At the peak of my OCD struggle, I wanted nothing more than my friends and family to understand what I was going through. I felt so alone in my thoughts and couldn’t work out how nobody else around me had a brain that worked liked mine. I spent probably a year confessing and confessing to them, trying to explain what was going on up in there and getting angry with their responses.
“Sleep on it, you may feel differently tomorrow.”
“Just try to live in the moment Maisie!”
“There’s no point worrying about things like that!”
I felt so misunderstood, like I was entitled to them understanding the disorder.
OCD can quickly feel like it has become your entire life when you’re in the depths of suffering and let’s be honest people with OCD LOVE to talk about their OCD. Just because it’s become your life though, doesn’t mean it’s become everyone else’s. We would prefer an understanding from our friends and family but we don’t need it. It’s not imperative for recovery but if we see it as such we can quickly go down a road of feeling resentful towards them, wondering why they’re ‘not doing enough’. If I hadn’t suffered from OCD I would not have a desire to research it, even if my friend was suffering from it and I hadn’t I doubt I’d put an awful lot of energy in to figuring out what they were going through. We all have our own struggles.
Talking about how you feel is important, especially if you don’t have a therapist to speak to, but we need to be careful with OCD as we can go down a route of reassurance-seeking and confession which usually the untrained mind gives in to and locks us in to the cycle even more. We don’t need our family to understand our struggle, just like they don’t need us to understand their depressions/anxiety/other struggles. It’s great to have that mutual compassion but they’re not lesser people for not putting their whole being in to understanding what you’re experiencing. They have their own lives too.
We’re lucky to live in this time of OCD awareness as in the support groups alone there are so many people we can talk to for help and who understand. Sometimes keeping OCD out of conversations with family and friends helps in recovery as contributes to bringing it for the ride and doing life as you usually would. Understanding is preferable but not essential and not something we deserve.