I want to change something I said the other day. The other day I said the reason OCD is so uncomfortable is cus certainty equals safety. But I realize now that may not be fully true. In certain regards certainty can equal a sense of safety, such as feeling certain that home is safe and sound and a place you can always go back to. It feels safe. But certainty can also feel unsafe. People who are always certain something bad will happen, or who always look back in time to bad events that have certainly happened, definitely don't feel so safe either usually. So certainty can equal safety, but so can uncertainty, cus depending on the context, both can keep us present

Well I think there is an interesting thing here. Nobody suffering with ocd actually cares as much about certaintity, as they care about “feeling certain”. For example- I don’t have compulsive desire to feel certain that the planet won’t explode Tomororw. Because I “feel certain” it won’t. But I have no certainty of it. So ultimately certain or uncertain doesn’t matter- you just desire the feeling of it.

I never thought into this as deeply as yall are, I was just listening to The Marfa Tapes album and felt nostalgic and was in the feels

They don’t think about certantity much, because they “feel certain” about things that are logical to them and they feel “uncertain” about things that logically scare them. It’s ultimately the feeling that holds the ocd suffering person captive. If our brain chemistry gave us a feeling that we were safe, we wouldn’t need compulsions. But since we don’t feel that, we give in to compulsions. That’s why exposure therapy is ideal, because it trains us to get comfortable in the discomfort of uncertainty. And then as a result, our brain begins to associate a feeling of certainty the more we expose ourselves to the disturbance.