With pure obsessive OCD you basically suffer from intrusive thoughts more than anything else.
With most of the subtypes you have physical compulsions that you deal with to counteract the intrusive obsessions / thoughts you have. Compulsions that others may see at some point. But with Pure O (as some call it) your compulsions happen in your mind.
For example, let’s say you randomly have a bad thought while trying to perform daily tasks or just relaxing. It will be something like this:
You’re watching TV, reading a book, or even washing dishes (random everyday things) and for some reason it occurs to you that one of your family members dies or gets hurt and you usually feel a bit complacent when respect. and you start to panic. At that moment, your whole life is on hiatus trying to deal with this horrible thought or thoughts that decided to come out of nowhere and make you question every fiber of your moral being and love for others.
Since the thought came out of nowhere, you start to panic and wonder why the hell you think such a thought. Then you have to go over and over again in your mind the thought you had and whether or not you really want that to happen, and / or why you are not responding in the way that you feel you should to said horrible thought. Of course, you don’t actually feel how the thought makes you feel, but your mind can’t connect with your true feelings because it’s caught in a loop of this thinking and your basal ganglia are firing error messages at record speed. .
Now anyone who doesn’t have OCD would think that’s crazy and what’s wrong with you, it’s just a random thought, keep going. But someone who suffers from OCD knows very well what I am talking about and may experience this several times a day, or several times an hour, depending on how bad their OCD has become. You can’t just move on, your brain won’t allow you to dismiss the thought quickly like the non-sufferers will. Your brain is stuck trying to make sense of the thought because your true feelings seem to be blocked and you cannot access them. Sometimes it can get to a point where you can really feel your true feelings quickly, but sometimes it takes hours … days to get there.
Back to the point of compulsion; you carried out the compulsion (to counteract the thought) only within your mind. No one saw you checking anything or washing anything. You may have seemed distraught at the time or dazed, or not, depending on how well you’ve managed to hide your OCD. People don’t see you physically doing anything and they have no idea what anguish you are going through in your head at the moment. Horrible thoughts of death or harm and feeling detached from your own feelings and emotions and trapped in a cold place desperately trying to find a part of your true feelings in the chaos, so you can feel relief.
Sounds familiar?
That’s pure obsessive OCD.
How to deal with it
I have spent MANY years with this horrible subtype. It got much worse after I got married and left home. My father had died when I was 13 and it was just my mother and I, and we were very close. I moved an hour away so the adjustment just devastated my thoughts and feelings. Also, after I had my son, it got a lot worse. Because that kid was more important to me than life, so all kinds of “what if” scenarios came up ALL THE TIME. It was horrible. Somehow I still managed to enjoy my son growing up and luckily for me anyway, once the years went by, I didn’t always remember the bad thoughts that I had associated with situations. If it was really distressing, you might remember it years later.
So how have I learned to deal with this?
Well, one thing you should probably do first is take a medication to help you balance, depending on how severe your OCD is. Mine was wrong. Once you are a little more balanced, you will be able to reason better. I have come to realize that their ability to reason correctly or at all is BACKWARD when these situations occur. When I can reason, I have realized that almost EVERY TIME this happened to me, and a thought came up about something horrible, it was the complete opposite of how I really felt the rest of the time. It’s almost as if OCD is taking your feelings and showing you a polar opposite of them and trying to convince you that this is how you really feel. Which is VERY distressing. Especially when you don’t have the ability to immediately correct the thought with how you really feel.
So for me, I realized this fact and when these thoughts came in, it became easier to tell myself, it’s just OCD and it has nothing to do with how you really feel.
Now it seems like it’s an easy fix, right? Well, with OCD it is not. Your brain will persist due to the error messages that fly around your brain like a tornado.
The persistence in telling yourself that it’s not me, and trying to refocus will ultimately break the habit of prolonged panic. It gets easier and eventually you can most of the time get rid of it in a more reasonable amount of time. After a while, it becomes almost comical when these thoughts just fly out of nowhere hoping that you lose your mind and can really recognize them for what they are.
However, there will be days when you will be worse off and you will not be able to recognize it or deal with it so easily, so wait for that. But, for the most part, you will now be in control instead of those error messages.
For me, being able to learn to realize that these thoughts are ANYWHERE like anything I personally feel in my heart and mind was a great relief. You realize that you are not a bad person, you are not crazy, your brain is physically different from people who suffer from OCD, and it fails. You can recognize the fault and act accordingly.