As the artist Hannah Montana once sagely sang, “Everybody makes mistakes. Everybody has those days.” This refrain is meant to comfort those of us frustrated by our mundane missteps with a reminder that we all mess up sometimes, and that ultimately, it’s probably not a big deal. But when you have obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), every single thing you do wrong—or could possibly do wrong—can seem like it’s about to ruin your life.
Many OCD compulsions are driven by the conviction that one wrong move—leaving the stove on after dinner is done, missing a mistake in an email, or sending a text that you’re worried could be misinterpreted—will lead to complete disaster for you or somebody else. Each action you take may feel like it could snowball into a life-altering mistake. This fear isn’t just a common experience for those with OCD. It’s part of the OCD symptom cycle itself, by which OCD works to convince you that the stakes of everything you do are breathtakingly high, and that the only way to mitigate the potential for catastrophe is to do whatever OCD tells you.
But the compulsions OCD insists will protect you from irrevocable errors are not keeping you safe, they’re only reinforcing your fears. Here’s how you can recognize when OCD tries to drag you into this cycle, and learn to break out of it.
How OCD makes ordinary mistakes feel like the end of the world
OCD combines catastrophic thinking with a sense of hyper-responsibility to turn small mistakes into apocalyptic-seeming ones. When you feel hyper-responsible for the world around you, as many people with OCD do, it can seem like you are accountable for preventing disasters. And when you think catastrophically, another common OCD experience, it can seem like those disasters you had better avert are around every corner.
That’s because OCD takes ordinary, common mistakes that have little real-world impact beyond inconvenience and frustration, and turns them into unforgivable sleights and nightmarish events. Then it demands you prevent, fix, or undo these atrocities.
Say you’ve just left the house for an evening stroll to help you relax and unwind after a long day. Before you know it, OCD has provided you with an intrusive thought highlighting a worst-case scenario: What if you left the stove on after dinner, and now your house is going to burn down, endangering your entire family—all because of your carelessness? In order to help you avoid this nightmare, OCD drives you to engage in compulsions. This might look like an urge to repeatedly check that the stove is in fact off, so strong that it makes you feel like you need to bee-line back for the house after you’ve already left for your walk, or climb out of bed throughout the night to check again. Or, it might manifest in other compulsions, like the drive to repeatedly review your memories, running back the moment you turned off the burner over and over to remind yourself it happened.
But the relief never lasts, because the doubt you feel isn’t really about the stove. It’s about whether you can truly trust yourself. And because OCD is ego-dystonic, meaning it latches onto concepts and images that run directly counter to your own values and beliefs, it’s constantly trying to convince you that you’re not worthy of your own trust via images and scenarios that are especially upsetting.
Perfectionism and the fear of making the “wrong” choice
If you’re worried about potentially causing problems or harming others, you’re probably a generally responsible person who thinks about the consequences of your actions—and that’s a good thing! But when OCD gets a hold of that facet of your personality, it turns it against you: Conscientiousness becomes a cage that stops you from being able to make any choice at all lest it have dire consequences.
This can make it impossible to make both significant and basic decisions as you find yourself caught in compulsive research, rumination, reassurance-seeking, list-making, and spiraling over the pros and cons of your options. OCD tries to frame this fear-fueled behavior as reasonable information-gathering, but the doubt it attempts to assuage will always come back.
Rumination, guilt, and shame over past mistakes
And often, OCD doesn’t just want you to worry that you’re about to ruin your life or someone else’s—it wants to convince you that you already have. Being wracked with shame and guilt over past choices can indicate that you may be dealing with real event OCD, a subtype that leads to obsessive fixation on a past action or experience and whether it was somehow harmful. You forgot a friend’s birthday last month and now you’re sure you’ve irrevocably damaged the friendship, or you shoplifted nail polish in high school and feel certain that means you’re a terrible person, and your OCD will simply not let it go. Real event OCD can feel unique (and uniquely frustrating) because the obsession may be rooted in something that actually happened—making it harder to convince yourself it isn’t worth worrying about. But, ultimately trying to convince yourself that an OCD fear isn’t important is usually a compulsion that doesn’t provide lasting relief, regardless of the form your OCD takes.
Additionally, many people with OCD find themselves ruminating, or mentally fixating on, a difficult decision or frustrating mistake made days, weeks, months, or even years ago. You may feel like there may have been horrible consequences of which you’re unaware, or like these horrible consequences might still come to pass.
You could also experience a compulsive need to “confess” what you’ve done to others in hopes of receiving reassurance that what you did was not wrong, or that you can be forgiven. If the people around you can’t meet this need, you might also find yourself compulsively researching reassuring perspectives on situations like the one you found yourself in.
How ERP can help
OCD treats every decision as if it’s irreversible, but the truth is that almost none of them are. Some things are harder to fix than others, sure, but divorces, career pivots, and even tattoo removal lasers all exist. That’s not to say everything can easily be entirely undone, but there are often opportunities to course-correct even from genuinely big decisions.
Exposure and response prevention (ERP) therapy can help you internalize this understanding and stop living in fear of life-altering mistakes. That doesn’t mean it will help you assuage your fears by proving to yourself that you didn’t leave the stove on, or say something unkind. Instead, it will help you accept that your mistakes may be real, and there will very likely be more around the corner (they’re a core part of being human, after all), but that doesn’t mean everything is ruined.
Tolerating the distress of potentially doing something wrong, without spiraling into a catastrophizing mindset that insists doom is nigh, is one of the key skills of ERP. The “exposures” of ERP, which are specifically tailored based on your OCD themes and obsessions, help you learn to bear discomfort and anxiety without engaging in compulsions. If you feel the need to check that the stove is off repeatedly before leaving the house, for example, an ERP therapist might recommend starting by reducing the number of times you check—until you’re able to tolerate not checking at all. If you find yourself fixated on whether you said something insensitive or acted awkwardly during a dinner with friends, a trained therapist might suggest that you avoid your ordinary habit of rehashing every beat of the night in your mind or with your partner, instead practicing sitting with the uncertainty that you may never know exactly how you came across to others.
Understanding your values, which is an essential step in ERP, makes that easier to do. An ERP therapist will guide you through identifying the beliefs and goals that you want to shape your life. You can never be absolutely certain that you won’t make a mistake, or cause harm in some way—no one can. In fact, you can probably be sure that you will mess up from time to time. But knowing your values means knowing how to move forward in a way that reflects the life you want to live. The fear OCD creates isn’t really about a single life-altering mistake. It’s about not being able to trust yourself to survive the ordinary, human-sized ones. Treatment helps you build that trust.
