The sticky brain filter in OCD
OCD can be hard to explain to people, but the author Natasha Daniels shares a really helpful and clear illustration of OCD as a stuck filter in her excellent Crushing OCD Workbook for Kids.
To expand on her illustration, every day we all have thousands of thoughts. A great many of these thoughts are senseless, meaningless and sometimes strange. When driving through town and hitting a small pothole we may briefly think “what if that was a person”, or when cutting vegetables at home, “I could easily stab someone in my family with this knife”. For someone without OCD, these thoughts briefly come into our awareness, pass through our brain’s filtering whose job it is to figure out which thoughts are important ones that we need to attend to, get marked by the filter as unimportant, and then pass out of awareness and we move on with whatever we happen to be doing at that time. However, for someone with OCD these thoughts can get stuck in the filter.
The reason they get stuck in the filter for someone with OCD is that OCD interferes with our brain’s filter by taking whatever is of central importance to our character, such as “it’s important to me to be kind to other people”, and tells the filter to identify any intrusive random thoughts that run counter to our character as a threat to our character. OCD then tells our brain’s filter not to let this threatening thought just pass through and demands that we do something to oppose or neutralize it.
The thought then gets stuck and, just like any external threat we might experience like a car on the wrong side of the road coming at us, or someone approaching us violently, we experience a burst of anxiety and fear. That burst of anxiety and fear communicates to us that we have an immediate threat and motivates us to take immediate action.
Our hope is that by taking some kind of action to deal with the threat that we can cope with it and any future similar threats. However, when we take immediate action to deal with the intrusive thought, we unintentionally confirm to our brain filter that the random senseless and meaningless intrusive thought really was a threat, so that causes the filter to catch more of these kinds of thoughts in the future, which, instead of reducing our anxiety and improving our ability to cope, actually accomplishes the reverse. Over time more and more of these intrusive thoughts get stuck, our anxiety increases, and our attempts to deal with them escalate. Eventually the effort we are putting in to coping with these meaningless intrusive thoughts begins to seriously affect our lives. In the above examples, maybe we end up driving over and over the same route to check if we actually hit anyone and it takes us longer and longer to get anywhere by car, or maybe we stop using knives altogether and start to struggle to prepare food.
Counterintuitively, effective treatment (Exposure Response Prevention or ERP) for OCD involves helping the brain to learn that these intrusive thoughts are normal and not a threat by making a plan to generate the thoughts (perhaps by intentionally driving through an area with potholes, or by handling a knife) and not following the demands that OCD is giving us to do something about them or to cope with them. Instead, letting the thoughts pass through the filter, like all of the other meaningless thoughts we have every day. This gradually gets the filter unstuck, and gradually we can claim our lives back from OCD.
If you are interested in Exposure Response Prevention for OCD then you can get help here.
