We all have preferences, and those preferences shape our behavior. Some people enjoy veggies, staying up late, or working in coffee shops. Others gag at the sight of broccoli, prefer to be in bed by 10 p.m., and can’t stand trying to be productive while surrounded by hustle and bustle. In short, the latter group might avoid the things that the former group likes based on their own specific preferences.
But if you have obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), your decision to avoid certain activities or situations might be based on more than just personal judgment, taste, or preference. OCD bombards you with intrusive thoughts, images, and urges, and then convinces you that these scary, stressful things can only be dealt with or prevented through compulsions—repetitive physical or mental behaviors that a person feels driven to perform in response to obsessions. For many, compulsions manifest as repeated avoidance of certain environments, experiences, things, or even thoughts.
This avoidance is not an expression of personal preference, but a restriction that OCD places on your personal preferences. For example, there’s a difference between eating at home for a few months, because you’re trying to save up for a summer vacation—or even preferring to do so because you’d rather skip the noise of a restaurant atmosphere—and doing so because contamination OCD makes you fear that you’ll get sick if you consume food prepared by anyone other than yourself. And while this kind of compulsive avoidance might quiet intrusive thoughts and distress in the short-term, it ultimately only reinforces the idea that you must continue avoiding restaurants in order to stay safe—worsening the OCD cycle, and undermining the choices you’d like to make for yourself based on your own judgment and taste.
How avoidance fuels the OCD cycle
While a strategic avoidance of triggers might be helpful for certain mental health conditions, such as someone with an eating disorder throwing away their scale, avoiding the things that trigger OCD contributes to long-term suffering. Compulsions reinforce obsessions and keep you trapped in OCD’s cycle.
The OCD cycle is a continuous loop of obsessions and compulsions. When an intrusive thought becomes the subject of obsession, leading to discomfort or fear, compulsive behaviors can provide temporary relief. In the long run, however, they contribute to more symptoms and distress. Even if you understand this logically, the urge to perform them can feel overwhelming.
When the compulsion is avoidance, it can be particularly difficult to break the pattern. Avoidance can feel protective and/or productive because avoiding situations, objects, people, and thoughts that trigger obsessions can seem like a way of preventing yourself from getting stuck in the OCD symptom cycle. But building your life around making sure that you don’t encounter things that cause discomfort and anxiety is not only unrealistic and highly disruptive to your day-to-day existence, it also reinforces the false idea that your fears are truly too daunting to be faced. Moreover, avoidance signals to your brain that what you’re avoiding is truly dangerous.
Caring for yourself, non-compulsively
Of course, it is always important to take care of yourself, and sometimes that looks like saying no to things in order to protect your peace and well-being. This is true both because you’re a person who deserves to be cared for, including through self-care, and because your lifestyle habits can have an impact on your OCD symptoms.
However, it’s important to understand the difference between setting healthy boundaries and engaging in compulsive avoidance. For example, getting enough sleep is crucial to your well-being, and prioritizing rest is a healthy habit, especially if you have OCD. At the same time, if you turn in early every night out of fear that anything less than a perfect eight hours of sleep will make you snap and experience psychosis, your compulsive avoidance will ultimately have a negative impact on your life since it’s being driven by OCD, no matter how well-rested you think you are. Similarly, it can be healthy to say no to social situations when your social battery is drained. But if you continuously miss out on important events and milestones in your and your loved ones’ lives because you worry about how these social situations might trigger relationship OCD (ROCD), the behavior is more likely compulsive than done out of care.
Taking care of yourself is important, and sometimes that means breaking OCD’s rules gradually. You don’t have to do every single exposure or resist every single compulsion all at once to experience an improvement in your symptoms. However, if “taking care” of yourself means building your life according to OCD’s demands, this ultimately contributes to poor mental health.
Identifying your actual values
You deserve to make choices based on your values, which means you have to be able to identify what your values actually are—not just what OCD is telling you they are
Values, which are different from goals, are principles important to you that guide the way you live. Examples of values include, but are not limited to, creativity, partnership, connection, kindness, and curiosity.
OCD often moves us away from our values. Someone with pedophilia OCD (POCD), for example, who values quality time with her children, might avoid being around them because of her obsessive fears. Someone with ROCD who values intimacy might avoid sexual connection with their partner because they’re worried they won’t feel “right enough” during it, which will trigger obsessions. Someone with harm OCD who values the creativity of cooking might avoid it entirely because they’re afraid to use knives and other sharp objects in the kitchen.
Identifying what your values are can help you better answer the following: is OCD making this decision for me, or is a value of mine making it? A good OCD specialist will begin treatment by helping you identify your values, and the ways OCD has been holding you back from living according to them—so you can co-create a plan that helps you live a more value-aligned life.
Exposure and response prevention (ERP) therapy, the most effective form of OCD treatment, can help you do this by gradually facing fears without performing compulsions like avoidance. Over time, gradual exposure can help you learn that avoidance isn’t necessary to stay safe.
The main goal of OCD treatment is to stop OCD from impairing your ability to live the way that you’d like to. For example, if you’ve always been a huge true crime fan but now avoid watching it because OCD says you might be aroused by violence, an ERP therapist may recommend that you practice watching true crime rather than shying away from it, and that you stay focused throughout rather than going on your phone or fast-forwarding through certain sections. They’ll do this in gradual and manageable steps. However, if you have just always disliked true crime as a genre, a therapist can help you identify that it’s perfectly fine to let this preference influence your behavior. In this case, your avoidance may not be a compulsion—it might simply be an expression of your taste.
Because ERP is about helping you live a value-aligned life, it should always be focused on helping you gain the skills to do something you actually want or need to do. This means that while some exercises might involve activities that are outside your ordinary comfort zone, an ERP therapist won’t direct you toward goals that don’t reflect your interests or what’s important to you. Instead, ERP therapy should help you do more of what you genuinely enjoy, according to your own judgment and taste.
If you’re struggling with OCD and find yourself relying on avoidance or other compulsions, NOCD can help. Our therapists understand the subtle ways OCD can show up—including avoidance—and use ERP to help you respond more effectively. To learn more about getting started, book a free call with our team today.
