142. How Do I Tell Someone I Have OCD?
In this episode, Carrie dives into the challenges of sharing your OCD diagnosis with others, offering practical guidance on how to navigate this delicate conversation.
Episode Highlights:
- Key traits to assess if someone is reliable enough to share your OCD diagnosis with.
- Understand how much detail to provide based on your relationship with the person and the context of the conversation.
- Effective ways to inform others about OCD beyond common stereotypes, using resources and examples.
- Insights on how to respond to different reactions, whether supportive or not.
Episode Summary:
Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD! In today’s episode, we’re tackling the question: How do I tell someone I have OCD? Whether it’s a coworker, friend, or romantic partner, this conversation can be daunting. But I’m here to help break down how you can approach it with wisdom and care.
Let’s start by considering who you want to tell. Is this person trustworthy? Sharing personal information like your OCD diagnosis requires discernment. Remember, different people require different layers of information. You don’t need to dive into every detail with everyone.
It’s also crucial to educate those around you about how OCD impacts you personally. People often have misconceptions, like thinking OCD is just about being overly clean or organized. To help them understand better, you could direct them to resources like our podcast or share helpful educational material.
Vulnerability can feel scary, but it’s often healing. You may be surprised at how sharing your struggles opens the door for others to share theirs.
Instead of focusing on worst-case scenarios, try imagining a positive outcome. Pray through the process, asking for God’s guidance in your words and in how you approach the conversation.
Thank you for joining today’s episode. If you want to connect with me further, be sure to sign up for our email list at carriebock.com
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Transcript
Welcome to episode 142. We are talking today about how do I tell someone that I have OCD? This may seem intimidating. Maybe you’re wanting to tell a coworker that you’ve become close to. Maybe you’re wanting to tell a friend or maybe you’re dating someone. You feel like things are getting more serious and you think, you know, it’s time to let them in on my secret.
That’s what we’re talking about today. Hello and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD with Carrie Bock. I’m a Christ follower, wife and mother licensed professional counselor who helps Christian 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, 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 into today’s episode.
We had a good time at our Zoom Q& A meeting earlier this month. I think I’m going to try this out for about six months and just see how it goes, how many people show up, what the engagement level is like. So if you want to get in on these meetings where you can ask a question, where you can show up on Zoom and get to know me a little bit better, or.
Have a greater understanding of OCD. The only way to do this is to get on our email list. Super simple. You go to karybach. com. Link will be in the show notes. You scroll all the way down on the homepage, like right before you get to the footer, and there will be a place for you to subscribe to the email list.
When you get that first email, you’ve got to click on it and confirm that you want to be a subscriber that protects us from spam. So join the email list, get on our Q& A sometime. We’d I’d love to see you face to face and meet you over zoom and it’d be awesome. I want you to think of a couple different considerations when you’re looking at telling someone that you have OCD.
Obviously, this is personal information. Some people are more open about their mental health than others, so it just depends on where you are at on that continuum, but most people that I meet, this is not something that they necessarily want everyone to know. Partially because it’s so misunderstood and people will be making comments like, I need to have you over to clean my house or organize my closet.
As we know, that’s not everybody with OCD. So why do you want to tell this person that you’re thinking about telling? Is this person worthy of the information? Do they have the ability to keep a confidence? Are they trustworthy? I had an experience recently that was It’s kind of funny where someone was sharing some information with some of my other friends.
And first of all, the information was actually wrong and inaccurate. So my other friends came to me and said, yeah, so and so said such and such was like, no. And then I realized I’m probably not going to be telling this person other things if they’re like going and sharing this information with other people just for gossipy purposes.
You know that friend that’s always gossiping about somebody else? I guarantee they’re gossiping about you, too. It took me a long time to figure this out. I’m a pretty smart person, and I don’t know why that didn’t click for me, but it has clicked for me, for sure. I’m just more careful about who I talk to regarding certain things.
I am incredibly thankful as well that I do have trustworthy people in my life that I can talk to about very personal things without it going anywhere. So let’s say that the person you want to tell is a trustworthy person, and you know they’re not going to be spreading this around for gossip, and Maybe you’re wanting to tell them because you want this person to understand you a little bit better and why you’re acting the way that you do in certain situations.
Maybe you want to tell this person to include them as part of your support system. This would be really huge if you’re dating someone and you believe that the relationship is moving in the direction of marriage. It still may be. A little too early to know that, but it’s kind of at that tipping point where we need to have more vulnerable conversations to continue to make sure that we’re moving in the right direction.
Another question I would want you to ask yourself is what exactly do you want to tell this person? You can think about explaining things in layers of information. Some people just need the glossy top overview layer. Let me give you an example. Let’s say that you have certain ways that you like to do things at work, and it may cross the line over into perfectionism or just right OCD.
You may have some concerns about your boss being upset if things aren’t done a certain way. So you may say something to your boss like, Hey, I just want you to know that I struggle sometimes with perfectionism. And I’m okay if you need to tell me to move on to another task that I’m taking too long to try to make this one perfect.
That would be kind of a high layer glossy overview. You’re not going into the details of Just Write OCD and how it affects you. Probably your boss doesn’t necessarily need to know all that information. But they may need to know that there are some levels of this that’s affecting your work, just so that you don’t get stuck.
Or they don’t ask you, well, why did this project not get done? And it’s because you didn’t feel confident that the boss was okay for you to move on from the first project. Maybe you had it in your mind, like, oh, they’re not going to be okay with this. They’re going to be upset with me if it’s not exactly perfect or exactly done a certain way.
My point is that what you tell a boss probably is going to be completely different or a different layer of information than what you would tell someone you’re dating. How much you tell might also depend on the severity of how this is impacting your work. or your relationship. Let’s say that you have a friendship where you’re always concerned.
There’s some relationship obsessions about whether or not you’ve offended other people and you keep asking that person and now the person is kind of withdrawing a little bit or they’re frustrated with you. Might be helpful to give them a little bit more of an explanation of what’s going on from your end.
This is going to give them a little bit more compassion for how you’re struggling, as well as if you can tell them certain things of how they can best support you. Often people in your life probably need to know that when you’re reassurance seeking, them reassuring you is only going to help very temporarily in the moment.
It’s going to help for a little bit. There’s going to be that slight relief, and then it’s going to toss back into that obsessional cycle, and next thing you know, you’re going to be asking for reassurance all over again. So it’s important for your support systems to know. What’s going to benefit your OCD and what can actually harm your recovery process?
If you are late every day to work because you can’t stop checking things before you leave the house, that might warrant a conversation with your boss regarding this being a mental health issue versus your boss just thinking, oh, you’re lazy, can’t get up on time, or you can’t manage yourself in the morning to get here on time.
Obviously, if someone understands what you’re going through, then they may be able to help problem solve it with you. Like, what can I do to support you in this? Do we need to make sure that you’re getting off of work early or during lunch so you can go to a therapy appointment so you can get help for this?
What are you going to need so that the needs of your work are met as well as your mental health needs are met? If you have relationship OCD or scrupulosity or other themes, you plan on getting married to someone someday, you think you’re in a positive, supportive, helpful relationship, You want to share with this person, Hey, this may show up in our relationship.
I may have doubts about whether or not I love you. I may have doubts surrounding whether or not God loves me. And this may cause difficulties for me in our interactions or in my interactions with the church. Here are some things that you can do to help support me. Here are some things that I’m working on within myself or with my therapist.
How that person responds is going to tell you quite a bit about the relationship and the level of safety that you have. We’re hoping that this person is going to be supportive and say, okay, let me learn more. Or how can I help you? Or how can I support you? When this gets bad, what do you need me to do?
It’s important to let those close to you know that during times of high stress, even positive stress like planning a wedding or having a baby, there is a tendency for OCD symptoms to go up because the higher your stress level, the more that can cause you to get triggered and get derailed by OCD, even if you’re in a manageable state.
You’re most likely going to have to do a lot of education. of this other person regarding what actually OCD is because the average person thinks of monk and that’s their picture of what OCD is. It’s really a shame if any of you work in TV or movies. We need a different representation. We need someone who’s having some type of relationship obsession or scrupulosity obsession or sexual obsessions of some kind so that other people can understand how vastly different these subtypes present within OCD.
You’re going to probably want to give the person that you’re telling some educational information either from a website or you can point them to some of our podcast episodes, the ones that you feel are most relevant to you. We have a great FAQ episode on OCD. We don’t talk as much about treatment on there specifically, but I just kind of go through these different themes and how OCD shows up and so forth.
Regardless of what your story is, learning to be vulnerable and learning to share your story with other people is so important. When we get vulnerable in safe relationships, it can be so therapeutic and so healing because we grow closer. to that other person as we share with them, and oftentimes it allows them to open up about themselves and say, you know what, I really appreciate you telling me that, and I want to share this piece with you so that you know that this is something that I struggle with, or this is something that I’m going through right now.
If you’re concerned about how that person might respond, I encourage you to grab a resource, and it’s going to sound a little strange for this episode. But it’s called Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus. It’s a marriage book. However, the best part of this book really is not 100 percent about marriage.
It’s about confrontation and relationships and sharing what he calls the four healing emotions. There’s a chapter, uh, I think, I believe it’s chapter 13, where he goes through these different emotions and writing what he calls a love letter to your spouse, but he also talks about writing a response letter.
Maybe that person doesn’t know how to respond to you, or they’re not exactly sure, like, what you’re needing. You can write a response letter of, these are some things that I really feel like, after I share this with you, that I need to hear from you. So, And it could be like, I support you, I love you, it just depends on the relationship, obviously, what the response letter might be.
It’s really valuable for you to think through what you want to say to someone else, maybe even jotting down on a post it note a few major bullet points so that you can express yourself well. This is something that I’ve had to learn over time when you have hard conversations, sometimes your brain, you know, isn’t fully online because that anxiety puts you into the whole fight, flight, or freeze situation, or maybe it triggers some like fear of rejection coming up for you or feeling unworthy.
If you have your little post it note with like the three main points maybe that you want to convey, that’s a good start and just say, Hey, I jotted a few things down and I just wanted to make sure that I didn’t forget to tell you these specific pieces. I realize that OCD may throw some worst case scenarios at you about how this person is going to respond.
Our brains have a natural inclination to veer towards the negative in efforts to keep us safe. So what we have to do consciously to combat that is ask ourselves, what if this went well? What would that look like? What would the situation look like if it went really well and was really positive? Focusing on that outcome, praying through that process.
While it may not go exactly the way that you want it to, communicating to your brain how you would like it to go is so powerful. Ultimately, spiritually, we then lay these things before the Lord and say, this is what I sense is the next step in the relationship. You know, give me guidance and wisdom on what to say, how to say it, and that I can be an acceptance of whatever the result of the conversation is.
That’s all for today. I want to read one of our recent reviews that says, I just started to listen to this podcast and Carrie Bach does a great job with multiple topics and great questions. I really appreciate the hard work she puts in and intend to support further. This is from Rob. Thank you, Rob, for saying that.
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.