Healthy psychology: The essence of obsessive-compulsive disorder

Obsessive-compulsive disorder is a disease of self-struggle. How to fundamentally treat this mental illness? To treat obsessive-compulsive disorder The first step in treating obsessive-compulsive disorder is to recognize the nature of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

The reason why you need to repeatedly test to confirm something is to relieve your inner anxiety. This is a wrong connection between obsessive-compulsive behaviors. It is precisely because compulsive behaviors can temporarily relieve our anxiety that we believe there is no way to reduce anxiety except by performing these behaviors. It is precisely because of this understanding that obsessive-compulsive behaviors can be fixed and developed. We We mistakenly believe that if we don't perform the compulsive behavior, then we can't do anything next. In fact, we don’t need to perform compulsive behaviors, and our anxiety will decrease over time. Therefore, this requires us to use our own willpower to control our compulsive behavior. Many friends think that we ourselves cannot control these behaviors at all. Think about it, in the past years, have we completely controlled our compulsive behaviors at any special time or when there was something urgent?

In addition, think about what we are afraid of? What we are afraid of is not that things are not arranged neatly, nor are we afraid of throwing away useful things when taking out the garbage. What we are afraid of is not that we make typos or cannot understand the article. These are It's all superficial phenomena. What we are really afraid of is a feeling of uncertainty within ourselves. This is the root of the problem. To address this root, our solution should be to make ourselves not afraid of this feeling of uncertainty. Let’s see if our compulsive behavior is aimed at solving the problem at this root. Obviously, our compulsive behavior is not aimed at this root, and our compulsive behavior does not make us less afraid of this feeling of uncertainty. So why does compulsive behavior relieve our anxiety? This is because compulsive behavior turns our sense of uncertainty into a sense of certainty. When our sense of uncertainty is eliminated, it becomes a sense of certainty, so we are no longer anxious. . Think about it, we can't be sure whether things are arranged neatly before we check them. After we do it several times, we are sure that they are arranged neatly. It is clear here that compulsive behavior changes our sense of uncertainty into a sense of certainty. The root of the problem is that we are afraid of the feeling of uncertainty. Compulsive behavior does not make us not afraid of uncertainty. Therefore, our obsessive-compulsive disorder cannot get better through compulsive behaviors, but instead becomes more and more serious. For example, we are originally afraid of snakes. Once we see a snake, we find a chef to make the snake into a dish. We are not afraid of this dish. We mistakenly think that doing this will solve our fear of snakes, but in fact this does not solve our fear of snakes at all. We will still be scared next time we see a snake. In this way, every time we see a snake, we will think of ways to turn the snake into a dish. This process of turning the snake into a dish is our compulsive behavior. Therefore, no matter how many snakes we turn into vegetables, we are still afraid of snakes, and the fundamental problem remains unsolved. Understand this truth, we must resolutely stop these original compulsive behaviors, but learn to tolerate this feeling of uncertainty, so that slowly we get used to it and we are no longer afraid of this feeling of uncertainty. Our fundamental problem will be solved.

The essence of obsessive-compulsive disorder behavior is fear of uncertainty, uncertainty about whether one has performed certain actions or not. The fundamental way to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder is to learn to tolerate this feeling of uncertainty, and only then can the essence to solve the problem.

;