“But that just doesn’t make sense …” – a personal account of learning to understand OCD

When I first encountered OCD

In February 2016, I began a placement at OCD Klinikken as a psychology student. For the first time, I met people living with a condition I knew very little about. OCD – that means washing your hands all the time and straightening everything, doesn’t it? The answer turned out to be no: it is far more complex than that.

Whenever I tell family, friends and acquaintances where I am on placement, I hear more or less the same response: OCD is about handwashing and order. Very few people realise that OCD is by no means always about handwashing and order, or understand what drives these compulsions. OCD is a condition in which anxiety often takes up a great deal of space. When I began at the clinic, I found OCD difficult to understand because I did not have it myself.

Again and again, I have been met with utterly puzzled looks when I try to explain how anyone can be so afraid of their own thoughts. In the clinic’s group for people close to someone with OCD, parents, siblings and partners ask: “But why does he get so frightened by it?” When I tried to explain to my mother how OCD can spread to the point where someone becomes afraid to touch the floors in their own home, she said: “But that just doesn’t make sense, Lærke!”

That prompted me to look for comparisons that could illustrate what anxiety can feel like for a person with OCD and why it actually makes sense. It has been a personal journey because I also struggled to understand the anxiety of people with OCD when I first started at the clinic. I now think I understand it a little better. I hope my experiences and explanations can help others understand a condition surrounded by so much stigma that it can be extraordinarily difficult to tell anyone about it. Many people feel ashamed of having OCD. And although OCD is about more than anxiety, anxiety often takes up space in a way we can all recognise.

My own exercise with spiders

At OCD Klinikken, we have a rule that, as therapists, we do not ask our clients to take on a task without also doing it ourselves. This matters because it gives us a sense of how much time and energy a task requires and, in turn, how much we can reasonably expect of our clients. Since I am not afraid of the same things as my clients, I considered what I could expose myself to instead. The answer was spiders. I am one of those people who feel uneasy around spiders. I do not consider myself afraid of them. I do not run screaming from the room when I see one on the wall, but I normally either vacuum it up or squash it with a shoe or a piece of kitchen roll, depending on its size. I know that spiders in Denmark are not dangerous. They do not lay eggs under your skin or anything like that, but I certainly find touching them unpleasant, and I had not touched one for years.

So, in exactly the same way as I set my clients a task they do not enjoy but do not find unmanageable, I set myself the task of picking up and holding a spider the next time I came across one at home. I can do that easily, I thought. I am not really afraid of spiders; I just find them disgusting. How difficult can it really be?

The first time I saw a spider on the wall, I sat on the sofa and stared at it for ten minutes. Then I went over and looked at it for another five minutes before deciding that I would not be able to pick it up directly with my hand. So I broke the task down into several stages, just as I break my clients’ tasks down into stages to make them more manageable. I let the spider crawl onto a sheet of paper so I could keep it reasonably under control without having to touch it straight away. The poor spider crawled around while I kept turning the paper and moving my fingers to stop it climbing onto my hand. We sat there sizing each other up for a while until I finally plucked up the courage to let it crawl onto my hand. Then I realised that it was neither unpleasant nor disgusting. I thought: “Was that it?” To be honest, by then I mostly felt sorry for the spider, which might not be too fond of people either.

I should stress that I do not have a spider phobia. My anxiety is nowhere near as intense as the anxiety a person with OCD can experience. You might think that once I was sitting there with the spider in my hand, the fear had disappeared. But it had not. The next time I encountered a spider, exactly the same thing happened again, except that it only took me about twelve minutes to work up the courage. The time after that, ten minutes, and so on. Today, I can pick up small spiders straight away and without difficulty. The larger ones? Well … I am not there yet.

Spiders as a metaphor for OCD

If you feel the same way about spiders as I do, try taking up the challenge and catching one the next time you have the chance. You can begin by catching it in a glass if, like me, you cannot pick it up directly. Then ask yourself: how rational is it, really, to be too afraid to touch this tiny animal when it is not dangerous at all? Does that make sense? The comparison does not, of course, capture the whole of OCD. Anxiety in OCD can feel something like this, except that spiders are crawling across pavements, floors and walls everywhere you go, and no one else seems afraid of them. If the world looked like that, wouldn’t you also do everything you could to avoid the spiders? Wear heavy boots and long trousers, never touch anything without looking first, and so on.

Other forms of irrational fear

Perhaps spiders do not bother you. If not, try imagining the same example with snakes instead. Another example many people recognise is fear of heights. When did you last jump off a three-metre diving board? Or a five-metre one? If you are thinking, “I could easily do that,” try walking to the top the next time you have the chance; it feels different once you are standing up there. Would you go skydiving if you had the opportunity? If not, consider why. If you would, consider how much it would take to make yourself do it. Do you think you would feel exhausted afterwards? People can learn to act despite fear. That is exactly what people with OCD practise in treatment, but it takes a great deal of energy.

Have you ever been unable to get hold of someone you love? They did not answer their phone, and your thoughts began circling around the possibility that something might have happened to them. You know that probably nothing has happened, but you still cannot relax until you hear from them. Perhaps you even become angry and tell them off when they finally call back because you have been frightened. Many parents have experienced this when a child loses track of time and forgets to let them know. Why become afraid? The risk is very small, and being afraid does not help. It makes no difference – the child will not come home any sooner. But try telling yourself that your fear is irrational while you are caught in it – it does not work. Fear does not care whether it is rational. And it can become stronger the more that seems to be at stake – for example, if someone you love could be harmed. Many people with OCD are terribly afraid of becoming ill or coming to harm in another way, for example by ingesting chemicals. But they are even more afraid that they could be responsible for someone else becoming ill or coming to harm.

I hope this account can help explain why people with OCD cannot simply “pull themselves together” and do what they fear so much. Yes, the fear is irrational, but people with OCD are certainly not the only ones who experience irrational fear – almost all of us do. And yes, we can face our fear and act despite it, but doing so demands enormous courage and energy. If the fear is great enough, you cannot face it alone. Then you need help breaking the tasks down into manageable stages. I find the clients I meet in my work incredibly brave because they face their fears every day and take on greater and greater challenges. I cannot claim to be as brave myself, but I will try to follow their example.

For now, I have promised myself that the next time I am at the swimming pool, I will jump from the five-metre diving board – something I have never dared to do before. And then I will see whether I can find some slightly larger spiders …