Tips for the loved ones of OCD sufferers
I want to preface this by saying that supporting my husband through Somatic OCD has been difficult. Watching the person you love crumble, lose themselves, and give up hope can be gut wrenching to watch. I have been faced with difficult situations, like deciding to hospitalize him when he was suicidal, or seriously consider divorce when he took to numbing himself with video games constantly for 9 months. The situation is far from simple. If you are feeling worn down or frustrated from trying to support someone through this process, know you are not alone. Here are some of my tips on how I managed to get through this:
- Take care of yourself first. You cannot help the OCD sufferer if you are suffering yourself. They might not like this. I know my husband didn’t always like it. Sometimes I had to turn off my phone or put it away when I went to dinner with a friend or went to the gym because I needed to have my own time to refresh my mind. If I hadn’t done that, I may have lost my temper with him and made things worse. In fact, I lost count of the times when that was the case.
- Don’t fall into comparative suffering. “I’m not the suicidal one, so I can’t complain.” This was the common thought process I would fall into. Just because you are not as far down a mental hole as someone else, doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to be suffering. This OCD stuff can get very heavy. Comparative suffering doesn’t make anything easier – and for me, it often led to me disobeying my first point of taking care of myself. I wasn’t suffering as badly as him, so it made sense for me to drop everything and fix everything for him, right? Wrong.
- Listen to understand. OCD is very difficult to understand when you’re not going through it. Sometimes the OCD sufferer will say things that will cause your immediate reaction to question their sanity. When Nick first told me he couldn’t stop thinking about blinking, my immediate reaction was, “That makes no sense.” So, how can you listen to understand? I would encourage you to respond with questions as much as possible. Do this instead of giving advice, especially until you have a better understanding of what their therapist or coach is telling them what to do. Your advice might make things worse. My advice was often met with, “You don’t understand.” Anyways, so my advice was very rarely taken into consideration. But maybe that’s marriage and not OCD.
- Don’t reassure. This one was really hard to do. Reassurance can make things worse in the long run. I can’t tell you how many times my gut reaction was to reassure Nick and tell him everything is going to be okay. OCD recovery takes a lot of work, and there is always that chance that the person with OCD will not fully recover.
- Keep them accountable. If there was a gold medal for bargaining, Nick would have won it. He would try to bargain and rationalize sleeping in later and later. He would do the same with smoking, playing video games, not going to class or work, or anything else that would temporarily ease his OCD symptoms. He would rationalize his way into delaying his appointments with Rob. He would say, “He has other clients who are so much worse off than me. I can get by without an appointment.” (The comparative suffering point applies to them too.) Make sure they schedule their appointments. Don’t let them sleep in. Remind them of what they said they were going to commit to. You might be labeled as the bad guy. But that’s okay. (As an added point, I would encourage you not to make the appointments for them. I will explain that in my next point.)
- Keep them accountable, but do not do everything for them. This is not your journey, it’s theirs. This is not for you to fix. Let them take the reins on their recovery. They need to continue with their regular life, and doing everything for them is just enabling their rationalizations when they are trying to avoid their symptoms.
- I want to add to this that I am an empath, meaning I take on other people’s emotions. The closer I am to them emotionally, the stronger I feel their emotions. So, when Nick was feeling depressed or anxious, I would feel depressed or anxious. It literally got to the point where I would wake up in the morning, before Nick was up, and know how he was going to feel that day. I could feel his anxiety hanging over me. But, when I got out of the house to walk the dog, it would disappear. As a result, not fixing things for him makes me very uncomfortable. I had to make the annoying realization that fixing and doing things for Nick was not the “selfless” thing I thought I was doing. I was doing it selfishly because I wanted to feel better. If you’re an empath or highly sensitive person (HSP) like me, supporting someone with OCD might be difficult for you. Not impossible, but difficult.
- Understand that this is an internal problem. You cannot solve an internal problem with external solutions. No amount of external factors (like medications, video games, smoking, etc.) will solve this problem. I don’t recommend encouraging them. Encourage internal work and hold them accountable to that, too. Think of external solutions as a crutch. They can be helpful, but they’re not what heals a broken leg. Internal processes in your body do that.
- This was something Nick and I fought about almost constantly. Video games were his only escape from his Somatic OCD, and it quickly turned into a video game addiction. Thankfully, Nick has given up video games altogether. But in my opinion, the more external solutions he relied on, the harder the internal work was. It was almost like a rebound effect. The longer he’d play, the harder time he had coping with the rest of the day when he wasn’t playing.
- Remember internal work can be exhausting. Don’t do what I did and ask, “What’s wrong?” 100 times a day when they seem down or tired. It gets annoying, especially because what’s “wrong” is they have OCD. To clarify, there’s nothing inherently wrong with asking what’s wrong, but don’t badger them. Trust that they’ll talk when they need to.
- Additionally, Nick got tired often (still does), because OCD recovery requires a lot of mental work, which also makes it seem like something is wrong. But imagine doing math problems all day long. I’d be hard-pressed to find someone who would find that energizing.
- Remind them of where they were when they first started. Nick will still get down on himself when he has a bad day or week. Sometimes he will spiral and think he’ll never get better. I have to remind him of where he was when he first started. He wouldn’t get out of bed. He was smoking. He wouldn’t go to class (we were students when this started). When we started our new jobs out of school, he had a hard time doing work or even showing up some days. He doesn’t do any of these things now.
- This one goes for OCD sufferers and supporters: we can do hard things. Hard things are what challenge us to grow. Don’t give up just because you’re faced with your personal version of climbing Everest. I’ve been asked how Nick is now. My answer is this: “I want to say I have my husband back. But I don’t. I have a better version of him.” This challenging time might paradoxically be the best and worst thing that ever happens to you.