Whether it’s a physical drawer full of old birthday cards that you don’t feel like you can throw away because you fear doing so would mean that you’re ungrateful, or a mental drawer full of “evidence” you turn to when trying to argue with upsetting or disturbing intrusive thoughts, many people with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) know the feeling of struggling to let something go.
Repeatedly analyzing your memories or cataloguing your belongings in an attempt to alleviate anxiety and uncertainty can feel productive. For example, if you’re having intrusive thoughts about hurting your dad, then mentally replaying all of the times you’ve supported or helped him, or examining every trinket from every trip you’ve taken together can temporarily seem to counter your fears.
But really, this compulsion only reinforces to your brain that your intrusive thoughts are truly threatening, and that you must engage in certain behaviors to overcome them. Collections and memories can be wonderful and bring joy, but not when you’re holding onto them out of fear that doing otherwise might have awful consequences. Here’s how OCD can drive you to maintain physical or mental storage space for objects or memories not out of love, but out of fear—and how specialized OCD therapy can help you learn to discern what you truly want to hold onto, and let the rest go.
OCD can make you feel like you need to hold onto memories
Memories of the past can feel like they help fortify the present. Sunny, warm recollections can help us believe that summer will come again even in the dead of winter, and fond memories can let us feel close to people and places even after we’ve lost them. Forgetting any of these things can feel like coming unmoored, for anyone.
Then add in OCD, which both creates doubt and demands a sense of absolute certainty. OCD can drive you to become obsessed with collecting and preserving memories or thoughts. This might be because you worry that you’ll need to be able to relay them perfectly in the future in order to prove a point or defend yourself against intrusive thoughts, or because it seems that the only way to retain the feeling from a poignant memory and know you truly appreciated it is to hold onto every detail.
This anxiety-fueled need to clutch onto and catalog your memories is a mental compulsion, meaning an OCD ritual that takes place in your head rather than being enacted physically. And some OCD subtypes can feel especially linked to this compulsion. For example, false memory OCD, a subtype that causes intrusive doubts about whether past events actually happened, can compel you to try to memorize experiences so that you can be more confident in their veracity later. If you’re tortured by intrusive thoughts about whether you accidentally hit someone with your car on the way home from work, you might try to vigilantly absorb every detail of your drives and replay them in your head later, so that you can be sure you didn’t hurt anyone.
Real event OCD, in which a person becomes fixated on events that did actually happen and worries that these events make them bad or dangerous, can make you want to constantly replay and meticulously analyze your memories in response to shame. For example, someone who engaged in common childhood sexual exploration with a friend when they were little might find themselves replaying the memory on loop, holding onto and examining every detail, to try to confirm that they didn’t accidentally cause harm.
OCD can make you feel like you can’t let go of physical objects
OCD can also drive you to hold onto physical objects. While it’s one thing to keep a few finger paintings from your kids’ preschool days, some parents with OCD hang onto every assignment their kids ever complete for fear that one missing test could ruin their kid’s college chances by making it impossible to confirm their grades, or concern that tossing a broken ceramics project means they’re an unloving parent.
Holding onto this much stuff can make your living space difficult to use, however, and cause frustration and overwhelm. In fact, living in a cluttered and chaotic space is known to negatively impact mental health, and may stop you from engaging fully with the present.
It can also be common to hold onto superfluous paperwork out of fear of being accused of doing something wrong in the future. Maybe you find yourself keeping every piece of paper related to every doctor’s visit, blood test, or insurance claim because you’re overcome with panic at the idea of being accused of healthcare fraud ten years down the line. Or, maybe you hold onto every receipt out of fear that you could be audited at any time.
OCD can make you feel like you can’t clear out digital devices
In today’s world, our phones and computers are snapshots of our lives. They contain not only the photos and videos we take, but our conversations with loved ones, evidence of our purchases, and records of what we read or watch and when. All of this information can feel essential to remembering who we are, and losing it can feel like losing a piece of ourselves. The documents and memories held on these devices can also feel essential to proving to ourselves and others that the past really did happen the way we remember it, which can feel crucial for those whose OCD makes them afraid that they may have committed a crime or grievously offended someone without remembering. But devices only have so much storage, and the compulsive need to hold onto every file can make them glitch (and, ultimately, end up losing precious data anyway if they stop working entirely). And even more importantly, it can make your own wellbeing lag and degrade, as it perpetuates the OCD cycle by reinforcing the idea that deleting anything off your devices really does pose a danger.
OCD can make it hard to move on from decisions you’ve made, or relationships that have ended
Because OCD loves to make you doubt yourself and your choices, holding onto physical and mental mementos as “evidence” can feel like a way of trying to protect yourself from regret and second-guessing. But the truth is that OCD will always be prepared to confront you with another reason to question your choices.You might break up with a partner, for example, and know that you made the right choice for you—but OCD still bombards you with intrusive doubts about the decision, the person you broke up with, and whether you made the right choice.
No amount of proof, whether it’s in the form of lovingly crafted scrapbooks, carefully filed invoices, or mental lists of things you have or haven’t done, can stop OCD from causing questions and doubts to arise. What does help? Learning to let these intrusive thoughts arise without engaging in the desire to review past memories, hold onto objects, or comb through digital devices in an effort to attain 100% certainty. In doing so, you can teach your brain that you’re stronger than OCD’s doubts—and help free up your mental and physical space for new memories and experiences.
How ERP can help
Exposure and response prevention (ERP) therapy, the most effective form of OCD treatment, teaches you how to do exactly this. ERP works by gradually building up your tolerance for facing fears without performing compulsions. If you have trouble letting go of sentimental objects, an ERP exercise might be as simple as throwing away a note your partner scribbled on the grocery list (and not returning to the trash can to retrieve it later), or giving away some of your adult child’s outgrown school clothes. If your OCD compulsions focus around holding onto and reviewing memories, your ERP therapist might teach you skills for focusing more on the present—including trying out spending an afternoon with loved ones without taking any photos, and then acknowledging the unease that follows without permitting it to control what you do next.
The goal of ERP is not to force you into irreversible or harmful losses, or cause unnecessary damage. At its core, ERP therapy isn’t about wiping your phone clean without a single back up, or throwing away your wedding dress, or donating the one item of your grandfather’s that you still have to remember him by. Rather, it’s about accepting uncertainty—which usually doesn’t involve going to extremes.
An ERP therapist will engage in thoughtful discussion to help you identify the kind of life you want to live. They’ll encourage you to ask yourself what level of clutter you’re truly okay with and how many hard drives or photo albums you actually have space for, and be sure to emphasize that the exercises they recommend are just recommendations. They can also guide you through exercises for living more mindfully, and ways to identify whether you’re slipping into rumination or mental review. By clarifying your values and understanding how they relate to the mental and physical mementos you’ve been holding onto, you can learn to let go of OCD-fueled anxiety and fear.
