OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) is a pretty common term in our society and often people without OCD will describe their actions, such as keeping a home neat and tidy or lining books perfectly up on a shelf, as OCD. And while this practice may bother some people with OCD, I see nothing inherently wrong with it as these actions are certainly OCD actions. A desire to keep things perfectly tidy or in a specific order, along with the idea of someone washing their hands many times, are the most common perceptions of what people generally think OCD entails. This was the extent of my knowledge too regarding OCD as I was going through high school and college. I knew I had some mild OCD, but it wasn’t anything particularly serious and my family often joked with me about it.
However, when I was 22 and about to enter the workforce, I started having these terrible thoughts and no matter what I did I could not get rid of them. I hated these thoughts and I never wanted to have them or act on them in any way. These were the type of thoughts that if they had been true or if they had represented some part of me, I would not have wanted to continue living. I would later learn that these thoughts are a form of OCD called “pure O” in which people have distressing intrusive thoughts and the compulsions that they use to try and cope with these thoughts take place inside their minds. People with pure O have worries about incredibly frightening topics like murder, self-harm, rape, deviant sexuality (beastiality, pedophilia, necrophilia, etc.), religious scrupulosity, and many more. It works basically the same way as “regular” OCD, as you can see below:
Regular OCD obsession-being germ-free
Pure O obsession- not wanting to become a murderer
Regular OCD compulsion– washing your hands 20 times (to try to be germ free)
Pure O compulsion- repeatedly telling yourself you are a good person and have never hurt anyone and never want to (to try to convince yourself you don’t want to become a murderer)
As I stated previously, the only real difference is that most of the pure O compulsions happen inside one’s mind as unlike washing your hands in a sink, there is not really anything in the physical world one can do to try and convince themself they aren’t a murderer. And arguably the most important facet of pure O OCD is that the people, like me, who have this form of OCD are the absolute last people in the world who would ever want to act on these horrible thoughts. We get so much anxiety from dealing with these ideas because they are so antithetical to who we are, yet they are constantly in our mind and our OCD is trying to convince us that these thoughts represent some part of us. And relatedly, therapy for pure O is not some scenario in which we are trying to repress “urges” to do the things in our mind. We never ever want to do act on these thoughts, and so treatment consists more of treating these thoughts as insignificant as a person without OCD would. But we will dive more into that later in the blog. To conclude, here is a cultural example that I feel like gives a pretty good idea of what it is like dealing with pure O on a daily basis: Pure O feels like you are in Room 101 from 1984 beset by boggarts commanded by Napoleon. On that cheery thought, have a great rest of your day!
Obsessive Compulsive Deprecation: Living with OCD at Work 