Willingness Is Your Tool To Tackle OCD

What does willingness mean when you live with OCD? Kristina Orlova explains why intrusive thoughts can carry so much weight, and how being willing to feel discomfort and sit with uncertainty can loosen OCD's grip. She talks about riding the wave of anxiety instead of checking, reviewing or seeking reassurance, giving your system time to settle so you can see things more clearly again. This content is educational and is not a substitute for one to one professional care.

Transcript

So I wanted to kind of talk to you a little bit today about willingness. So, You know, In having OCD, Working with OCD, Kind of one of the things that I see a lot is when people have intrusive thoughts and they assign so much meaning to that process. And even when they're going through treatment or self-studying or whatever it is, That they tend to get stuck on, You know, Not maybe wanting to do some exposures because there's this fear of if I do it, Maybe it's going to make it worse or, Oh my God, What if I actually do my exposures and, You know, Things will become true. And it can be really kind of confusing when we get stuck in our heads, Right? And we start to overvalue value and overthink. This whole process about what it means to have thoughts. First of all, You know, Having thoughts, It's kind of like the brain's job, Right? Like the brain is designed to think. So it is literally doing what it's supposed to be doing. The second thing is that when we're having thoughts, No matter what thoughts we have, We kind of forget and we think that, You know, We only should be having certain kinds of thoughts, Thoughts that are more morally acceptable, Thoughts that are quote unquote appropriate, Thoughts that are nice. But the fact is, I hate to kind of, You know, Tell it to you, But I'm going to break kind of the secret here. The reality is that we all have a lot of random thoughts bunch of random intrusive thoughts. And yes, Intrusive. Every human has some random thought that pops in their head. And guess what? They're not always appropriate. And you know, The amount of years I've been in the mental health field, Which at this point, I think it's like 14 or 15 years, The amount of things I have heard and witnessed, Let me tell you, These ears have heard a whole lot of stuff that if you even heard a quarter of it, You think what? But the truth is, As humans, Instead of judging each other for thoughts, Let's recognize that we all have a bunch of random whack-a-doodle thoughts and that's actually normal. What we always forget to distinguish is that there's a difference when you're having an intrusive thought that's ego dystonic, Meaning I don't want to have this, Meaning this is not something that I like. It's not at all congruent with who I know myself to be versus somebody who's having thoughts that give them pleasure and that make them be like, Oh yeah, I want that. Those are completely different things that are happening. And I think people Confuse the two sometimes. So that's what today on this channel. I really want to clarify this point So I kind of have a little bit of a pet peeve when people go off about like, Oh my gosh Somebody has these bad thoughts about Pedophilia OCD. Oh my god, They're horrible. They want to do this I'm like, Hold on first of all, If you're saying that that sounds to me like you maybe don't have enough education or understanding on the topic Second of all, You're jumping to conclusions and third of all, You're being extremely judgmental So can we pause for a minute sometimes? Jumping into stuff, How about first ask, Do I really grasp this topic and concept that's being discussed? So in OCD, And yes, You might sense a little bit of passion for me coming through this screen or through whatever, You know, Device you're using to watch, You know, A little bit of the passion that's coming through is because OCD gets so misunderstood and it literally drives me a little bit nuts when people start to make comments that I think are just inappropriate because it really It just speaks to the fact that you just don't know really what this disorder is. And we'll circle back to willingness. So when we're talking about thoughts, Intrusive thoughts, Thoughts that you don't want to have that pop in your head for whatever reason, Right, What we want to be able to do is recognize a thought is a thought is a thought, Period, End of story. You know, We don't have to assign meaning to every single experience we have or to every thought we have. And. When somebody makes a comment like, Oh, I can't believe you had that thought you know this is the kind of statements that actually make it. Um you know, Makes a person who has OCD feel ashamed to even share this, Right? Because they feel they're gonna be judged because guess what? In society, Do any of us want to be judged? No. And if you're the one judging, Pause for a second and ask yourself, What if you were judged? Would you like it? Probably not, Because none of us like that. So when we're having intrusive thoughts, What I want to normalize is that it's fine and normal to have intrusive thoughts, Period, End of story. Whatever other fringe or weird or wild thoughts you have, Just know that when you work with specialist, They will normalize it for you and help you actually understand yourself better and realize that it is a thought. It's there. It doesn't mean anything. And you can move on with your life. You don't have to stop your entire life to try to figure out what this thought means. And now let's bring this back to willingness. And part of doing this work and being successful in it is having the willingness to feel uncomfortable because in OCD, We have to remember what's going on is there's a little bit of a brain kind of misfiring that's going on. So if somebody else has the luxury of recognizing that a random thought popped in and they're like, What, What was that? Oh, That's weird. Okay, That's garbage. I'll toss it. A person with OCD doesn't have that capacity because their brain is operating a little bit differently. So for a person with OCD, When they have a random weird thought pop in that's uncomfortable for them, They will actually pause and pay attention to it because that part of their brain that's producing that kind of thought is also triggering another part of the brain that's hitting on that fight and flight response. So they're at the same time having this visceral reaction where they're having like anxiety symptoms, Like a rapid heart rate or the racing thoughts, Or maybe their stomach is feeling queasy. So they're going to assume and kind of associate that, Oh, Because I'm having this thought and now I'm having this physiological reaction, That must mean something. So then they're going to be unwilling to go any further with it because they're going to try to get rid of that experience because that's normal, Right? Any one of us, None of us want to feel weird or uncomfortable or anxious or guilty or ashamed. So we're going to do everything in our power that we know to do to get rid of this. And that's where compulsions come in, Right? We repetitively will do things. We'll mentally try to check and review stuff or we'll physically check or we will seek reassurance and so on. So What we have to understand is in order to get better with OCD, To master this disease, To master this anxiety disorder is recognizing that I have to check in with myself and my own what I would say my willingness scale. What is my degree of willingness today? To sit with this feeling that I have of anxiety and shame and disgust and guilt and embarrassment What is my willingness to sit with this? And am I willing to deal with not knowing 100% the answer? Am I willing to deal with being uncertain and kind of just sitting in that experience and feeling a little bit awkward probably through it and feeling a little bit kind of off kilter because it's not comfortable. But am I willing to feel that and go through that process, Ride that wave So that I can give my system some time to cool down and recalibrate, So I can start to maybe perceive things a little bit more accurately again, And come back in and realize and recognize what just happened and go, Oh wait a minute. That was a really intense intrusive thought I had that triggered my anxiety through the roof. But then when I allowed myself to just be in that experience and go through it and not do anything. I now got to learn something new like oh, That was a thought, Huh, That was super uncomfortable I didn't like it. I got to learn that I can tolerate it, I can have it. And so willingness is an important big part of working on your OCD. So to master your OCD is to recognize that I have to have some degree of willingness to feel discomfort and to sit in the unknown. So I hope that today's episode was helpful for you and looking forward to seeing you in the next one.