“You are not your thoughts.”
This is a phrase that anyone with OCD, like me, has likely heard many times in the course of seeking help or getting treatment. And while the phrase itself isn’t always all that helpful when OCD seems to take over your mind, it does hold a lot of meaning for us who live in a cycle of obsessions and compulsions.
With intrusive thoughts being a large part of what many with OCD deal with on a daily basis, it can become extremely difficult at times to differentiate between OCD thoughts and your normal run-of-the-mill worry or concern. Not only does this territory come with intense feelings of distress, it can start to impact your view of who you are as a person. When disturbing images and repetitive urges race through your mind constantly, separating these from our own identity can seem impossible. This is, in part, the reason that OCD sufferers often carry around so much guilt and shame; it begins to feel like having these awful thoughts must mean you’re just an awful person.
But again, you are not your thoughts.
If someone were to hijack your car, push you into the passenger seat and proceed to drive wherever they wanted and commit some truly awful actions, this would not be your fault whatsoever. You would be wholly considered a victim of someone else’s malicious intent, right? Well, let me tell you that OCD is an experienced hijacker of something other than cars— it hijacks our thoughts. OCD does such a good job of taking over our thoughts, in fact, that it can actually manage to convince us that the hijacker doesn’t exist at all. To bring back the previous example, it would be very hard to convince you that nobody had carjacked you and that it must have been something you created in your own mind, and therefore you would be at fault. But in the case of OCD, because it lives inside your mind, it can easily manipulate the logic that tries to remind you that you’ve been thrown into the passenger seat and no longer have your hands on the wheel.
