Accepting and Owning Your Choices

Hey everyone! I'm new to this community, but I thought I'd share some thoughts about acceptance and ownership when it comes to physical compulsions. I'd love to hear your thoughts, so feel free to reply. Also, this is not mental health advice and is not the right perspective for everyone – I found it helpful in my journey, but it goes without saying that this approach is by no means the correct or best one, and different things will work for different people :) Finally, this perspective is focused on physical compulsions and won't make sense for mental ones. I used to say things like "OCD made me check it," or "OCD is being loud," or "my OCD is really bad today." These are totally understandable phrases and there's nothing wrong with them, and it often feels like OCD is controlling our behaviour. This is one of the hardest parts of the disorder. But I realised that speaking about OCD in this way makes it sound like an illness or ailment that you possess – something that is external to yourself that is influencing or controlling your behaviour. I found that the more I blamed OCD for my behaviour, however, the more I started to give up. "OCD made me do that," I would say, feeling sorry for myself. I would pass the responsibility onto the disorder, not accepting it for myself. Whilst it's true that neural pathways and chemical imbalances are to blame for much of our OCD suffering, it is *also* very, very importantly true, that *you are still in control.* Even when it feels like you aren't, you can still make the choice to walk away, stop, or do whatever it is that you want to do. (Critically, this is not the case for mental compulsions, rituals, rumination, and the like. This only really applies to checking and other physical compulsions. If you suffer from mental compulsions, it is absolutely true that you can't control your thoughts, so don't blame yourself for what pops into your head - it doesn't represent you! It's just noisy brain activity in a brain evolved to protect us from any possible threat, so it can go into overdrive sometimes and start throwing things at us that don't really make sense). When I blamed my OCD for my behaviour, I gave it control. I said, "OCD made me do it," and I became blameless. Blamelessness is nice, but it also equals powerlessness. If I wanted to change my behaviour, I would have to own it - I needed to recognise that, in truth, OCD didn't make me do it. I did. The only way to change my behaviour was to accept responsibility for it and acknowledge that I made the choice to do it. And the flip side to this somewhat dismaying revelation is that, if I made the choice to do it, I could also have made the choice *not* to do it. So next time you feel like blaming your OCD for your suffering or for a physical compulsion, you might want to gently remind yourself of two things: Firstly, that you *are* choosing to do this. BUT. Because you are choosing to do this, you also have the power to choose *not* to do this. OCD is not controlling you. If you can take responsibility for your compulsions, you might find that you have power over them, instead of the other way around! :) Have a lovely day!