today i'm going to be talking about the secret thoughts that cause ocd
that you may have never heard of or may not even recognize that you're having
hi everybody in today's video we're going to be talking about ocd and some of the thoughts that
behind ocd that drive ocd now the thing is ocd can be a really scary condition associated with lots
of out of control upsetting intrusive thoughts and for people with ocd these obsessive thoughts can
be at the forefront of their mind all the time in today's video i'm going to be talking about
some of the secret thoughts that people with ocd may not even know that they're having and
it's these secret thoughts that are really the thoughts that are driving ocd but before i get
into that just a couple of disclaimers to go over i'm a registered psychologist in the province of
british columbia canada and this video is for informational purposes only it is not intended
as a substitute or replacement for advice from your doctor or mental health professional now
with those things out of the way let's start talking about thinking in ocd
now in a previous video i discussed the behavioral model of ocd sort of the typical behavioral model
that really forms the basis for understanding uh the rationale behind exposure and response
prevention treatment for ocd and in brief the the model starts with some sort of trigger situation
so like i feel a bump while i'm driving and then i get the intrusive thought like something
like did i just hit somebody with my car and this intrusive thought can then lead to high levels of
anxiety or distress i feel really anxious about the thought that i just hit somebody with my car
and so i have this urge to neutralize and to engage in some sort of compulsive behavior or some
sort of compulsion to neutralize my anxiety or distress so i may drive around the block a
few times to check to see if there's somebody who was injured uh in the area where i was driving by
and so this compulsion behavior this neutralization reduces my anxiety in
the short term but ultimately feeds back and fuels the intrusive thought
in the long term thereby perpetuating ocd if you want to learn more about the behavioral
model of ocd i'll leave a link up above and then you can sort of check out that video
now the thing about the behavioral model of ocd is that it's missing one key component and and what's
missing is an understanding that everybody gets these types of intrusive thoughts everybody has
these kind of random intrusive types of thoughts that come up you know occasionally from time to
time and these intrusive thoughts tend to take the form of sort of three main categories of thinking
and these are the main categories that really drive some ocd types of thoughts and behaviors
and the categories tend to relate to harm so harm coming to myself or harm coming to other people
blasphemous or religious types of thoughts or thoughts around sexual deviance now the thing is
everyone gets these types of thoughts everyone has these types of kind of intrusive random
types of thoughts that come from out of the blue and so the thing is if it was
just the thought that was triggering the anxiety and the distress then everybody would have ocd
so there's part of the puzzle that's missing in this pure behavioral model of ocd and the part of
the puzzle that's missing is something we call the appraisal and the appraisal is the meaning
that you give to the intrusive thought so in other words what does it mean
that you have the thought what do these thoughts actually mean so i'll give you an example
uh that i like to to share with my clients it was it was a number of years ago when
my my eldest daughter was just an infant she was probably about six or seven months old and i was
carrying her and i was walking down the stairs with her and i as i was walking down the stairs
i had this intrusive thought and almost like an intrusive urge to throw her down the stairs and
the thing was when i when i had that thought and that urge the first thing that came to my mind was
oh that's a good one that's a that's a really good thought that's one that i can share with
my clients so that was the appraisal that was the way i interpreted that thought was hey this
is something that is a really useful example that i'll be able to share with my clients with ocd now
the thing is i'm not sort of a typical person having these types of thoughts i'm a psychologist
who works with people with ocd so of course i'm going to probably interpret that situation
a little bit differently but think about someone else in that exact same situation what might be
their appraisal of walking down the stairs with their infant child and having the thought or the
urge to throw that child down the stairs well they could think oh my god i'm a horrible person
is it possible that i could do something like that to hurt my child
i'm dangerous to my child i shouldn't be left alone with them so you can see that
having this type of intrusive thought can lead to all sorts of appraisals or other thoughts
about the meaning of that thought that then is likely to cause a lot of anxiety or distress
so the thing is the appraisal is key to whether or not a person experiences distress
in a situation like that so in my case i didn't experience any distress because i appraised it as
a really good real life example that i can share with my clients in the case
of the other person they interpret it as this is horrible this is dangerous i'm a terrible parent
i'm a risk to the safety of my child now the thing is for a lot of people
they aren't aware of these appraisals we typically don't tend to be aware of our
thinking and our interpretation of our thoughts and so we don't really understand what's going
on in ocd and how the way i'm interpreting my thoughts determines how scary my thoughts are
and so these appraisals tend to be kind of these secret thoughts that are hanging out in the
background that are really driving the ocd engine without us even being aware that they're there
and so there tend to be four main sort of categories of appraisals that tend to happen
in ocd that tend to drive ocd the first is uh over importance of thoughts and the idea here
is that because i have the thought it must mean something just the fact that i'm having a thought
means it's important or there's some meaning behind it so if i have a thought about uh
having an affair with someone it just sort of pops into my head well that must mean that i
actually do want to cheat on my wife or that must mean that i'm not happy in my relationship
additionally people can sort of interpret the frequency of thoughts as being important so
if i have a thought a lot it must mean something more than if i have a thought just once in a while
another way this over importance of thoughts can take hold is through something we call
thought action fusion and this is the thought action fusion is this notion that
just having the thought makes it more likely that the thing i'm thinking about
will happen or having the thought is equivalent to engaging in the behavior
so if i have an intrusive thought about cheating on my spouse that's the same thing
as actually cheating on my spouse so there's this equivalency between the thought and the behavior
now the second category of appraisals relates to overestimations of danger
that i tend to overestimate the likelihood that something bad might happen now this is
not unique to ocd this is actually very common in all of the anxiety disorders this tendency to
think that unlikely or rare events are much more likely to happen than they actually are
so overestimating danger and threat in the world now a third category of appraisals relates to an
inflated sense of responsibility this is what i refer to as the superman syndrome this notion
that i'm responsible for the safety and well-being of people around me that i have to protect other
people and that if something bad were to happen it would be my fault because i'm responsible for them
so it's this kind of again this superman notion that it's my responsibility to keep everyone safe
and if anything bad happens it was because i wasn't doing my job well enough and finally
the fourth sort of category of these appraisals these negative appraisals in ocd
relates to a need for certainty and control over my thoughts and my thinking in other words
i need to be in control of all of my thoughts all the time and so the assumption here is that
i should be able to control every thought that occurs in my head
now if you have this appraisal you can probably understand how this might be a problem
in ocd that i have these intrusive thoughts that seem to come out of the blue that i can't control
and so if i'm supposed to be able to control my thoughts but i can't control my thoughts
then there must be something wrong there must be something wrong with me there's
something dangerous here because i'm not able to control thoughts i should be able to control
so those are the four common appraisals that occur in ocd over importance of thoughts
over estimations of danger inflated sense of responsibility and a need for certainty and
control over my thoughts now in future videos i'm going to talk about the each of these
types of appraisals in more detail and how to identify and challenge these faulty appraisals
as a way of disrupting that ocd cycle so just like with the example of me throwing my having the
thought of throwing my daughter down the stairs it didn't spiral into anything i didn't experience
any anxiety or distress not because i didn't have the thought but because i interpreted the thought
in a different way in a way that wasn't scary in a way that wasn't dangerous or threatening
so uh i hope that makes sense i know it's a bit of a a different way of thinking about ocd
but i'd love to hear your thoughts and ideas about this so please leave me some comments
in the comments section down below if you're enjoying my videos and would like to see more
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a new video so that's all for today's video as always thank you for making it
all the way to the end of this video and i will see you in the next one