Hi all, I was looking for information about ‘magical thinking’ because I suffer from severe OCD and that’s my problem and I found this answer to someone who suffers ‘ magical thinking OCD’ from someone who knows exactly what living that hell means. It helped me lots. Source: https://www.ocdaction.org.uk/forum/obsessive-compulsive-disorder-ocd/please-help-me-4 It’s hard to answer the first question, especially to someone trapped in the grip of magical thinking. I think it's a realisation we really have to come to ourselves in the end and cannot be told. And that's perfectly do'able, it's not some unattainable holy grail. If I could do it the state I was in then I'm pretty sure you can. First of all, to even start discussing this we have to agree on an assumption that there's a mental disorder that is very widely recognised called OCD and that you have it. You have to accept this to be able to move forward OK? So if that is part of the problem here, then I'd strongly urge you to get reading about OCD and learning more about it and reminding yourself why you were drawn to believe that you had OCD in the first place. And be aware that OCD itself will try to question this and find loopholes, so be ready for that and treat it accordingly. Once you've accepted that you have OCD, then we know that you perform compulsions to prevent various doubts and fears coming true. We also know that these compulsions are driven by magical thinking, so the compulsion has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on whether the doubt/fear is true in the first place, and has no power to change it or stop it coming true. So regardless of whether you believe the doubt/fear has any basis in reality, the compulsion is and can only ever be a completely unnecessary waste of time that doesn't affect it at all and never ever will. And realising that can get you through some tough exposures that you might not otherwise be prepared to do. It has me anyway. Also magical thinking makes the false assumption that you can somehow control things with your mind. This is not true, no-one can. That's just the way it is. And if you have OCD it really feels like this is true and you can, but it's 100% misleading, believe me. A common flaw would be to wait for something bad to happen and say "ah but look a bad thing happened and I didn't do my compulsion!". That's not proof of anything, and the thing was going to happen anyway regardless of whether you did it or not. That's confirmation bias. It disregards all the times the thing didn't happen and focuses only on the one time it did. It's horribly flawed science. I think many of us with OCD fail to recognise what magical thinking really is. My interpretation of it is this: when a mind cannot deal with certain fears or difficult situations satisfactorily, and cannot live with not being able to deal with them, it takes extra-ordinary action, by creating imaginary connections between those things and certain thoughts or actions that can influence the outcome of the thing if done right or with the right feeling. If it works once, it does it again for similar difficult situations, and if we're not careful our mind becomes addicted to it and our whole way of thinking becomes poisoned with it. I think a large part of getting over OCD has to be recognising this phenomenon of magical thinking, accepting we very much have it, and defying it whenever we can at all costs. And every time we defy it those imagined connections become weaker and eventually break, and then it's easier to defy more and more, until hopefully we can change our whole way of thinking back to before. But of course we may then still have work to do on finding another more healthy way of dealing with the original fears that started us off down the magical thinking road. So there's some steps involved and it's not one quick solution at all. To answer the second question, I think you have to put some faith in all the psychologists who've studied CBT and exposure therapy, who all seem to agree that if you do enough exposures, the anxiety associated with that thing just has to decrease, so it shouldn't ever be the case that the fear will remain in your mind forever. And by the way I remember asking some similar questions to my therapist when I started therapy: "ah but it's different in my case... "I don't believe the therapy will work on my OCD..." "You really don't understand. The whole reason I'm driven to do exposures in the first place is because it really feels like the bad things will come true if I don't!?..." To all of this she said "yes and this is EXACTLY how OCD keeps you trapped.". I'm afraid it's a tricky business. It's almost like we have amnesia. We keep realising and forgetting again. Climbing then falling, So all we can do is keep reminding ourselves and keep getting up and trying again. All we can do is listen to the people with the best knowledge of it and follow their advice of what it is and what it isn't and follow the therapy they suggest. But if we think we know better, and keep making excuses as to why it won't work on us, or finding loopholes in the therapy or our personal circumstances, then I'm afraid we will remain very much trapped. That is guaranteed. And as usual, but particularly at the moment, I'm saying all of this as much to myself as to you Nid, as I've been having a rather difficult few weeks here with external events derailing my progress. So I too need a refresher! I hope you can make some improvement in due course Nid Good luck.