wizardarchetypes:

wizardarchetypes:

wizardarchetypes:

i think avoidance is such a little-recognized ocd compulsion. all the time i talk to people with ocd who are like “i was always having intrusive thoughts about using kitchen knives and harming myself or others but i’m okay now because i just stopped using knives ever 👍 so i’m good now”

and i’m like unfortunately i have bad news.

if you don’t know why this doesn’t work, the issue is that ocd never stops when you implement a compulsion. it evolves. today you’ve “solved” it by never using a knife again (and losing access to an important cooking tool, thus limiting an aspect of your life) but in a few months or a year it’ll be that forks are dangerous too. and hey, isn’t it risky to use the stove? avoidance will even begin to manifest in places you might not recognize.

the point is that OCD compulsions are never solutions, they’re actually the problems. the intrusive thoughts SEEM like the problem and the compulsions FEEL like the solution. and that’s how it getsya.

ALT

i once saw a serial killer on the news wearing green and became fixated on the obsession that if i wore green it would like. hypnotize me into serial killing in my sleep (???) so i didn’t wear the color green for an entire year. and of course being OCD i knew how “stupid” that was and that i wouldn’t actually be effected by green clothes. i didn’t actually believe that! but the fear didn’t need to be real; the distress was real.

looking back it’s so funny. like. dude my eyes are green. i was never safe hahahaaaa

Yeah like. I remember years ago there was a post about a woman who was in danger of losing her job because she kept running late because she obsessively feared she’d left the hair dryer on and was gonna burn down her house and she couldn’t stop herself from going back home to check.

And she had a therapist but none of the usual therapy for OCD was working, no matter how hard everyone tried, and the risk to her job was getting more dire… and then her therapist suggested she just bring the hair dryer with her in the car.

And it worked. Saved her job, got her back on track etc. but other therapists apparently got really really mad at this therapist because he wasn’t doing it the way you’re supposed to.

and I remember everyone replying to that post was all like “omg it’s so obvious, why are all the normal therapists so stupid”… but when I read that I remember thinking: ok but… I can see their point? It’s not just that this isn’t “the norm”– it’s that it isn’t addressing the root of the problem. Like, if she later fixates on some other obsessive fear, the whole thing will begin again, and she hasn’t learned any skills to deal with it except “avoid leaving anything at home that she could worry about”

And yet… she had tried the “normal” techniques and they weren’t helping… so what was she supposed to do? Lose her job?

i dunno. Maybe the debate isn’t between the two techniques exactly, but on whether the avoidance one should be treated as a fix or just a stopgap measure to buy time. (Because sometimes you do need a stopgap, and sometimes that is all you have that works right now.)