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One of my pet peeves is when people straighten something and then laugh and say "OMG I'm so OCD!" No, you're not. OCD is not about liking things tidy. Yes, some people with OCD do express it in ways that include straightening things like crooked pictures or their table settings, but that's not what OCD is. Look at the letters - OCD is about having intrusive thoughts that you obsess over, and then having compulsive behaviour that you literally cannot stop yourself from doing no matter what. What makes it OCD is that last letter - D for Disorder.
When I was a child, we used to laugh at and tease my dad because he couldn't leave the house without checking that the stove was off and then asking all of us if we checked to make sure the stove was off. Then, as he drove away from the house, he had to have everyone verify for him that the garage door was closed. If he couldn't get verification of these things, he would sometimes even drive all the way back to make sure.
We all treated it like some kind of quirk, something worth making fun of. Dad seemed to take our teasing in good humor, but that may be a survival trait he picked up from his own family growing up. His family is ruthless about teasing each other. As much as I loved hanging out with my fun-loving uncles, growing up for me was also torturous because I couldn't escape the harsh insults and criticisms from people who seemed to have a magical laser-like ability to find exactly those insults that would hurt me the most. So when my sister and mother and I would roll our eyes and say "geez, Dad!" or "there he goes again!", it was probably pretty mild by comparison and something he was able to laugh about himself.
A psychological disorder is a deviant, distressful, and dysfunctional pattern of thoughts, feelings, or behaviours that interferes with the ability to function in a healthy way.Let me repeat that: distressful; dysfunctional; interferes with.
When I was a child, we used to laugh at and tease my dad because he couldn't leave the house without checking that the stove was off and then asking all of us if we checked to make sure the stove was off. Then, as he drove away from the house, he had to have everyone verify for him that the garage door was closed. If he couldn't get verification of these things, he would sometimes even drive all the way back to make sure.
We all treated it like some kind of quirk, something worth making fun of. Dad seemed to take our teasing in good humor, but that may be a survival trait he picked up from his own family growing up. His family is ruthless about teasing each other. As much as I loved hanging out with my fun-loving uncles, growing up for me was also torturous because I couldn't escape the harsh insults and criticisms from people who seemed to have a magical laser-like ability to find exactly those insults that would hurt me the most. So when my sister and mother and I would roll our eyes and say "geez, Dad!" or "there he goes again!", it was probably pretty mild by comparison and something he was able to laugh about himself.
In college, I took my first broadcast class with a teacher who had OCD bad enough that he was, at one time, institutionalized for it. On the first day of class, he showed us a video he had made called The Touching Tree. He showed us this video for 2 reasons: 1) it was an example of the kinds of things he would be teaching in his course - composition, lighting, camera movements, editing, etc. and 2) it explained what having him for a teacher all semester would be like.
Watching this video I finally put a label to my father - OCD. I had no idea that his silly quirk about the stove or the garage door or needing to check all the windows at night or not being able to sleep without a fan running or needing to have a bowl of ice cream before he could sleep or of microwaving his food even if it came right off the stove were all symptoms of a mild form of OCD. I also had no idea that some of the intrusive thoughts and odd behaviours that I had were also OCD.
Many years after identifying that I probably had some form of OCD, I discovered another thing that explained why my OCD isn't quite the same as either my dad's or my former teacher's versions and not in ways that were accommodated for in the natural variance of expression of the disorder - I discovered that anorexia actually could *cause* OCD. My own condition wasn't isolated as an anxiety disorder on its own, but a *symptom* of some other disorder! So there are some specific things about me that don't *quite* line up with classic OCD. But there are lots of things that do.
For instance, one of the expressions of OCD is getting stuck in a counting loop. Right now, go ahead and count to yourself from 1 to 10. If you don't have OCD, you probably just counted 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. If you do have OCD, there's a good chance that your counting sounded more like this: 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5...
Imagine if you had a simple task like counting inventory. Now imagine reaching a particular number, and then thinking to yourself "wait a minute, did I skip a number? I might have skipped one. I did skip a number. I better start over to make sure I didn't skip a number," and having that thought intrude repeatedly while you are trying to count so that you never finish counting. Imagine not being able to silence that voice and not being able to stop yourself from starting over, even though you KNOW that you didn't skip a number and that this is holding you up from your job.
My version of that is songs. In fact, while writing that paragraph about counting, in my head I now have the counting song from Sesame Street stuck in my head, but only the chorus. I constantly have a song playing in my head. Most people are familiar with earworms. But what if you have never in your entire life NOT had a song stuck in your head? And what if it's not the whole song, but one verse stuck on repeat, like a scratched record, and it's playing for hours, sometimes days?
As the song lyric is playing in my head, I'm having parallel thoughts that go like this: "did I sing that too fast? Thoughts travel faster than verbal sounds, I might have played that part too fast. Yep, the tempo is too fast, if I try to sing it out loud, I'm singing faster than the song in my head. I need to start over. Did I faithfully recreate the entire song with all the instruments and harmonies or did I just play the lead vocals? I'm sure I forgot the guitar in there. I better start over. Oops, I'm going too fast again, I better start over..." This is why I'm always wearing headphones, or at least why I try to always have them with me. I can drown out this broken record player with other music (and it has to be some other song, not the same song).
Sometimes, it's not a song lyric, but a spoken sentence. If you ever watch a movie with me or listen to a podcast with me, watch my hands. I will often tap out the rhythm of the last sentence I just heard and I'll tap it out over and over again until some other sentence or phrase catches my attention. Sometimes I'll mouth the sentence myself just after they did, and I might silently whisper it several times. This is an outward expression of the same loop in my head and that sentence or phrase will be repeating long after I've managed to still the tapping or whispering.
OCD is expressed in a lot of different ways, so even though it's popular to think of it as neatening up things or washing hands, that's only scratching the surface of ways that someone can have disruptive, intrusive thoughts and compulsive behaviours. Something that I didn't know until I talked with my teacher that first night of class is that people think that germaphobes are neat freaks but sometimes they are incredibly dirty. It sounds counter-intuitive, but think about it - if you are *afraid* of germs, you might be too afraid to actually clean a surface where you think the germs are living. That might get you too close to the germs. So someone with the germaphobic expression of OCD might actually live in filth and squalor because they are too afraid of germs to clean their house.
So, you see, OCD doesn't mean simply that you like things in order. It doesn't just mean that you like even numbers. It doesn't only mean that you straighten crooked picture frames or place your books and DVDs all in order. Does the thought of those things being out of order intrude on your ability to do anything else? Are you helpless to move onto the next task until the straightening is done? Do you repeatedly go back and check to make sure you really did straighten it correctly? Do you know that you're acting irrationally and do you feel a sense of self-loathing that you can't control this straightening behaviour? Then you might actually have OCD. But just liking things straight and orderly, even if it will "bug you until you fix it" is not OCD.
My OCD is very light because my anorexia is very light. I've only had it get out of control twice in my life and both were under extreme duress (which is actually kinda the definition of anorexia - when I feel that my life is out of my control, I seize control over the one thing I know I can control, my diet). Most of the time, my OCD interferes with my life but in a manageable sort of way. I'm fortunate, I have found some tricks that work just well enough that people think I'm merely quirky, like my dad, instead of actually making it hard to hold down a job or maintain social ties.
But those intrusive thoughts are still there, always running in the background. It's a constant struggle to drown them out or channel them into helpful ways. The compulsive behaviour is always there, interfering with my daily life. It's a constant struggle to contain them to unnoticeable blocks of time or movements too small to notice. If your interest in straight lines isn't something you fight with in order to be productive and prevent people from thinking you're weird, then it's probably not OCD, you just like things straight, which a lot of people do.
If you take away only one thing from this, take this: OCD and other anxiety disorders are not about willpower or preferences. This is not something that you can just stop if you try hard enough.
By definition, a compulsion is something that you cannot stop, at least not without help. I didn't eat for a year and I used to do 500 crunches every night before bed, so trust me when I say that I have plenty of willpower. And yet, I can't stop doing certain other things. That's because these things don't fall under the category of "willpower". Willpower doesn't touch these things.
And logicking or rationalizing them doesn't make them go away either. Most people with OCD are very well aware that they are doing fucked up shit. We are aware that it's not rational, that our brains are lying to us, and that other people don't do these things. That's part of the problem - we know the truth but we can't stop anyway.
IT HAS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH WILLPOWER. I can't stress that enough.
This is not something that a person can just change if you explain how ridiculous they're being. This is not a character flaw. This is not a sign of weakness or laziness or lack of trying. This is a mis-wiring of the brain that mere "willpower" or "strong character" can even touch let alone fix, anymore than having trouble walking on a broken ankle is about "willpower" or having a "strong character". It's fucking broken, we know it's broken, and it will take outside intervention to correct it and even then it may never be as good as an ankle that was never broken.
Here are some videos that explain OCD. If you have ever straightened something up and then said to the person next to you "oh, it's just my OCD", then you need to watch these, at least the shorter ones. And if you only watch one, watch the first one called OCD & Anxiety Disorders: Crash Course Psychology #29. I'll include near the end the trailer for the video that my old broadcast teacher made, because the whole video is about 40 minutes long but if you have the time to watch the whole thing, I recommend it. I'll post the whole video just after the trailer.
OCD & Anxiety Disorders: Crash Course Phsychology #29:
This Is What It's Like To Be In My Head For 3 Minutes:
A video about OCD:
Preview Of The Touching Tree by James Callner:
The Touching Tree (the full movie) by James Callner:
This movie was my introduction to OCD and it's how I learned that my dad likely has it because I recognized him in the main character. The teacher in this film is actually *my* first film teacher. And I don't mean that my teacher was like the film teacher, I mean that the actor who played the teacher was my professor in college. He showed us this film both as an illustration for the sorts of things we would be learning in class and also to introduce us to his condition so that we would understand what it meant to interact with him.
The Touching Tree (the full movie) by James Callner:
This movie was my introduction to OCD and it's how I learned that my dad likely has it because I recognized him in the main character. The teacher in this film is actually *my* first film teacher. And I don't mean that my teacher was like the film teacher, I mean that the actor who played the teacher was my professor in college. He showed us this film both as an illustration for the sorts of things we would be learning in class and also to introduce us to his condition so that we would understand what it meant to interact with him.
Just because you like things neat and tidy, it doesn't mean you have OCD, but there is a slight possibility (2%-8% of the population) that you have something called OCPD - Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder. Now, this is really confusing because the names are so similar and even the symptoms seem similar.
But OCPD is characterized by a general pattern of concern with orderliness, perfectionism, excessive attention to details, mental and interpersonal control, and a need for control over one's environment, at the expense of flexibility, openness, and efficiency. People with OCPD do not generally feel the need to repeatedly perform ritualistic actions - a common symptom of OCD - and usually find pleasure in perfecting a task, whereas people with OCD are often more distressed after their actions.
According to Wikipedia:
"Unlike OCPD, OCD is described as invasive, stressful, time-consuming obsessions and habits aimed at reducing the obsession related stress. OCD symptoms are at times regarded as ego-dystonic because they are experienced as alien and repulsive to the person. Therefore, there is a greater mental anxiety associated with OCD. In contrast, the symptoms seen in OCPD, though they are repetitive, are not linked with repulsive thoughts, images, or urges. OCPD characteristics and behaviors are known as ego-syntonic, as persons with the disorder view them as suitable and correct. On the other hand, the main features of perfectionism and inflexibility can result in considerable suffering in an individual with OCPD as a result of the associated need for control."Anorexics are extremely likely to have either OCD or OCPD - or both! I likely am one of those anorexics that has both, as I have the distressful intrusive obsessive thoughts like patterns and loops of OCD as well as the satisfying feeling of lists and organization and the rigidity and inflexibility (my mother would say "stubbornness") associated with OCPD.
More about OCPD at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsessive%E2%80%93compulsive_personality_disorder and more about OCD at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsessive%E2%80%93compulsive_disorder
