Have you ever tried to explain an opinion, feeling, or need, only to have the person you’re talking to stare uncomprehendingly in response? Have you ever felt like you had to hide the content of your thoughts, dreams, or fears because it might be completely misunderstood? Do you ever find yourself composing novel-length text messages or emails to friends and coworkers in the hope of perfectly articulating your perspective, only to receive responses that show your meaning wasn’t clear to them at all? Does this kind of thing happen not just every now and then, but all the time?
Those with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) often feel like the way they’re seen by others is totally unaligned with how they view themselves. Feeling like the people around you have a false understanding of who you are can be frustrating, exhausting, and at times truly painful. When those people are your loved ones, this hurt is often multiplied. And while a lot of people experience feeling misunderstood from time to time, OCD can play a unique role in this experience for those who live with the condition.
For example, if you experience fears of harming others, you might have also experienced voicing those fears—and having someone assume you want to harm your loved ones, when the opposite is true. Or, if you experience obsessions around whether or not your partner is the one for you, you may have engaged in compulsive reassurance-seeking—causing the mistaken impression that you’re clingy, when really you’re trying to make sure the relationship is right for both of you.
These misunderstandings can also come from widespread misconceptions about OCD itself. Often, OCD jokes in pop culture portray a very narrow understanding of the condition—more meticulously organized desks, fewer intrusive thoughts about accidentally running someone over with your car—that can also lead people to make incorrect assumptions about who you are. Many mental health professionals receive little clinical training around OCD, which can mean that even a clinician may inadvertently make you feel misunderstood.
While nobody will be understood perfectly 100% of the time, feeling like you’re never seen clearly or like people always assume the worst of you pushes the limits of what most people can tolerate. Fortunately, the right type of specialized therapy from a trained provider can help you learn to manage OCD symptoms that may be contributing to inaccurate perceptions of who you are, and learn to better tolerate the discomfort of not knowing exactly how you’re being perceived.
What they see vs. what you feel
Though it can feel like they are, people who misunderstand you or your motivations probably aren’t trying to cast you in the worst possible light. They can only see your actions, and so they fill in the motivations themselves. Because compulsions are visible but intrusive thoughts are not, it can be difficult for people who don’t understand OCD well to see how the two connect. Many common subtypes of OCD lead to frequent misunderstandings. Some of the ways this can show up include:
Contamination OCD
Contamination OCD causes an intense fear of germs, illness, or becoming “contaminated” by certain substances, people, or environments. Because it can lead to excessive cleaning, handwashing, or avoidance behaviors of “messy” or “dirty” situations, people with contamination OCD are often viewed as “germaphobes” or “hypochondriacs.”
They might be treated like they’re being prissy for refusing to sit in the grass at a picnic, or selfish if their compulsive avoidance inconveniences other people. But contamination OCD can include a fear of getting other people sick, and the compulsions it incites can come from a desire to protect others.
Magical thinking OCD
People with magical thinking OCD, which is rooted in the superstition or belief that one’s thoughts or actions can prevent negative experiences or harm, fear they’ll be responsible for awful things happening to others or themselves if they do not perform specific actions. To others, those with this subtype often fall on a continuum from “quirky” to “enlightened” to “weirdly superstitious,” and these traits may even be lauded or seen as charming.
And the interpretation isn’t always so generous. From the outside, someone who has an extremely time-consuming morning routine that consistently makes them late for work might be painted as vain or irresponsible. And to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with enjoying a nice moisturizer or a long morning meditation, no matter the reason. But what others misinterpret as indulgent might actually be an OCD-driven need to repeat steps a specific number of times, in a certain order, in exactly the right way before being allowed to continue on with the day—all while being afraid that failing to do so will cause horrible things will happen to their family and friends. This experience is far from luxurious, and being perceived negatively for it can make it feel even worse.
Harm OCD, POCD, and other taboo themes
If your OCD is focused on a theme that’s often considered taboo, being misunderstood can feel devastating and have serious consequences. Taboo subtypes are often stigmatized and difficult to talk about, because they’re tied to things that our culture is afraid of or that people find uncomfortable—and often, your own sense of fear and disgust about these topics is the very reason that your OCD has latched onto them. That’s because OCD obsessions are generally ego-dystonic, meaning that they go against your identity, values, and intentions. This can include subtypes like incest OCD and harm OCD—which creates intrusive thoughts and obsessions about the possibility that you might harm another person, or yourself (this subtype is called suicidal OCD).
Taboo themes are also often harder for other people to understand, and therefore can create higher stakes misunderstandings. People with pedophilia OCD, for example, which causes unwanted, intrusive thoughts about harming or being sexually attracted to children, are often terrified to speak about their experiences or seek help. The reality is that people with POCD or other taboo themes are not more likely to act on their intrusive thoughts. But fear that other people might think they will, or want to, is often a severe deterrent from seeking help that can lead to unnecessary suffering as people go without treatment. And when other people mistake intrusive thoughts for consensual fantasies, people with OCD can end up in involuntary mental health treatment or even being reported to law enforcement. An OCD specialist will understand that these thoughts do not reflect your character, desire, or intent, and they’ll be sure to make that clear to you as well.
Feeling constantly misunderstood wears you down
Even when the stakes are comparatively less high, going through life feeling chronically misunderstood takes a toll. It’s hard to feel close to people when it seems like they don’t truly see you, especially if they’re often frustrated with you about behaviors driven by OCD and what they believe those behaviors represent about your intentions and character.
For example, some people with OCD feel like others see them as “overthinkers,” or “too sensitive.” And because OCD can push you to wring every last thought out of a horrifying or exhausting topic, or put you so on edge that you feel like you’ll break down at the slightest provocation, these labels can feel apt. But they’re not inherent personality traits—few people are glad to have spent an hour at the grocery store mulling over the pros and cons of each granola bar brand, or to have broken down into tears because one subdued text from their partner activated deep relationship fears.These are often exhausting, OCD-driven internal experiences resulting in external reactions that paint only half the picture.
When explaining becomes a compulsion
In reaction to this feeling of being misunderstood, some people with OCD overexplain themselves, preemptively narrating, justifying, and adding caveats in hopes of closing the gap between what others see and what they’re actually experiencing.
This effort to “get ahead of” being misunderstood generally comes from a place of wanting to feel seen and prevent conflict. But it can become a compulsion in and of itself, turning into a form of reassurance-seeking in which you keep adding onto the explanation until it elicits a comforting enough reaction or feels like it ‘proves” that you’re not a bad person.
How ERP can help
Exposure and response prevention (ERP) therapy is the most effective OCD treatment because it’s designed to help you face your fears. On a practical level, reducing the frequency and intensity of your compulsions can help reduce the frequency with which your behaviors are misunderstood by other people. The goal of ERP isn’t to make sure that everyone in your life can understand OCD perfectly, but rather to loosen its grip so that you’re better able to tolerate discomfort and uncertainty—whether it be from a frightening intrusive thought about accidentally harming someone, or the fear that you might have been misunderstood.
Depending on your specific subtype(s) of OCD, an ERP therapist will create a treatment plan that gradually and compassionately pushes and expands your capacity for sitting with the discomfort of obsessive thoughts without engaging in compulsions. Maybe ROCD is causing you to constantly wonder whether your partner no longer loves you and is cheating on you, and therefore to repeatedly ask if their feelings have changed, and check in with them incessantly about where they are and what they’re doing. In this situation, an ERP therapist might encourage you to stop asking your partner about their whereabouts while you’re apart, or start small by limiting yourself to only a specific number of check-in texts per day. If you’re a compulsive over-explainer who follows every statement with a treatise hedging about each point, an ERP therapist might ask you to practice just letting your statements stand on their own, without follow-up. These adjustments will both strengthen your resilience to the fear that your partner no longer loves you—all you can do right now is remain present in the relationship—and have a tendency to strengthen the relationship itself (partnerships are typically easier to navigate when one partner isn’t constantly asking for reassurance).
The other way ERP can help you is by building up your tolerance for the fact that, because you can’t read minds, you can never truly know or control how others feel about you. You’ve probably heard the saying, What other people think of you is none of your business. And while this isn’t always true—like if people’s misunderstandings of your OCD symptoms have led them to believe that you are a danger to yourself or others—it’s often the case. While you learn you take control back from OCD so that your actions and choices can feel more like your own, you also learn to handle the stress of potentially being misunderstood.
You don’t have to make every person in your life comprehend every intricacy of your mind in order to feel seen, or make them fully understand the nuances of OCD in order to recover. ERP can help reduce your OCD symptoms, and make being misunderstood feel less like a catastrophe.
