it’s been said before that a lot of OCD-related advice from people who don’t know anything about OCD that gets passed around on this site is like “if you have [obsession] try [compulsion] #lifehack” and that is not funny. it can be genuinely dangerous. however. the time someone told me a Quick, Easy, and Free way to get a pre-exposure rabies vaccination would be to simply volunteer at a tiger sanctuary makes me laugh every time I remember it
i bet a HUGE number of vampire hunters would develop obsessive compulsive symptoms around the possibility of being a vampire. carrying around a little compact mirror so they can compulsively check for a reflection. saying DON’T INVITE ME IN to anyone who opens a door for them, and if they forget they have to walk out and tell the person to revoke the invitation. spending hours after counting anything obsessively wondering if they did it compulsively you get the picture
and because vampires exhibit obsessive compulsive behavior i’m sure there’s a huge stigma in the vampire hunter community around admitting to having ocd. i bet it’s fucking rampant. they probably encourage other vampire hunters to take up their compulsions under the guise of sharing life-saving advice
Pro tip! If u have OCD, that genre of advice stuff that’s like “if youre questioning whether youre X, you probably are” is not for you and is in fact poison!!!
Someone tagged this as “unless its about transitioning” and no actually that is 100% not an exception. Gender and sexuality related obsessions are not uncommon, so if someone is spiraling from that kind of advice about transitioning, then its not for them and should be ignored.
The come-down from doing a good deed is crazy. Like I think I could rescue a baby from a burning building and 30 minutes later I’d be like, “Idk was it cringe of me to run into that building like that? The baby didn’t even seem that happy to get rescued. Honestly maybe the baby started the house fire and I interrupted an important life lesson.”
the way my partner talks about my ocd is so hilariously on point. for context, i experience a lot of verbal compulsions (feeling like i Have to Say a Certain Thing to magically fix another) and he just told me. “most of the time it’s easy to spot a compulsion cause literally nobody asked”
i’ll tell him that i want to watch a movie and then I’ll specify out loud “you do not have to comply with my wish, but it was good to freely express it just as it is good for you to freely refute it” and he will look at me dead in the eye and say “who asked. compulsion”. it’s just brutal
this is genuinely such good OCD treatment partnership though. acknowledging the compulsion & refusing to participate in the OCD narrative & reassurance loop. we love to see informed support.
I HATE MORAL OCD. well i shouldnt say hate thats a strong word. and i dont want to sound like i hate people WITH moral ocd because i dont of course. i just hate having it. but i shouldnt think that, i do like having morals, its just stressful to be thinking about them so constantly and scrutinizing every little thing i do or think. but really thats the least i could do so i should at least try, right? just because i suffer from— no, struggle with moral ocd doesn’t mean i should just stop thinking about things all together, thats not what im saying and i should make that clear, but i
ive found that partially treated mental illness can sometimes look to uninvolved onlookers like faked mental illness.
“someone who really has pOCD would be disgusted and horrified at their intrusive thoughts” or maybe i’m in therapy & am going by the books, being radically ambivalent to my intrusive thoughts instead of wasting energy mentally washing my paws of sin. i’m not going to perform my rock bottom for you for the sake of being believed.
can we talk about how being so pants-shittingly terrified of Doing A Racism you freeze up or Get Weird around anyone a shade darker than the sugar in your cupboard or with an accent is effectively the same as being scared of brown people and doesn’t make you much better than Sandra Lilly Smith from the suburbs who clings her purse when a black guy gets on the elevator with her
It also, generally, makes you much less safe to actually confront when you do inevitably fuck up and do some kind of racism, such as being scared of being around PoC for the above reasons. Because you’re so wound up and tense that it becomes this Big Catastrophic Failure and your Worst Fears Realized, which immediately takes the conversation away from the racism and instead collapses it around your feelings as the offender.
This is an example of an intersection of white fragility with white guilt, both of which are ways in which white people deflect the responsibility of examining their own racist biases or actions by weaponizing their feelings to keep the conversation about them and their feelings, either by getting defensive about accusations of racism or imploding with self-flagellation and guilt for being Such A Terrible Person.
The thing about being raised white in the US, europe, and canada, is that the society you grew up in will inevitably instill subconscious racist biases in you, directly or indirectly. Even the most leftist white spaces are rife with racist tendencies, many of which stem from absences, rather than overt presence of denegrating opinions of PoC. Like ignorance to the breadth and nature of the struggles of BIPoC, the nuances of systemic racism, where assumptions of equal opportunity and saftey in a given scenario break down.
If you want to actually be an effective anti-racist, it needs to be easy and safe to tell you “hey, that was racist” without you imploding, exploding, getting defensive, or centering your guilt. Don’t make it a bigger deal than the person approaching you has made it, keep the apology short and sweet, and keep the load off of whoever aproached you to correct your error; that is your responsibility to fix and your responsibility to manage your emotions about, not the victim of your racist behavior.
Like all things in life, you need to be willing to make a little bit of an ass of yourself if you want to get better. You need to get comfortable being wrong, being the bad guy. Because sooner or later, you will be, and you can’t let it be the end of the world. Because it never is, but treating it like one forces everyone else to save you from whatever personal apocalypse you’ve spun up over it. And when you’ve fucked up or hurt someone, it is always the wrong time to make yourself need rescue first.
You can come back from a faux pas, even a Racist one. You just need to chill the fuck out and listen.
80% of OCD sufferers stop ruminating right before they’re about to reach true moral purity … NEVER STOP THE GRIND !!
kirkybull:
hey is racism one of your obsessions? also white and ocd. if it is, how u cope with it? i'm really afraid all the time to hurt my loved ones who are black people, and they're the majority of my loved ones. and how do u identify whats racism from whats an intrusive thought?
scrupulosity-comics:
Most of my race-related OCD is abstract stuff like “if I move out of my parents’ house and try to live my own life outside of their control, I will have to find somewhere I can afford to pay rent, which will probably mean moving into a low-income neighborhood, which would mean inadvertently helping to gentrify the community, which would gradually push the original residents out of their homes and disrupt community ties and support systems and creating housing insecurity, so therefore I can’t move out or move on”.
I think that’s just part of a larger existential terror that I can only ever make the world worse by living in it—a net harm to the universe, molecule by misspent molecule.
I have been letting this ask sit in my inbox for weeks now because I’m convinced that anything I say will be destructive. What if my answer enables or excuses racism? What if my answer fuels the anguish of the mentally ill?
The rational and compassionate part of my mind insists that your loved ones (and mine!) understand that you (and I) are white, and have likely dealt with white peoples all their lives, and are capable of judging for themselves whether you are good to them and deserving of their intimacy. It is impossible to go through life without hurting and being hurt by people you care about—always you will have blindspots and miscommunications and competing needs. That’s just part of the curse of consciousness and being a social species. We all get a little blood on our hands eventually, one way or another… friendship involves knowing this, accepting this, and committing to avoid it and then, that failed, to make things right.
Again: your friends know you’re white. They have reason to expect the best of you or they wouldn’t be your friends. They choose to have you in their lives; trust them to trust you, and to recognize the difference between a beloved friend struggling with a treacherous and unkind brain and doing their best in an inescapably racist society, and a racist who whose bigotry makes them unworthy of their time and affection.
I do think racism obsessions are a particularly difficult manifestation of OCD to cope with because they’re hard to discuss at all without feeling like you’re implicitly asking for absolution. With other types of OCD, it’s common to seek reassurance that what you’re obsessively afraid of isn’t true—but what feels more racist than asking someone to reassure you that you’re not racist…? LMAO.
They say the “cure” to OCD, such as it is, is just to learn how to embrace the existential horror of uncertainty. Tall fucking order. Hell on Earth! But in a bizarre way I have found the rhetoric that “everyone is unconsciously and incurably racist” to be unexpectedly helpful… there is no total psychological purging and mental purification we can undergo, no amount of ritual self-flagellation that will drive the demons out, no pristine state we can aspire to and hate ourselves for soiling. Only mundane everyday commitments to compassion and empathy and solidarity and cleaning up our messes. But even then, a thought isn’t a mess. A thought I’d not a thing that happened or a choice you made. It doesn’t represent an alternate timeline branching off into a parallel universe where you have acted on it and hurt people.
Earlier this year I was playing a video game—during my lunch break I got to wondering what happened if you failed a skill check that I had passed in my own playthough, so I looked up a clip on YouTube and was so triggered by the answer (the player character calls his companion a racial slur in the heat of the moment, without meaning to, even if you’ve played him as a committed anti-racist) that I immediately spiraled and was close to throwing up in the broom closet, and when I got home I opened my own save and tried to make the player character kill himself as catharsis. It was an incredibly unreasonable guilt response to a completely fictional scenario that I hadn’t even gotten in my own playthrough, but in retrospect it was a safe way to explore fear of my own internalized racism hurting somebody and what might happen if my intrusive thoughts came true. It sucked and it was terrible and I was angry at myself for being crazy about it, but it ended up being a small dose of exposure therapy and practice at not repenting for nonexistent through self-abuse.
I dunno. This has been a long uncomfortably personal ramble but I hope it’s helpful. I don’t know if your friends know you have OCD (or how it manifests) and I don’t know whether telling them would help. But allowing yourself to trust others to trust you is far more useful than beating yourself up for thoughts you don’t want. I have on occasion warned people that I am cautious about doing certain things with them—particularly drinking—because there is a risk that I may spiral and show symptoms humiliating and uncomfortable to both of us, and I don’t want to put them in a position where they witness or feel like they have to help me manage the white guilt elements of my disorder. These conversations have usually gone well, and the mutual understanding to boundaries takes some of the tension out, which seems to reduce the triggers. It’s messy and awkward and maybe it limits who is willing to be friends with me, but IMHO it’s better than surprising someone.
As for determining whether something is an intrusive thought or actual racism, I guess my answer is: does it matter? Would you manage them differently? Intrusive thoughts may be an evil voice in your brain, but racism is an evil voice in society’s brain.
em3rg3ncy-backup-deactivated202:
“being distressed about an evil thought is what shows you’re a good person” = bad, unhelpful, is not at all conducive to OCD recovery
“there’s no such thing as a good or bad thought”, “your thoughts do not define your morality”, etc = good, helpful, acknowledges the fact that thoughtcrime isn’t real
remember kids, implying that distress is what makes you a good person is NOT a good way to encourage people to build a life where they are able to learn to live alongside intrusive thoughts
im praying for everyone whose ocd will be triggered by the whole situation with covid 19. please remember that while it is very important to wash your hands + stay clean, your contamination fears and obsessions are not going to protect you.
wash your hands, use hand sanitizer, keep your environment clean, avoid social gatherings as much as possible, but only do what is necessary. falling back into your compulsions will only make this more difficult. you’re strong and you can do this.