My guess is that you've got used to coping with this feeling through compulsions. However, the problem is that it buys into the idea that compulsions get rid of the emotion or any emotion in general, which is false. Compulsions always only work temporarily in getting rid of emotion. This problem may not affect your life but it will support reacting to emotions in other aspects of your OCD, so is worth tackling. 

Remember that if you try to give up these compulsions, only then may you feel the feeling you avoid and that might be scary, but feelings are just feelings and they will pass if we give them no attention or meaning. Hope this helps ?

Edited by Gemma7
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This is exactly what I had with some obsessions - no consequential fear if I failed to do the resultant compulsion, just a feeling of unease. 

But that in fact makes it a whole lot easier to understand that there is no real purpose to the obsessional urge and stop doing it. I stopped pretty quickly when I learned this, and the feelings of unease soon disappeared. 

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I actually have quite a few things that others see as a bit odd, I need order and balance and the things u describe like an unfinished line or something drive me nuts, some people may disagreee with me here but I view them as quirks and part of my personality, they do not cause me a great amount of distress just an annoying feeling like an itch that needs scratched, I don’t spend all my time thinking about these things nor being anxious about them, so I accept them and that’s just how I am.xx

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Thanks everyone- so there seems to be a range of opinions, from suggesting it’s best to resist to saying it’s maybe fine to just live with it.

On 16/07/2018 at 23:39, taurean said:

This is exactly what I had with some obsessions - no consequential fear if I failed to do the resultant compulsion, just a feeling of unease. 

But that in fact makes it a whole lot easier to understand that there is no real purpose to the obsessional urge and stop doing it. I stopped pretty quickly when I learned this, and the feelings of unease soon disappeared. 

Do you find then that you no longer get those feelings anymore? I just worry it will keep feeling uncomfortable even if I keep resisting them.

I just don’t understand why this form of OCD exists. One of the weird things I have is if I see a number 9 I have to see a 1 to ‘balance it out’. For example, I play a game on this phone where part of it is collecting hearts. If I’ve collected say 49 hearts, I can’t stop there, or even at 50- I have to go to 51, otherwise I feel weird. Sometimes I make myself resist it, but the feeling is still there the next time. Why would my brain decide I have to do this? I get other compulsions, like my brain thinks something bad will happen if I don’t do a certain amount of exercise etc, but I don’t get this one at all! Why do the numbers matter to me?

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16 minutes ago, kaheath80 said:

Why do the numbers matter to me?

I doubt you’ll ever find the answer to this question and it isn't important to know it. It's highly likely that at some point a long time ago, you felt uneasy randomly and you placed a meaning on it being because of certain numbers, you then will have found a solution however illogical to get rid of the feeling. It's not uncommon, i used to wait for certain times on the clock to change and would stare at it until it did. This was when i was younger. 

I really think that all behaviours that impact on someone's life should be challenged and what behaviours they are is a personal choice for the person involved. I would say from what you mention that for you it interferes regularly and causes regular negative feelings. You deserve to not have to do these neutralising compulsions, and in order to not keep getting this feeling back you're going to have to persist again and again. You have to show yourself that the behaviour is actually pointless and counter productive. Also, getting the feeling back is expected considering how long you will have been doing these compulsions so don't let that be a factor in giving up. 

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38 minutes ago, kaheath80 said:

Do you find then that you no longer get those feelings anymore? I just worry it will keep feeling uncomfortable even if I keep resisting them.

I was a child at the time, and these were only minor issues, and OCD was not that powerful with them - so once I realised they were pointless, it wasn't difficult to stop them. 

Re the numbers as Gemma says, the compulsions are neutralising ones - and they will only strengthen the obsession. 

My sister was  uncomfortable with the number eleven, and of course her brain was scanning for it and when it found it would announce this with full trumpets and drums accompaniment :)

But it was just a silly, meaningless, obsession. 

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Guest OCDhavenobrain

This was my problem for the majority of my life. I couldn't make the connection between compulsions and anxiety. Everybody who spoke about OCD always said that compulsions are done because of anxiety, well i know how anxiety feels but i couldn't see the connection to what i am doing. I still have some problems with this. Even if i  now have accepted that i can also be a feeling of unease. And it is possible that we are so familiar to all of this, so used to anxiety that we don't see it. 

No matter what the case is in my situation i wouldn't advice anyone to get to stuck up in trying to search after the connection. Maybe i do not need to tell you this but it can also get obsessive very quickly, i have been very obsessed about trying to find the connection between specific thoughts and the reaction. Trying to pinpoint the exact thought who gave raise to the anxiety i was feeling.

Edited by OCDhavenobrain
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I get these types of compulsions and did so even more as a kid.  I'd get the urge to touch something, or to say a certain phrase, or clench a certain muscle a specific number of times, or look at a certain thing, or whatever.  To me they always seemed more like "tics" than compulsions.  There is no obsession attached (and I don't think there ever was) - it is just a build-up of almost physical discomfort until I perform the action.  To me this seems similar to what people describe when they talk about Tourette's.

Anyway as others have said, I suppose the reasoning isn't important really, it's tackling the compulsion which matters.  I have to say I haven't really properly attempted to tackle these kinds of compulsions as they've never really distressed me enough to try.

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3 hours ago, gingerbreadgirl said:

I get these types of compulsions and did so even more as a kid.  I'd get the urge to touch something, or to say a certain phrase, or clench a certain muscle a specific number of times, or look at a certain thing, or whatever.  To me they always seemed more like "tics" than compulsions.  There is no obsession attached (and I don't think there ever was) - it is just a build-up of almost physical discomfort until I perform the action.  To me this seems similar to what people describe when they talk about Tourette's.

Anyway as others have said, I suppose the reasoning isn't important really, it's tackling the compulsion which matters.  I have to say I haven't really properly attempted to tackle these kinds of compulsions as they've never really distressed me enough to try.

I would beg to differ slightly here GBG. 

The obsession is the focusing on the desire to do the activity, ritual. 

The compulsion is the urge to carry out the activity.

When we look at the cognitive side, there is no fear consequence - but there is a feeling of discomfort if we don't. 

When I, as a child, realised that there was no real point in the activity I was obsessing about doing, and gradually stopped, the discomfort feelings gradually disappeared. 

 

Edited by taurean
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Thanks everyone! I agree that trying to work out the reasons behind this could become an obsession in their own right, so I’ll leave that alone.

I think it would be worth trying to resist these things. They don’t cause me huge amounts of distress either, but in the past I’ve had to interrupt meetings to perform compulsions like these, I also once purposely burnt one thumb with the iron as I had accidentally burnt the other one and needed to feel balanced.

At work my phone cord is always tangled and people remark on it. I seem to be the only one at work with this problem. A new guy at work said this week that he watched me on the phone and I switched hands holding the phone, which would cause it to become tangled. I should have known it was OCD related! :lol:

Incidentally I have tics too and have done since I was a child. I keep winking one eye and it’s embarrassing as I’m sure people think I’m winking at them! I read once that people with the kind of OCD I’ve described above are more likely to have tics.

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I experience a ton of these, and have done since I was a child.

I kind of assumed that if people who develop OCD are more prone to anxiety anyway, that sense of unease is just an expression of that higher baseline level of anxiety. Or compulsions are a learned, self-reinforcing response to that kind of anxiety. Sometimes I can resist these compulsions, but it's a lot harder to when I'm unwell/hormonal. They're more pressing before bed too.

It's been tricky explaining to therapists. I'm not spending hours at a time on compulsions any more, but they're constantly there and apply to almost everything I do. The OCD goes, "Do this instead of that, and you'll be safe." or "That feels odd, touch it again. Again. Again, it's not safe yet, again." If there are multiple options of things in a shop, I can spend minutes trying to pick the "right one" or the one that is "safe". It's tied itself into a "butterfly effect" way of thinking, like I can somehow predict the future by going along with it. Which I know is ludicrous, but in the moment it feels safer to go along with it. Which is a typical OCD thing!

One therapist once described it as giving the OCD snacks -- by doing it, you're activating the OCD brain patterns and strengthening them, so the more troubling obsessions and compulsions that use those same pathways are also strengthened.

Edited by Raffles
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Guest OCDhavenobrain
4 hours ago, gingerbreadgirl said:

I get these types of compulsions and did so even more as a kid.  I'd get the urge to touch something, or to say a certain phrase, or clench a certain muscle a specific number of times, or look at a certain thing, or whatever.  To me they always seemed more like "tics" than compulsions.  There is no obsession attached (and I don't think there ever was) - it is just a build-up of almost physical discomfort until I perform the action.  To me this seems similar to what people describe when they talk about Tourette's.

 Anyway as others have said, I suppose the reasoning isn't important really, it's tackling the compulsion which matters.  I have to say I haven't really properly attempted to tackle these kinds of compulsions as they've never really distressed me enough to try.

I have those too, but i also have to disagree, but from a personal standpoint. I find that those tics/compulsions increases if i do them. I am not to sure about how people with tourettes feels when they do them, even if i have tried a lot to understand what is going on and how they feel. 

If i do those "automated tics" more and more will i feel the need to do them even more and i also get feelings of unease in general. Irritation/anger/anxiety. 

My plan and it have alwyas been is to get over OCD and then see if those automated tics are OCD, tourettes or even AUTISM. I don't know. I have analyzed it quite a bit, one problem seems to be that if it is OCD and it is a compulsion, that means that if you stop going over ""false memory  - thoughts"" and let your mind replace it with tics than do you not decrease the amount of compulsions you are doing and the story goes on. 

 

 

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