What Is The Relationship Between OCD And The Feeling Of Responsibility?
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is one of the psychological disorders linked to a strong feeling of anguish that has attracted the most attention in the media and popular culture.
Typically, the most widespread idea about this disorder is that it is a pathological extreme of perfectionism: an unhealthy tendency to want everything to be in the exact place it should be. However, this is a mistaken belief. OCD is not linked to perfectionism, but to a personality trait known as Conscientiousness
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder is a psychological disorder that appears in reference diagnostic manuals in the world of clinical psychology and psychiatry. It is characterized by the presence of repetitive and intrusive thoughts (that is, they arise involuntarily without the person thinking about a similar issue) that are associated with a great feeling of anguish.
This feeling of sudden and intense discomfort leads the person to perform repetitive routines to try to alleviate the anguish, “closing the mental circle” opened by the intrusive thought through a kind of ritual created by the person themselves.
OCD may seem trivial if we assume that it is just the consequence of an uncomfortable thought, but that is not the case; It can seriously harm the person, drastically altering their mood in the medium and long term and is associated with a greater tendency to attempt suicide (although, since the latter is a statistical phenomenon, it is not something that happens to all people with OCD).
An example of a person who has developed OCD is the following. A 25-year-old young man starts a new job, and believes he is qualified to perform it. However, on his first day in his position, the memory comes to mind of a situation in which, according to him, he made a fool of himself in front of his entire high school class for not knowing how to do an oral presentation well.
This image, together with the idea that possibly many people remember that event, makes the young man begin to feel a lot of anxiety and guilt, to the point of not being able to think about anything else in the following minutes. To “disconnect” from that sensation, he is forced to perform an action that he has learned to associate with the fading of anguish and guilt: scratching the face always following certain movement patterns in a certain order, and in 13 series, one after the other, representing the number of years he was when that happened to him.
The relationship between OCD and low responsibility
Explaining, in a nutshell, that OCD is linked to an excessive amount of perfectionism may be appropriate if we are explaining it without going into too much detail to someone who doesn’t know much about the topic. However, if we want to have a reasonably realistic idea about what developing this disorder entails, it is necessary to reject this supposed link between OCD and the tendency to seek perfection.
It is true that there is a characteristic, called conscientiousness, that is related to a mental disorder similar to OCD: Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder. This disorder is often confused with the previous one due to the obvious similarity of its name, but, in fact, it is very different.
In Obsessive-Complusive Personality Disorder, a tendency towards extreme perfectionism is observed Specifically, people who develop it obtain very high scores in the personality trait known as Responsibility, which indicates the propensity to take charge of ensuring that everything goes as it should, even if it requires effort. On the other hand, in people with OCD, just the opposite is observed: they score very low in Responsibility, which means that they are normally more disorganized and tend not to always meet small day-to-day objectives.
Thus, in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder it is not only the fact that the need to perform “rituals” is felt repetitively. It is also in what happens just before that need arises: the feeling that there are many aspects of life that have escaped your control and create chaos around you
Do you need help treating OCD?
Although Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder can cause serious problems, that does not mean that it can only be treated medically, through the use of psychotropic drugs. These medications can help alleviate symptoms when the worst attacks occur, but they do not “cure” the patient. To combat the disorder from the root, we must intervene on behavior, those behavioral patterns that keep OCD alive.
As a psychologist specialized in therapy for adults and adolescents and Director of the Begoña Fernández Psychology Center, I often work with cases of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, helping to undo the sequence of actions that feed the development of this mental alteration. If you are interested in seeing my contact information or learning more about what psychotherapy involves, click here.
