While a lot has been written about OCD and its treatment, there is significantly less information for family members of a loved one struggling with OCD who are looking for advice on how they can help. This post aims to provide several suggestions for these individuals.
What is OCD?
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is a mental disorder characterized by obsessions or recurrent and persistent thoughts or images. They can keep intruding on the person’s mind even when the person is trying very hard to ignore or suppress them. It is a form of anxiety disorder. The other component of that disorder are compulsions, or rituals the person engages in to alleviate the anxiety. This is associated with obsessive thoughts. For example, someone might have obsessive thoughts about their house catching on fire and compulsively check the stove multiple times to ensure it is turned off, or someone might struggle with obsessive thoughts related to germs and clean obsessively in response to them.
What to do when a loved one is struggling with OCD?
Noticing that a loved one is engaging in compulsive behaviors can suggest that they are struggling with OCD, which can be the first step towards providing help. Educating oneself on what having OCD means and how it usually exhibits itself can help recognize OCD symptoms. This can include noticing that the loved one is doing something over and over again; constantly questioning him or herself, checking things multiple times, or frequently asking for reassurance.
Encouraging the loved one to seek treatment and to stick to it is also very important. Individuals with OCD may feel embarrassed about their symptoms and be reluctant to seek help. They also may be avoiding carrying out agreed-upon therapy tasks because of the distress these bring. Since stress tends to exacerbate OCD symptoms, keeping the environment at home calm and positive can make it easier for the person as they address their symptoms.
In addition, while it can sometimes be frustrating when, for instance, your loved one takes a very long time to complete a seemingly simple task by redoing it multiple times, it is best to avoid criticism. It is important to remember and to make an effort to see OCD-related behaviors not as character flaws, but as symptoms of a disorder.
Things to avoid when helping your loved one struggling with OCD
One of the ways family members of someone with OCD can inadvertently make the situation worse is by becoming involved in the OCD rituals. For example, someone with a fear of germs may ask a family member whether they touched something dirty or contaminated. It can be tempting to reassure them that they did not. They open the door for them so that they do not have to touch the dreaded doorknob.
However, while in the short run this decreases the distress of the person struggling with OCD and resolves the situation, in the long run, it only serves to maintain the OCD cycle. The way it works is that the family member’s “assistance” takes the place of the compulsion. Since compulsions decrease the anxiety that the obsessive thought evokes, they provide emotional relief and this reinforces the cycle of needing to do the compulsion again once the obsessive thought enters the mind. In treatment, individuals with OCD learn to break the association between their obsessive thoughts and compulsions by refraining from engaging in the ritual and allowing the anxiety brought on by the obsessive thought to decrease on its own.
Providing reassurance or doing anything else to help decrease anxiety does not allow this healing process to happen. Instead, it again strengthens the OCD cycle, and the next time your loved one experiences an obsessive thought, he or she will again need either your assistance/reassurance or to engage in the ritual to decrease their anxiety.
How to help your partner break their OCD cycles?
What can you do instead? It can be very challenging to refuse to reassure or to not participate in the ritual. This is difficult especially if this has been the pattern for some time. In order to make it a little easier, it can be helpful to discuss this together as a family prior to disengaging. It may be helpful to perhaps agree on what should be said during challenging instances.
For example, the family member could say, “I understand you’re feeling anxious right now. But I can’t answer you/help you, because then I’m helping the OCD rather than helping you”. It is also extremely important to remain consistent because occasionally providing reassurance or participating in the ritual is detrimental for their progress. It is ikely to teach the individual struggling with OCD that if they insist long enough, you will give in. This will subsequently make this process longer and unnecessarily more painful.
Instead, family members can provide encouragement and praise any positive changes their loved one is making in challenging their OCD, no matter how seemingly small.
Finally, it is also important for the family members to acknowledge that it is challenging for them as well. It then becomes easier to give themselves permission to sometimes feel frustrated with the OCD. Denying this would only cause feelings of guilt and self-blame, which would then lead to discouragement. Instead, family members can seek support and take good care of themselves. This will help them stand by their loved ones as they are working together towards beating OCD.
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