Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is considered part of the anxiety disorder family. Many people are misinformed about this disorder and the way that it affects someone’s life. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is the result of intrusive, unwanted, obsessive thoughts that lead to a compulsive behavior in order to relieve the obsessive thinking. Cleanliness and organization, as well as repeated ritual behavior are the most common manifestations of OCD. What is commonly misunderstood is what kinds of thoughts fuel these behaviors. It is not the slight tilt of a picture frame that weighs heavily on the mind of someone with OCD to the point that they urgently have to fix it, then fix a number of other things in their immediate surrounding. The object or behavior of fixation in obsessive compulsive disorder is less about the object or behavior itself and about what they mean.
Beneath the surface of a compulsion to wash one’s hands is a deep need for cleanliness. When considering the root of psychological behaviors one has to ask, “What happened to cause this?” What happens to someone to cause them to need to be compulsively clean in order to feel safe and orderly in their own mind? The answer is draws on the same thematic. Something happened to them that made their life feel unclean
As a result, their mind is full of disordered thinking which is convincing that unless repeated cleaning behaviors take place, a number of things could happen as a consequence. Lack of control might lead to life becoming “dirty” again.
However, the compulsions that develop as a result of OCD are not the same for everyone nor are the obsessive thoughts which inspire the compulsive behaviors. Critical to realize is that the obsessive thoughts and the behaviors might not always be rationally connected. For example, one might have repeated intrusive thoughts about losing their mother and become convinced that arranging and rearranging all of the dishes in the kitchen might prevent her from dying in a car accident on her way home from work. A certain traumatic event in life might have separated an individual from their mother and created this paranoid attachment to the relationship.