143. What if OCD is Telling Me I Don’t Have OCD?

Have you ever had that experience where maybe you’ve been diagnosed with OCD but then you go back and you start to actually doubt? Is that actually accurate? What if I don’t have OCD? What if I really am this horrible person with deep, dark desires to harm someone?

Hello and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD with Carrie Bock. I’m a Christ follower, wife and mother, licensed professional counselor who helps Christians struggling with OCD get to a deeper level of healing. When I couldn’t find resources for my clients with OCD, God called me to bring this podcast to you with practical tools for developing greater peace.

We’re here to bust through the shame and stigma surrounding struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories of healing and helping you replace uncertainty with faith. I’m here to help you let go of the past and future to walk in the present abundant life God has for you. So let’s dive right in to today’s episode.

Happy October. I hope that you are enjoying all the fun things that fall has to bring. Here on the podcast, we are doing a very special giveaway in October. We are going to be giving away a 100 gift card to Amazon for anyone who is an email subscriber to the list and who rates and reviews our show on iTunes.

There will be full instructions for entering the giveaway in our show notes because I don’t want to take up too much time here. You can always reach us for further information at karybach. com slash podcast. There’s one thing I know about OCD, and you probably do too, is that it is super sneaky, and an inference based cognitive behavioral therapy, or ICBT that we talk about on the show, We say that OCD is really good at drawing you in with a story.

Everyone loves stories and we can get just really sucked into the imagination of the story. If you’re denying the existence of OCD, potentially it could be a way of avoiding it. Avoidance is super common with OCD. It’s kind of like, if I don’t have to acknowledge it, I don’t have to deal with it, or the need for treatment.

If I don’t go to that restaurant that I find triggering, I’m fine. I won’t have any triggers, and I’ll be okay. Or if I don’t try to do the really hard, scary thing that OCD is telling me not to do, then I give in to that avoidance, but I actually feel okay. And it can be hard to accept this diagnosis. It doesn’t always look the way that people think it should look, right?

So it doesn’t always look like cleaning or checking. Sometimes it can look like a lot of ruminating about spiritual things or getting stuck on relationship obsessions, lots of reassurance seeking. Things that people don’t typically associate with OCD. Hopefully we’re changing that and we’re letting people know more and more, Hey, OCD looks like a variety of different things.

So accepting the diagnosis, there can be this element, for sure, of grief and loss. It’s scary, it’s unknown, and a lot of times it’s just easier in the general populace to tell people, like, oh, I’m dealing with anxiety, I have some anxieties about driving. Because a lot of people have anxiety and people feel like they can relate to it.

Unfortunately, in our society, it’s a little bit become a badge of honor, like, Oh, I have anxiety, somehow means that you’re, I don’t know, really striving or succeeding or pushing yourself really hard. That’s not always a good thing. That’s just a side note. What I want you to know is that OCD telling you, You don’t have OCD is actually a really common obsession.

I’ve had several clients come back to me saying that they’ve doubted the diagnosis, or maybe that they’ve tried to find evidence in their life that they didn’t have OCD. And they can get really stuck on this, like maybe what if I’m making excuses for a sin in my life, like I’m saying that this sexual thought is an intrusive thought, but maybe it’s just really me lusting after this person.

What if I really am going to harm someone and you’re telling me it’s actually OCD and I’m using that OCD as an excuse. Or, what if this obsession is not really OCD, but it’s part of my identity, it’s who I am, like in sexual orientation OCD. What if I really am gay, and then I’m using OCD as some type of excuse to deny my inner feelings?

If you are dealing with this particular obsession about whether or not you have OCD, the first thing to do is identify that this is OCD. That’s your first step, always, is being able to identify when OCD is knocking on the door to say, Okay, I know what this is. I know this is OCD coming to call. The reason I know it’s OCD a lot of times is because it is connected to a very specific anxiety that shows up in your brain, in your body.

It can feel like you want to crawl out of your skin. It can cause your heart to race. It can cause you some mild panic symptoms. And a lot of times these things can happen very fast and you can get sucked into that imaginal story very quickly. Your second step is to identify the emotions that come up for you surrounding the diagnosis of OCD.

Is there shame for having this diagnosis? You need to know that you didn’t cause this. Lots of other Christians struggle too. This is how we can have an entire podcast called Christian Faith and OCD where we get hundreds of downloads every week for people just like you who are also dealing with some of these same struggles.

Doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. Doesn’t mean you’re a bad Christian. Didn’t cause it. It’s just something that happens to people. Is there sadness connected to this diagnosis? It’s okay to grieve that. Don’t. I remember my husband getting his health diagnosis around the time that my mother died. And I thought I was sad because my mother had died, obviously I was certainly sad over that.

But the piece that was missing was that I never really got to grieve that the person that I married was not going to be able to do some of the things that I had envisioned us doing, or being able to travel as freely as we hoped to be able to travel. When you have someone with balance issues, certainly you’re not going to be hiking up to waterfalls like we were doing when we were dating.

I had to grieve those things. I had to grieve the fact that no one understands this. We go to doctors and we’re literally like explaining stuff to them. Or we’ve had medical professionals say, I’ve never heard of that before. And that is really a challenging place to be in. And I know some of you with OCD can relate to that.

Because your OCD doesn’t look like textbook, typical OCD of what people identify with. And it’s okay to grieve that you feel strange or have to constantly explain things to people all the time. It’s something that we’ve just kind of learned to open up about with relatively quickly with people in our scenario because they can see it, it’s a little bit different than with OCD, and it’s gotten easier to deal with over time, but at first it was super awkward and uncomfortable.

And not something that we wanted to talk about all the time, because we were still trying to wrap our minds around it ourselves, you know, and you get all kinds of different responses when you share this type of information, you have the people that are trying to fix you, you have the people that are just really sad or feel sorry for you, you have the people that just don’t know how to respond or aren’t sure what to say.

If you’re sad about your diagnosis, just know that that’s okay, and like, you can process that emotion. Give yourself time to grieve it, and to really work through it, that you have challenges that other people don’t have. You have challenges that other people aren’t going to understand, even if you try to explain it to them.

Maybe the diagnosis for you feels really anxious or overwhelming. It can be pretty common for people struggling with OCD to fear becoming non functional, go into a hospital, or quote, going crazy, like developing schizophrenia that is not the same as OCD, but it can become an obsession for people. I feel like I’m going to lose my mind, is what they will say, which of course is a very vague term.

When you’re having those obsessions, it’s important to bring yourself to the present of what is actually going on right now. I’m not experiencing that. I am functioning in my day life. I do have supports around me and people that can help me through my process. I can also add additional professional supports to that at any point in time.

So if you are at a really low place in your OCD, where you’re constantly obsessing and compulsing, You might need to go to an intensive outpatient treatment, or you might need to be hospitalized until you can get to a place of medical stability, and that is okay. That does not mean that you are not going to be able to be functional again.

It does not mean that you’re losing your mind or going crazy. We all have different needs at different points in our life, and that’s not anything to be ashamed of either, so I want you to hear that as well. Just knowing that you can feel these variety of different feelings, whether it’s the anxiety, the sadness, the shame, and you can work through them to get you to a place of acceptance.

You may be angry about your diagnosis. I know some people are mad at God. Why is he allowing me to go through this? Why won’t he heal me? What’s going on? Anger is a common emotion connected to grief and loss. So feeling those feelings, working through them, talking through them with somebody else, like your therapist or your loved ones, will help you get to a place of acceptance.

And then when you’re in that place of acceptance, then you can really move forward and know what to do. If I’m really, really stuck on the fact that I’ve lost my mom, I can’t move forward and figure out how to live without her. And essentially, that’s what I’ve had to do in this process, is I’ve had to figure out I think that’s a big task of grief that people miss.

Now I have a missing person in my life. I have a missing piece that was there my whole entire life. Your parents are there your whole life until they pass away. And then you have to figure out, like, how to live without them. You’re not ever going to replace them. There’s nothing, like, magically that shows up there.

But it’s almost like things get rearranged and reconfigured in your life. And that’s okay. I want you to see what happens when you say to yourself, I am struggling with OCD. What is it like to sit with that? Some of you may have had a visceral reaction to that when I said it, like, ugh, that doesn’t feel good at all.

But I like to tell this story because I think it makes a lot of sense in these situations where I volunteered for a short period of time and I went through massive amounts of training to be a victim advocate with the police department in Colorado, and they said, if you’re going to go out and give a death notification, which I never actually had to do, but if you’re going to tell someone that their loved one died, you have to actually say the word died, dead, death, You can’t say, so and so, I’m really sorry that your brother is no longer with us.

What does that mean? Where did he go? You have to say, so and so died. I’m sorry your brother died. Because that sinks into that person’s brain. It starts to help them realize this is real. If we start to use all these euphemisms and other things, they’re not getting the full message. And so that’s what we have to do sometimes within ourselves, is sit with hard truths that we don’t like.

I remember going through the divorce process. I was reading this loss book, and there were different things that they wanted you to kind of write on your mirror. And one of the things that I got actually not out of that loss book, but it was out of divorce care. And it was something to the effect of like, I can’t have plan A for my life, which was a huge deal because life had kind of been, you plan out your life in your twenties.

So having that acceptance of now being like a young 30 something saying I can’t have plan A, but I can do the best that I can with plan B. So maybe your plan A of life. Involved not having OCD or not having to deal with the suffering that you’re dealing with right now, and you can’t have plan A, that’s okay, but you can have plan B, and plan B can look really, really amazing and beautiful.

And you know what? God is in the midst of when life throws us a curveball. He is still there and He is still walking with you on that journey. He loves you incredibly. What’s so interesting was I started out this episode Wanting to just come on here and tell you, hey, it’s a really common obsession to have an obsession about having OCD.

And I realized how much of this whole episode has become about grief and loss and getting our way to acceptance, which is so important. So thanks for tuning in for that. You may be struggling. And when we had our monthly gathering, someone said, I’ve shared several of your podcasts with other people in church so that they can understand what I’m going through better.

I just loved that. I thought it was so beautiful. And so if you need someone else in your life who is close to you to really understand what you’re going through, and if these podcasts help you are a good vehicle to do that, then I am so happy for you to share it with someone else who can help you and support you along in your process.

Be blessed as you go today. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you. Were you blessed by today’s episode? If so, I’d really appreciate it if you would go over to your iTunes account or Apple Podcasts app on your computer if you’re an Android person and leave us a review. This really helps other Christians who are struggling with OCD be able to find our show.

Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By The Well Counseling. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area.