Trauma’s relation to subtype

OCD is caused my genetics, medical, or trauma, so no, it is not weird. I was molested as a child and my first pure O theme was POCD which was very hard to get over because of my abuse (but I did get over it).

So when the body experiences trauma, it changes the brain and body, especially the parts of the brain that evaluate threats that can help regulate our nervous system. The part where OCD occurs in the brain tends to overlap with the areas that are impacted by trauma as well. So for example a non OCD person would scan the environment and their brain would play out all the possible scenarios, sometimes things that are way out there, but the filter that says “hey, that’s less likely to occur” will filter out those scenarios, meaning they get way less intrusive thoughts. They still happen, but not as often. Now a person with trauma has lived an abnormal living experience, where the brain didn’t anticipate the threat (especially in instances that involve s.a.), so now the brain doesn’t know what thoughts to flag as abnormal vs normal. It will scan the environment for threats, and in the scenario where you are most likely to be the main threat, the brain is still going to play that scenario out, just in case, and it may not flag the thought as unlikely or irrelevant. Because the brain has been wired to protect at all costs, it will even try to protect itself from itself. That’s why people with harm and POCD themes tend to only have these fears towards people that they feel are weaker than them. And then with the general ptsd around what happened, it’s like experiencing a flashback but in thought form that you know isn’t real and would never happen, but the brain needs you to feel it’s real so you take the threat seriously, because in the past it wasn’t able to protect itself, and needs to feel like it can now.