Kavin Senapathy has a particularly good read on one way of helping someone you love who has OCD — basically, don’t help.
At least not in the way you might think.
Basically, people with OCD crave reassurance (it’s often called “the doubter’s disease”), and they frequently turn to their closest family or friends for that reassurance.
“Do you think this cut looks infected?”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“Okay, great.”
On the surface, that seems to be helpful, but for someone with OCD, it just reinforces their addiction to reassurance.
Telling someone with OCD that they don’t have cancer or that the baby is fine “are lies,” Yip points out. “How could a spouse possibly know that their loved one doesn’t have cancer without medical training and CAT scans?” she says. In most cases, a response that “everything is fine” is an educated and highly likely assumption, but it never quite fulfills what someone with OCD is craving.
And responding to these sorts of compulsions in such a matter-of-fact way also reinforces them, in a way. It made me believe my questions were reasonable and valid, and made me constantly seek the temporary comfort that the reassurance provided.
It’s also only a band-aid, a temporary solution. “If you respond with certainty, for example, ‘No, you won’t die,’ the person with OCD will still always wonder and have the same question and continue to ask in a hundred different ways,” Yip explains. “The best way you can support your loved one is to help him or her tolerate uncertainty.”
So how do you help? The article recommends these responses to requests for reassurance.
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“That sounds like a reassurance question. I can answer, but it may feed your OCD. What would you like for me to do?”
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“What if you waited a while before I answer that, and if it still feels pressing for you to know, I’ll tell you later?”
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“Is that you asking, or your OCD?”
Ugh.
As someone who’s struggled with OCD, I really hate this, but it’s true.
There’s nothing better than feeling relief from our obsessions. But the point is that relief is only temporary, and the relief reinforces the underlying disorder. You know, kind of like a drug addiction.
Now — back to this site’s mission.
As I’ve written before, it takes a holistic response to tackle any health problem, including brain disorders like OCD.
Scripture sometimes helps, sometimes it does nothing, but the fact of the matter is that science has proven the medical basis of OCD, and those who suffer from it, I believe, will never truly be “cured.”
As of yet, there isn’t a medicine or surgery that can correct neuroanatomical defects that are associated with it.
The OCD advocacy site, Beyond OCD, writes, “OCD is chronic. This means it is like having asthma or diabetes. You can get it under control and become recovered but, at the present time, there is no cure…. the current thinking is that it is probably genetic in origin, and not within our current reach to treat at that level.”
Now, just like asthma or diabetes, you can often find relief from symptoms, and that’s where things like medicine, talk therapy, and spirituality come into play.
But I’ve found it particularly dangerous to tell people with OCD to “just stop worrying.” In my case, for example, that prompts me to start obsessing about the “sin of worry,” and starts a whole new round of OCD (But that’s just what happens when the prefrontal cortex, basal ganglia, and thalamus aren’t getting the job done right).
The thing to tell people with OCD isn’t “stop worrying,” but instead, “Hey, go get some medical advice. Medicine and talk therapy seem to help a lot of people. Maybe they can help you too!”
For more information on the medical basis of these disorders, please pick up a copy of Dr. Matthew Stanford’s fantastic book Grace for the Afflicted, and read my interview with him here.
We can help loved ones with OCD by (counter-intuitively) not reassuring them, but we can hurt them terribly by judging them for what is a real, observable medical condition. It doesn’t just hurt “feelings,” more importantly, it sends them on a new downward spiral of obsession over their failings.
