OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE DISORDER (OCD): Some causes, strategies, and coping-mechanisms (Updated Article)

In my late childhood and early teenage years, I acquired a habit of thinking that if I didn't repeat certain patterns, such as walk over a certain spot, or touch a certain object more than once, then certain bad or harmful consequences would follow: injury to myself or others. However, this is not mere irrationality or superstition, but is rooted in social causes, and rooted in personal coping-mechanisms and strategies. Whilst in secondary school, I noticed and discovered that at separate times, two completely different school friends had exactly the same habitual fear.

One friend of mine, who had the same habit, fear, or negative thought-pattern, when he once asked a voluntary mental health worker what it was he was experiencing, this person replied, "If you think negatively about things, then negative things might happen, and so you have to think positive." This reply was a layman's version of the cognitive-behavioural psychiatric model, and is fairly accurate, but there are all kinds of different ways of doing this that need to be explored, and for some people, dissociation, distraction, or diversion, isn't enough, and like me, they might need to reverse the negative analogy or thought-pattern they've been using, instead of replacing it altogether with a positive one.

When this friend told his mum what this preoccupation, habit, fear, or phobia was all about, (that if he didn't touch or repeat certain patterns, then he felt bad things would happen), she said she thought he was mad or stupid, which made him feel mad and stupid in the first place for telling her about it. It does sound ridiculous for people who've never experienced such a fear or preoccupation, but from the increasing amount of people on TV chat-shows admitting they experience this, it is something far more common than is admitted to or realised by many people.

My way of eventually coping or curing myself of this negative thought-pattern or phobia termed Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, was not to deny myself of any autonomous thought or action, to distract myself, or replace it with an entirely positive analogy, but to reverse the strategy or analogy, and to convince myself that if I DID carry out the repetitive action, then certain harmful or bad things would happen. In this unconventional use of positive thinking, I reversed the negative-pattern of the thought, eventually bringing myself back to complete control and autonomy.

Maybe this strategy or method I used of reversing the original analogy, is less authoritarian, because it concentrates on self-control, whereas the absolutist method of purely positive-thinking used in conventional cognitive therapy, often relies upon being told what to think and do, and is a control imposed by others, unless it is a shared strategy and coping-mechanism between diagnosed patients.

What has previously been called Obsessive Compulsive Disorder by psychiatry, is in my experience a fear or phobia, and not an entirely unreasonable human fear, because it is based-upon both negative past experiences, and a present fear of irrational, unreasonable, or immoral social-repression, negative social control, and imposed social compulsion.

So what Obsessive Compulsive Disorder really is, is a repetitive or habitual phobia, and even some modern psychiatry now, sees it as far more helpful for people to realise and understand their phobias as negative or habitual patterns of thought, in line with cognitive behavioural therapy, although cognitive behavioural therapy is not very good at realising the combination of social causes and personal coping-mechanisms, and it resorts to the psychologism of presuming everything is motivated by merely personal behaviour which needs to be socially isolated and controlled from the outset.