As OCD sufferers, we are so used to the feeling of anxiety and can get to a point that we don’t always realize whereby we feel like it protects us. I would get thoughts like “I must hate the idea of doing x because it makes me so anxious” and :I’ll never do x because even the thought of it gives me anxiety.” Not only is this reassurance (a dead end in OCD recovery) but in reality anxiety doesn’t protect us from anything. Its presence or lack of means nothing.
This can be particularly distressing when we’re doing our exposures and find that we’re barely anxious – maybe the first time we perform it or after a few times. We get anxious because we’re not anxious (the backdoor spike) and think that it means something awful, like we’re more likely to do what we fear or that it confirms that it’s what we truly desire.
It’s important to remember that anxiety is not an indication of our wants or desires and it doesn’t protect us from danger like we like to think it will. Acknowledging anxiety’s presence or absence but not attaching meaning to it is needed as we begin to recover. Sensitized nerves from OCD can make us anxious for no reason and as we allow them to recover and we become rational beings it’s more than okay for anxiety to drop during exposures. Just like we need to aim to not engage with thoughts, we need to learn to do the same with our feelings. OCD is a master manipulator and can hijack our every emotion so we can’t use anxiety as a scale for how ‘dangerous’ or ‘true’ our thoughts are.