My mother keeps telling me to "get in control" of my head and "just say no". Any advice on how I can make her understand better ?

A way that helped me was talking about fight or flight responses. When you're in a dangerous situation, you get filled with adrenaline and have an intense feeling of panic/anxiety. Picture this feeling of a loss of control and total and utter fear, except it's over something others may find very small, or even pointless. What we then try to do it escape that, wether it be through washing hands or counting or rearranging or whatever. We will not stop being on edge until we've done it properly, that is our way of getting "in control" of our heads, even if we recognise that this behaviour is unhealthy.

There are some really good personal accounts of OCD if you search for them (short / personal experiences on OCD) and you could always have her try to read some of those to see what it's like for you if you find some you resonate with

I know that was a huge generalisability but it may help her understand a little, best of luck ❤️

I agree with whoever suggested the videos. They're an incredibly powerful tool, so much so that they're often used nowadays for legit teaching purposes. I showed one to my mom (who joked about occasionally having "OCD brain") and I think it really put things in perspective for her. She hasn't used OCD as an adjective ever since.

Ya I have some advice, especially since my family was the exact same. 1) There are some really good videos that show what suffering from OCD feels like. You can show here those. 2) I often like to use analogies that my family can understand. For instance, if you told your mom "imagine a woman who was terrified that she may accidentally drop and hurt her newborn baby, so she avoided it completely".

Do you all have any links to videos that helped?