If your view of situations is unbalanced, then your emotional reaction will be unbalanced (exaggerated or inappropriate). For example, many people experience obsessional thoughts just like the kind you experience, but they are not bothered by them. The reason is that those people do not interpret such thoughts to be meaningful or to be signaling harm or danger or to be something that requires action on their part. Thus, they can easily dismiss them.
The paradox of mental control is the harder people try to control a thought, the more difficulty they have with it.
The very act of trying to control a thought led to an opposite, unintended effect; suppression can actually cause more preoccupation with an unwanted thought.
Searching for distracters takes a lot of mental effort, and your ability to effectively do so is really reduced when you have to concentrate on something else. However, your mind will keep scanning itself for signs of the thought you want to suppress, whether you have a distracter thought ready or not. What also happens is that all the distracters you used to replace the unwanted thought become associated with it and begin to actually trigger it. For example, during the white bear test, if you tried to suppress the white bear thought by replacing it with a thought of, say, a bluebird, eventually the thought of a bluebird will trigger the white bear thought.
The Islamic scholar, Said Nursi, makes an insightful observation about scrupulosity that is entirely consistent with a cognitive behavioral approach to OCD:
O one afflicted with the sickness of scruples! Do you know what your scruples resemble? A calamity! The more importance they are given, the more they grow. If you give them no importance, they die away. If you see them as big, they grow bigger. If you see them as small, they grow smaller. If you fear them, they swell and make you ill. If you do not fear them, they are light and remain hidden. (Nursi 1998)
“The less I control the obsession, the more quickly it will spontaneously fade.”
Success in overcoming OCD is best judged by your response to obsessional thoughts when you have them, not by the absence of obsessional thoughts. Recall that most people report having obsessional thoughts from time to time. What differentiates people without OCD from people with OCD is that people without OCD do not overinterpret the meaning of their obsessional thoughts, do not become distressed by them, and therefore are able to readily ignore them without needing to develop ways of coping with them that are ultimately
problematic.
It is important for you to remember that courage isn’t just being unafraid of something; it also means being afraid of something but facing it anyway.
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