The Best Approach if Your Loved One Has OCD

Welcome back! In this blog, we are going to chat about how to respond as a loved one, a parent, a friend, a spouse, a sibling, whomever you are, to someone with OCD. An important piece in OCD treatment is the way the people in their lives respond to the OCD. Because of that, we want to have a discussion about the more effective and productive ways to respond to those moments where we see our loved one’s OCD showing up. 

If you’re a loved one, a parent, a spouse, to someone with OCD, take a moment before going on and reading this blog and just think about all the ways you engage in helping your loved one. Do you help to calm and lessen their anxiety? Do you tell them to “just stop”? Do you accommodate the OCD by participating? Do you purposely not accommodate the OCD? Regardless of how you respond to it, you’re likely doing it out of a place of love and concern for them, and at the root of it, you just want them to get better, and that is what’s important.  

Now that you have at the front of your mind, we’re going to talk about the effectiveness of these types of responses. Truthfully, none of those responses are really helping your loved ones OCD. In the moment you may provide temporary relief by giving them that reassurance or by participating in OCD’s rules, but it ultimately does not fix the real problem and you likely find yourself providing that reassurance or participating in OCD’s rules quite often to help with the anxiety. 

In those scenarios what’s happening is you may either be enabling the OCD by engaging in OCD’s rules to help calm your loved one’s anxiety or, you’re demanding the OCD by trying to utilize logic and reason to dispel and reduce their anxiety. Our goal is to shift these enabling or demanding responses more into the effective helping responses where we are productively responding to our loved one and their OCD. 

Let’s take a look at two similar examples of what enabling and demanding responses can look like disguised as helping. 

Every day when you come home from work, your spouse has you take all your outside clothes off as soon as you walk in the door to ensure no one gets sick from any germs or bacteria that you may be carrying on you. In the past if you don’t do this, your spouse becomes very anxious and cleans the house furiously by rewashing rugs, bedsheets and disinfecting every area of the home you’ve walked through to ensure there are no outside germs or bacteria that can make anyone sick. This takes your spouse hours and takes them a while to relax after this all happens. You have found it easier on them and yourself to just change your clothes as soon as you walk in the door even though this is awkward and kind of annoying for you.

Every day when you come home from work, you do not take off your outside clothes as soon as you walk in the door even though your spouse has countlessly requested this of you to ensure no one gets sick from any germs or bacteria that may be on you. To you, this is ridiculous, because what is the likelihood that there is bacteria or germs on your clothes that are going to get everyone sick? You walk through the house disregarding your spouse’s requests and respond to them utilizing logic and tough love because this to you is the most logical way to respond to help calm their anxiety, though it does not. 

These two responses are both very different, however they ultimately yield the same results which is just justifying or amplifying the OCD which intensifies everything all together and doesn’t really solve anything.