Are your feelings always valid when you have OCD?

[hetty]

I have always quite firmly believed in 'your feelings are valid'. I have never taken it to mean 'it's okay to hurt people because you feel bad', but rather that you cannot control your feelings and that how you feel is always valid, but how you act is not always valid or okay.

But lately I've been questioning that. When I am in an OCD spiral my OCD tends to attack guilt. I've read that people with OCD have something wrong with their brains that produces an excess of guilt. When I am in an OCD spiral I feel extremely, horrifically guilty over something I've done, even when other people tell me I haven't done anything wrong. I just can't stop feeling guilty.

I will always remember one day years back I was discussing this guilt with someone and they said 'how you feel about this is valid'. And that just made me feel so bad...like it was okay that I was feeling guilty? But it was hurting me badly. 

I don't really know what to think about this and am I suppose poking my feelers out to get other people's opinions.

[PolarBear]

Abso-bloody-lutely not.

You know how people are always saying, trust your gut? Not when you have OCD. It's our guts telling us to do the compulsion just in case the obsession is true.

Understand that obsessions are not just thoughts. They can be images, urges, impulses, sensations or feelings. Further, they are intrusive. So you can have intrusive feelings.

That's why you can feel a horrendous amount of guilt even though everyone around you is telling you that you have no reason to feel guilty.

We feel guilt, shame, disgust and fear, when there is no reason to. It's all part of the big lie.

OCD always lies. It never tells the truth.

[Angst]

I frequently feel the need to check. I perceive excess checking as a compulsion. I think compulsions are feeling a need to do something and CBT is about stop acting on our feelings. However, not all feelings are OCD related. The secret is separately out non OCD feelings and feelings in general. In general, feelings that lead to repetitive behaviour are OCD related. Compulsions are repetitive in nature and are an attempt to allay a fear which has become obsessive.
 

Guilt is a moral emotion where you judge yourself as having done something which was wrong. I think that you cannot generalise about whether it is right or wrong to feel guilt:  it depends on a particular act and the context of it. But if you feel a surfeit of guilt and others believe that you haven’t broken a moral code then this needs resolving in your mind.

[dksea]

9 hours ago, hetty said:

I have always quite firmly believed in 'your feelings are valid'. I have never taken it to mean 'it's okay to hurt people because you feel bad', but rather that you cannot control your feelings and that how you feel is always valid, but how you act is not always valid or okay.

I can understand this kind of philosophy but I don't exactly agree with it.  
How you feel is how you feel, thats true.  If you feel angry, well, you feel angry, thats just the way things are and its good to acknowledge that these emotions and feelings are real.
But I disagree that you can't control your feelings or that how you feel is always valid.
For example, lets say you are driving your car and someone cuts you off.  You feel angry.  But you don't have to STAY angry.  You DO have at least some control over that.  You can choose to reframe how you view these situations and how you do that will also change how you feel about it.  Changing ones perspective is an important part of OCD recovery as we want to train our brains to react to situations differently than the OCD would have us otherwise react.  So you decide to take a different approach to such situations.  You could, for example, decide to take the approach that, while its annoying when someone cuts you off, dwelling on it after the fact doesn't change anything so its not worth the energy to remain angry.

Similarly, maybe you feel upset at someone because of something you think they did, say you are angry at your brother because he took the last slice of pie.  But what if it turns out he didn't take it?  Was your anger valid?  Or did you jump to a conclusion and get angry without reason. However angry you feel/felt towards your brother doesn't mean it was fair.  In OCD things are slightly different but the same concept remains.  You can be fearful of something even if its not an actual risk.  You felt fear, thats a fact, but your fear was based on false information, it wasn't a reasonable fear.

OCD sends false alarms and interferes with our brain operating normally.  We can't control that we have OCD, but we CAN control how we react to it and handle it. We can learn to ignore the false alarms and adjust our emotional response.  True we are not in complete control of every feeling or emotion we have, but we do have some control, maybe its indirect at times but its there.

[hetty]

8 hours ago, dksea said:

I can understand this kind of philosophy but I don't exactly agree with it.  
How you feel is how you feel, thats true.  If you feel angry, well, you feel angry, thats just the way things are and its good to acknowledge that these emotions and feelings are real.
But I disagree that you can't control your feelings or that how you feel is always valid.
For example, lets say you are driving your car and someone cuts you off.  You feel angry.  But you don't have to STAY angry.  You DO have at least some control over that.  You can choose to reframe how you view these situations and how you do that will also change how you feel about it.  Changing ones perspective is an important part of OCD recovery as we want to train our brains to react to situations differently than the OCD would have us otherwise react.  So you decide to take a different approach to such situations.  You could, for example, decide to take the approach that, while its annoying when someone cuts you off, dwelling on it after the fact doesn't change anything so its not worth the energy to remain angry.

Similarly, maybe you feel upset at someone because of something you think they did, say you are angry at your brother because he took the last slice of pie.  But what if it turns out he didn't take it?  Was your anger valid?  Or did you jump to a conclusion and get angry without reason. However angry you feel/felt towards your brother doesn't mean it was fair.  In OCD things are slightly different but the same concept remains.  You can be fearful of something even if its not an actual risk.  You felt fear, thats a fact, but your fear was based on false information, it wasn't a reasonable fear.

OCD sends false alarms and interferes with our brain operating normally.  We can't control that we have OCD, but we CAN control how we react to it and handle it. We can learn to ignore the false alarms and adjust our emotional response.  True we are not in complete control of every feeling or emotion we have, but we do have some control, maybe its indirect at times but its there.

Yes, I see what you mean. Perhaps 'your feelings are valid' is just a happy-go-lucky way of covering up our worst qualities. Say a racist is angry that they're sat at a restaurant and on the table next to them is a Muslim. The racist doesn't do or say anything, just eats and leaves, but they are angry the Muslim is in the restaurant. Is that feeling valid?

Well, of course not. Being angry that someone of a certain race is eating out isn't valid at all. It never will be.

Or say an abusive husband is angry his wife is wearing an attractive dress because he's scared it means she's going to flirt with other men. Is being angry your wife is wearing a nice dress valid?

Of course not. That's ridiculous.

I guess the 'your feelings are valid' shtick helped me through some really tough times but now I'm out the other side I can see its flaws. 

 

I agree with you, I think. Thank you for your input. Our emotions are not completely out of our control. Even with mental illness. We can use coping mechanisms to help ourselves feel better.

[hetty]

17 hours ago, PolarBear said:

Abso-bloody-lutely not.

You know how people are always saying, trust your gut? Not when you have OCD. It's our guts telling us to do the compulsion just in case the obsession is true.

Understand that obsessions are not just thoughts. They can be images, urges, impulses, sensations or feelings. Further, they are intrusive. So you can have intrusive feelings.

That's why you can feel a horrendous amount of guilt even though everyone around you is telling you that you have no reason to feel guilty.

We feel guilt, shame, disgust and fear, when there is no reason to. It's all part of the big lie.

OCD always lies. It never tells the truth.

I like the way you phrased that  Yes, you are right, I get uncomfortable with the phrase 'trust your instincts'. Well, one time my instincts were screaming at me that the perfectly nice waiter in a cafe had poisoned my Fanta because it was a bit more orange than usual. Should I have trusted my instincts? No.

Of course if it's a man coming up in a dark alley looking weird and with something shiny in his pocket, yes, trust your instincts and run. But that's rational. Mental illness is not.

I honestly didn't realize you can have intrusive feelings. That explains a lot. Thank you.

[hetty]

17 hours ago, Angst said:

I frequently feel the need to check. I perceive excess checking as a compulsion. I think compulsions are feeling a need to do something and CBT is about stop acting on our feelings. However, not all feelings are OCD related. The secret is separately out non OCD feelings and feelings in general. In general, feelings that lead to repetitive behaviour are OCD related. Compulsions are repetitive in nature and are an attempt to allay a fear which has become obsessive.
 

Guilt is a moral emotion where you judge yourself as having done something which was wrong. I think that you cannot generalise about whether it is right or wrong to feel guilt:  it depends on a particular act and the context of it. But if you feel a surfeit of guilt and others believe that you haven’t broken a moral code then this needs resolving in your mind.

Yes, it's very difficult, isn't it? But usually I can tell when a thought/feeling is OCD and when it's not.

 

You are completely correct that sometimes guilt is right to feel. Like all emotions it has a place! If we didn't feel guilt, we would just keep doing really bad things. It's entirely possible, for example, to commit murder and get away with it without any punishment; but most people don't because they know it would be wrong anyway, and they know it would be wrong because they would feel guilt. Same with sadness...there's depression, which is a mental illness and irrational, and then there's perfectly normal times to feel sadness, like when someone dies. All our emotions have a place, even the scary ones.

[malina]

Hey @hetty,

I don't really think feelings can be valid or invalid. They just are. Like you can't say that it's wrong to have a certain emotion, even if it's not socially acceptable or morally wrong (as in the racist example you pointed out). You just feel them and sometimes you can't help that.

I think the problem for everybody, not just people with OCD, is finding a balance between our emotions and rational thinking. For us that is a particular challenge because mental illness tricks our emotions, it makes us feel strongly about things that aren't true, thereby making us thing they are true. Therefore, we have to make ourselves rely on logic as much as we can, to be rational and learn to ignore these strong emotions sometimes.

[dksea]

On 16/04/2021 at 20:40, hetty said:

Yes, I see what you mean. Perhaps 'your feelings are valid' is just a happy-go-lucky way of covering up our worst qualities.

I think the phrase kind of grew out of the movement to challenge attitudes that seek to deny feelings and experiences, especially in areas such as racism or sexism or toxic masculinity.  Things like "real men don't cry" or "women are too emotional" or what not.  So there is some value in recognizing that historically ignored/diminished experiences are ok.  But the more it is applied as a blanket statement, the less helpful it becomes.  People can abuse it as a way to justify not just valid behavior, but also negative behavior and even abusive behavior.  As in just about everything, context matters.

[BelAnna]

On 15/04/2021 at 18:34, hetty said:

I have always quite firmly believed in 'your feelings are valid'. I have never taken it to mean 'it's okay to hurt people because you feel bad', but rather that you cannot control your feelings and that how you feel is always valid, but how you act is not always valid or okay.

But lately I've been questioning that. When I am in an OCD spiral my OCD tends to attack guilt. I've read that people with OCD have something wrong with their brains that produces an excess of guilt. When I am in an OCD spiral I feel extremely, horrifically guilty over something I've done, even when other people tell me I haven't done anything wrong. I just can't stop feeling guilty.

I will always remember one day years back I was discussing this guilt with someone and they said 'how you feel about this is valid'. And that just made me feel so bad...like it was okay that I was feeling guilty? But it was hurting me badly. 

I don't really know what to think about this and am I suppose poking my feelers out to get other people's opinions.

I think that with OCD you can have intrusive thoughts and intrusive feelings; which belong to the illness, rather than to you. 

You can feel excessive obsessive guilt, which has no real basis in reality and although your feelings are 'valid' in that you are allowed to feel anything you want- that guilt feeling is actually a feature of the illness. Just the same as someone with paranoid schizophrenia might feel paranoid- it's a feature of the illness. Pathological guilt is a feature of OCD for lots of people!

I like Malina's idea that feelings are neither valid nor invalid and there does need to be a certain level acceptance of thoughts and feelings in order to recover from OCD- the feeling might be an OCD feeling, you can relabel it as an 'OCD feeling' and then let it be rather than fighting it. 

 

 

Edited April 20, 2021 by BelAnna

[snowbear]

5 hours ago, BelAnna said:

I think that with OCD you can have intrusive thoughts and intrusive feelings; which belong to the illness, rather than to you. 

However unwanted or out of character they are, I'm not sure it's helpful to think of things which your own brain generates as something separate from you.

'You' are not your illness , for sure, but 'intrusive' thoughts are still your thoughts. They don't magically arise in your brain because you have OCD. Unpleasant or incongrous thoughts arise in everybody's brains all the time. What makes it an illness isn't having the thought but how you respond to having it.

For people just discovering they have OCD it can be helpful to initially label their troublesome thoughts as 'not me', it's the illness. But as time progresses that same labelling , I believe, holds people back from fully understanding and recovering from OCD.

As long as you're offloading the thoughts as OCD you're not taking full responsibility for your response to your own thoughts.

5 hours ago, BelAnna said:

I like Malina's idea that feelings are neither valid nor invalid and there does need to be a certain level acceptance of thoughts and feelings in order to recover from OCD- the feeling might be an OCD feeling, you can relabel it as an 'OCD feeling' and then let it be rather than fighting it. 

Acceptance is indeed what you're aiming for. But it's acceptance that 'you' ( a trully good and honourable person) can still have unpleasant thoughts same as everybody else.

That's why you don't react or fight it - because it's normal even in good people - not because it's OCD and therefore separate to 'you'.

Ultimately, it's about recognising that the thoughts you experience don't define 'you' or what kind of person you are, so you don't need to resist, avoid or neutralise them when they happen.

I'm making a point of it because I think it's a turning point once you get your head around 'whatever crazy/horrid thoughts pop into my head it says nothing about the kind of person I am.'