The Many Types of OCD Explained Simply

Types of OCD Explained

I am John Glanvill, author of The Calmness in Mind Process for anxiety and OCD recovery treatment.

In this video, we will be talking about how OCD develops out of anxiety, after long periods of stress, illness or trauma.

First a quick summary… In the last video, we talked about how our childlike, animal, subconscious may use anxiety to sabotage us when our emotional battery is flat by us scaring us into retreating from life and staying at home.

It doesn’t care about your job or your relationships etc. All it cares about is you being alive and biologically being calm and recharged.

We talked about the strategies available to your subconscious to scare you, fell into 5 categories which included: Generalised anxiety, Travel Anxiety, Social Anxiety, Sabotage Anxiety, through- work, relationships or self-sabotage – and finally, health anxiety.

Well, (for the majority of people,) OCD is what happens when anxiety hasn’t been enough to scare you enough to realise that you are exhausted – so your subconscious mind brings in the big guns to try and get your full attention…..

So it needs to ramp up your anxiety to stop you from even leaving the house – or when you do, it scares you with thoughts or compulsions that force you to quickly return.

The options available to your subconscious to stop you leaving the house and to get you to return quickly, fall into 3 distinct categories – which can be described as follows:

Firstly, things you have to do, touch, check, unplug, clean, align, make symmetrical, wash hands, line things up etc.

Secondly, things you may have to think, say, count, sing, pray, swallow, breathe – and then, you may need to take some sort of physical action too – and, for some, if you don’t do it right, the fear that something bad may happen to you or a loved one.

And the final group is intrusive and unrequested thoughts that arise within your mind that can be very scary, – thoughts about harming others, thoughts of a sexual nature, paranoid thoughts about being spied on or controlled and fearful thoughts about people you love – and very often you will need constant reassurance from people you trust.

As we proceed through this video I will go into lots more detail about these elements of OCD.

So, I am going to do my best to explain how “I” think OCD works based on my own recovery (so I know it is possible) and from working for 12 years with many many people who have made big changes in their emotional well-being.

To set the tone for where we are going I would like to define a few boundaries;

I believe the following statements (although metaphoric) are still realistic – please don’t take offence to any of them, just keep an open mind.

Boundary 1: OCD sits on top of anxiety; so, by only focussing on your OCD thoughts or compulsions you are attending to the symptoms, not the actual problems, yes the compulsions cause problems, but they are the symptoms.

Boundary 2 – To think you will ever be completely free of any unrequested thoughts or compulsions from your mind is probably unrealistic.

However, to not have it be an issue in your life is very achievable.

Boundary 3 – OCD used to be called the “Doubting Disease” because the person begins to doubt everything, they need constant reassurance, more data, proof of this and that, they doubt everything – and the part of the brain that “trusts” gets very conditioned to “not trust” – so it is very hard to get the “feeling” that something is safe, so the bodies urge to check and recheck is very strong.

Therefore, begining to doubt “doubt,” – learning to trust more and testing to see if things are really true is very important – which, of course, is the basis of exposure

therapy and I will be teaching you how to do this effectively once we get to the change phase of this course.

Boundary 4 – A person with OCD is usually trying to control outcomes – and as we go through this course it will become very clear, there is very little you can directly consciously control – except, perhaps, your attitude, your attention and your perspectives.

What other people do, say, think, behave is very much out of your control – so we are going to learn to be more accepting, less controlling and more allowing ourselves to be calmly vulnerable and accepting that very often we won’t know what to do for the best – and that is OK! Who said we should know? It’s ok to not know!

Boundary 5 – OCD nearly always makes you more reclusive, your home slowly becomes a prison, and then more and more, you become dependant on others to support, reassure and look after you.

Boundary 6 – Become aware of something called “secondary gain.” These are the “benefits” people get from NOT overcoming their problem. For example; perhaps if you recovered from OCD you may no longer be able to receive housing benefits – Or your recovery may mean you now can work but you don’t have any work experience or a trade?

Or perhaps, if you recover, you know that you will have to end an abusive relationship and that may scare you?

Often when secondary gain is active, we can’t consciously see it, or we are in denial that our own subconscious mind can even do this to us.

If I stay on the subject of secondary gain – another thing to consider is – are your carers helping you to get better, or unknowingly keeping you stuck?

Do “they” have a secondary gain (for themselves) from keeping you stuck?

Such as a mother looking after a child in their thirties who has OCD and if the child got better, they would leave home, and the Mother would have to face up to the fact that her marriage is over and she only ever stayed together for the sake of her child.

In later videos I will be exploring ways that carers and partners can support people with anxiety or depression.

My metaphors point to what is happening to you, rather than saying “this is the truth about OCD” or “that is a fact about OCD” – even Doctors at the cutting edge of research into OCD don’t truly know what it is.

So, until the medical world can definitively tell you what OCD is – and what you can do about it – my question is “how can you try everything and anything to help yourself?” – and that is what these videos are about.

A great question to ask yourself is “did I develop OCD – or was I born with it?”

Well, It is very uncommon for a child under 6 to have OCD unless they go through some sort of emotional trauma or unless their parents have it – therefore they copied it or had it fearfully trained into them by their environment – perhaps, parents saying “careful with that” – “Did you wash your hands properly” – “did you make sure you it put away properly” – can see what I mean?

As I will keep on saying I don’t classify OCD as a disease – it is a “condition” you can’t catch it – you develop it – and by changing the way you think and behave you can undo your learned conditioning. It’s not easy, but it is possible to make significant improvements.

This course will, overtime, tell you what to do – but you have to put the work in, repetition, repetition, repetition – reconditions your unconscious responses.

In videos 8 and 9 I will be showing you how to interrupt OCD and calm yourself down, I will also be showing you how to reprogram certain parts of your brain like the amygdala which is what your brain uses to decide what is safe and what is not – and, of course, in people with OCD the amygdala has become conditioned to see danger in events or thoughts that the majority of people’s amygdala see’s as safe.

Now, even if you (think) you don’t have OCD, I would still really recommend you pay attention and watch this video; Firstly, because you might actually have it, yet it is masquerading under your radar, like an obsessive need to be right, or in control or be perfect and you are just saying “well, it’s just the way I am…”

Or maybe you don’t have to check that the door is locked, but can’t stop thinking about things – perhaps we could call this obsessive OCD thinking?

And secondly, by understanding how it works, you can understand and support others who do have OCD – which is far more common than you can possibly imagine.

I think we all have it some level – from a person who is obsessive about winning, or being right, or helping others, or filing papers away, or being a perfectionist.

Anybody who is very good at what they do, a sportsman, a CEO, a PA they are good because they focus, they like a process, they know what they want – they feel more comfortable if things are the way they like them to be.

A quick word here about focus and attention – most people with OCD tell me that they can’t focus well or struggle to keep their attention on what they need to do.

However, the reality is that their focus and their attention is super powerful, it’s just that they are using it in the wrong way. The degree of focus it takes to remain in OCD or to run continuous OCD loops is amazing – they are brilliant at focus – just on the wrong things, imagine how productive a person would be if they put the same amount of effort into their recovery rather than on their existing OCD compulsions!!!

Plus we can see it in other “hidden” ways too – obsessive about not being told what to do, not following rules, obsessive about weight, fitness, clothes, makeup, hair, not looking silly, suntans or obsessive belief systems; like being vegan, religiosity or charity working.

I am not saying any of these things are good or bad, just, where is the line between “wanting” to do something and “having” to do something – because once you have to do it, you no longer have choice – and I feel that calmness comes from having choice and being able to accept things being out of your control and having the confidence to do what is right for you in any moment, regardless of the outcome.

Now, a little disclaimer here; there seem to be some very major brain disorders that may trigger the symptoms of anxiety & OCD, things like schizophrenia, brain damage, Alzheimer’s, Dementia, autism, Parkinson’s and PTSD – this video is not targeting these conditions.

I am addressing relatively normal individuals who are caught up in OCD and are typically saying to themselves “This is ridiculous, why am I thinking and behaving in these ways?”

However, a person with the aforementioned conditions may be able to find strategies from within my work that may help them to find more calmness.

The typical medical description for OCD is: OCD is a common, chronic and long- lasting disorder in which a person has uncontrollable reoccurring thoughts (obsessions) and behaviours (compulsions) that he or she feels the urge to repeat over and over.

Now, as usual, I am going to be a little contentious and speak from my experience – many people who have OCD see the condition as something that has happened to

them, some problem within their mind and body that has made them broken and there is little they can do about it – and they often get agitated if I suggest that the condition is mainly self-perpetuating and can be managed.

Keep an open mind, try the things I say, then once you have tried them you can knowingly say if they work or not – don’t let your OCD thoughts make decisions for you – with thoughts like “well, that will never work!”

How would it know? Why would you believe those thoughts without trying things for yourself, start doubting your thoughts, start testing everything!

So, to me, OCD is the sixth class of anxiety that is used by your little 8-year-old once the first five; Generalised anxiety, Travel anxiety, Social anxiety, Sabotage anxiety and Health anxiety have all been exhausted.

If you are still ploughing on with your life, still thinking too much, worrying too much – your little 8-year-old needs to get super tough and super sneaky with more scary ways to sabotage you from leaving your house.

Plus, if you do manage to leave the house – she wants to violently scare you to get you back home as quickly as possible – Remember you biology does not care about your job, you relationships or your car – its cares about you being alive and emotionally functional.

So, my own definition of OCD is: “Any thought, urge, compulsion, phobia or habit that tries to stop you from leaving your home, or, when out of your home, tries to

make you so anxious, so you want to return quickly to the “perceived safety” of your home, then makes you doubt everything (including yourself) so you retreat from life – where your biology hopes you will sit silently, recalibrate and recharge.

Really think about this, not from your OCD mind-set but from the perspective of your unconscious mind and your exhausted chemistry and biology that we have discussed so much.

That’s why if you do manage to get some rest or the bad events in your life lessen (or if people around you pamper to your needs and don’t stress you out) your OCD backs off a little.

So, as ever, let’s look at the patterns, but know this, OCD will morph around from one thing to another and it is very clever and very sneaky – only bright people get OCD and the more intelligent they are the more complex the knots their unconscious mind can tie them up with, to urge them to retreat from life.

Just like anxiety, OCD always works in the same patterns, which mainly fall into 4 categories;

The first category is just your normal anxiety problem – escalated to new levels of intensity – so take any of the 5 previously explained types of anxiety and spend all day worrying about it.

So, mild hypochondria becomes an absolute fear of death and dying.

Sabotaging your travel by making you afraid to drive – becomes an obsession that if you drove your car you may drive into a person on purpose and kill them.

Sabotage by insomnia – may become a fear that if you fall asleep you will flat-line and die.

A fear of germs may become a full blown fear of vomiting which can make you fearful of alcohol, children or restaurants.

Can you see how these things can intensify from one thing to another and really scare you? So you stay at home.

Patterns, patterns, patterns.

Once you can see these patterns you can stop asking, “Why do I have this?” and focus on the real solution.

“How can I find more silence in my mind, recharge my biological battery, recondition the fear response in my brain, recalibrate my central nervous system and retrain the receptors on my cells for more calmness and less for fear – so my subconscious will then stop sabotaging me!”

Now, the second category of OCD are compulsive things you have to physically do;

Washing your hands Cleaning the house

Lining things up
Touching things a certain number of times Avoiding odd or even numbers
Avoiding germs or contamination
Checking doors and windows
Checking electrical appliances are unplugged Compulsive exercising
Compulsive food regimes
Changing from work clothes to home clothes Breathing in certain ways

I could go on all day about these things (and it doesn’t matter which ones you have) all these compulsions, no matter what, are just an unconscious trick to get your attention and pull you away from life.

However, your conscious mind is looking for answers “Why do I have to do this? What will happen if I don’t?”

These compulsions are just what your subconscious mind decided to focus on. Plus you already know that once you can manage to overcome one compulsion it just morphs to another – which further proves my statement, no compulsion has any meaning, it is just a way to make you disengage with life.

Category 3 – are things you have to think, say, pray, count, sing – all in a certain way – if you get it wrong you may need to start again and again until a certain number of repetitions or a time limit is met.

Many children have this type of compulsion and it can often take them 2 to 3 hours to get to sleep because they need to run through certain procedures in their mind in a perfect way.

For some, perfecting the mental routine is enough to calm themselves down, for others, they then need to actually do something physically too, such as turning all the lights on and off, checking the doors or arranging things into certain orders.

For some people, these thinking procedures can become very scary, especially if they add in the belief that if they don’t do it, or if they get it wrong, something bad will happen to themselves or a loved one or that there may be negative religious connotations.

We often see this pattern formed after a family member has been ill or passes away and there is a feeling of guilt or blame that they could have prevented it in some way. Of course, these are only stories, but they are enough to scare you into doing the procedures “just in case!”

Know this, the world will not end if you don’t do these things, all that will happen is that you will feel anxious, this is why, as we move forward in the course I will be teaching you how to interrupt the anxiety, calm yourself down, reprogram your mind and let go of the stories you are addicted to.

The final category (and of course you may have differing compulsions from each group) are intrusive thoughts; these are often nasty and very scary. These are

unrequested thoughts, desires or urges that may shock or frighten you – you know you probably wouldn’t act on them, but worry that you might!

Doubt becomes prevalent and once again this stops you going out and traps you at home and badgering others for reassurance or validation.

Consciously you are thinking “what’s wrong with me, why am I having these thoughts?” Yet, subconsciously you are thinking “Excellent this will scare him and make him stay at home where he can recharge.”

You do stay at home but instead of silently recharging you are further driving yourself mad and exhausting yourself with more worrying, guilt, ocd thoughts or beating yourself up for missing out on life.

Let me give you some examples of intrusive thoughts that are commonly experienced:

The thought you might stab your family to death whilst they sleep at night. A mother may fear she will drown or throw her baby down the stairs.
A thought that you may sexually abuse a child – or even your own child.
A fear you may poison some people if you made coffee for them.

A fear that you may be gay and in the wrong relationship.

Thoughts of an inappropriate sexual nature about yourself or others.

A fear you are being watched, observed, tracked or will have your identity fraudulently misused.

A fear people can read your thoughts.
A fear you are being controlled by the Devil or demons.

A fear you may set fire to a house – or if you read about an arson attack in the newspaper, wonder if it was you and need to find proof it wasn’t you.

Once again, there is no limit to the stories that your mind can use to trap you – these are just some of the more common ones. They are not true! They are OCD, which tries to catch your attention and keep you stuck.

They feel so real though! But they are not true, it’s a trap, a trick of ocd.

I will be teaching you how to change these thoughts as we move on through the course, remember, we are still in the understanding phase of this course.

As we stay with patterns, what are the common patterns of behaviour that people with OCD use to cover up all their anxiety and behavioral ticks?

These fall into one of the following lifestyle categories:

Firstly we have “The stay at home prisoner”

For some individuals who have experienced ocd issues around germs, infection, blood and cleanliness – the idea of working in shared offices, or visiting shopping centres or other public areas can be fearful and distressing, therefore, it becomes easier to stay at home in a sanitised environment.

Then we have the Technical loner

This group learn how to manage their ruminations and compulsions by losing themselves in distracting thought processes or complex mental tasks like science based activities and technical careers where they can often work alone or in small groups. They often attract partners who are also technical or happy to live in a more enclosed and structured living environment.

One of my favourite groups are the – The self employed controllers

For some, it is so much easier to manage their OCD compulsions by working for themselves, and I have always been amazed at how many business owners have varying degrees of compulsive behaviours and scary intrusive thoughts.

Not only do they work for themselves, they usually only have one or two employees or they employ family members to assist them, this way, they can still earn a living

and can more easily cover up their compulsions or do them in the privacy of their own office. And If their office is in their home – all the better.

We then have the ‘get on with it anyway‘ pragmatist

This is by far the biggest group, and in some ways they have the hardest time, as they are always trying to face their fears and “just get on with it.” In other ways they are the most free of the groups as they can “kind of “ function despite the OCD.

This group will find that their compulsions and ruminations will increase with stress and disruption, therefore holidays, Christmas, job interviews, dating, travel and surprise events are times of great anxiety and can be mentally exhausting.

The last group I am going to call – The High Functioning Pedantics.
This group, just know how they want things to be, they are quite methodical, fussy, rigid, pedantic and controlling of people and wanting specific outcomes. Others would call them OCD, but they would just say “I just know how I like things to be.”

This group can benefit greatly from considering that some of their behaviours are obsessive and that they may be really annoying others through their need for outcomes to be a certain way.

I hope that you can begin to see yourself in the patterns that I am detailing here – this is the beginning of your recovery, to see that actually OCD is very similar the whole world over and there are many things you can do to interrupt it.

You can see here a chart I made that shows most of the ocd conditions – as before I will also make this available as a free download.

Now, for many people with ocd – they need constant reassurance from loved ones or people in authority like doctors – be careful of this trap, many carers unknowingly perpetuate a problem by pandering to their fears.

The best way I could try and explain this – is by using the metaphor of training a puppy – if family ‘A’ collected a puppy from the rescue centre – and the staff said “careful with this dog because it was abused, if you raise your hand, the poor little dog will shake with fear, as its previous owner used to smack him.

So, family ‘A’ say to each other “don’t raise your hand because it will scare him, they avoid raising their hands and try to love the dog by not scaring it.

Family ‘B’ on the other hand take the puppy home and say, we need to retrain the poor little hound, lets raise our hand, but then give the dog a treat, they then repeat it again, raise their hand and give the dog a treat – within 10 minutes the dogs brain has been reprogrammed and they don’t have to avoid anything anymore.

You must stop avoiding things you don’t like, and start retraining yourself to be ok with feeling uncomfortable, out of control or to have unrequested thoughts in your mind.

Once again, I will be teaching you how to do this – but know this….. avoiding your fears will not lead you out of ocd, it will just trap you further!

In the next video, where we explore depression, I will be going into lots of detail about our cells, our chemistry and our biology, because if you currently feel anxious or depressed (which is a function of your chemistry), then unless these aspects of you change – then you will always feel this way.

So, do you have a defective brain? – Or has ocd developed overtime, through your troubled thinking and exhausted biology – which has conditioned your brain and biology?

Well, I believe that for 90% of people with OCD it is the latter, therefore, you are not stuck with it, it’s not genetic, it’s behavioural – so, by embracing new behaviours we can begin to rewire ourselves.

Plus, even if you think you naturally have chemical or structural brain imbalances, then surely you should be open to trying anything new to plug these gaps, rather than just saying “well there’s nothing I can do because anxiety runs in my family!”

No, the behaviour of anxiety runs in your family and those behaviours have defined your brain operation and your resultant chemical composition and belief systems to avoid feeling anxious.

So, if OCD is not a disease, it is a conditioning of the mind and body, then to escape it you need to become a person who thinks and acts differently, so anxiety can’t survive within you – and this is what I will be teaching you.

Then, ask yourself, if my OCD was gone do I have the right skills, knowledge or resources to get a job, to be in a relationship, to communicate more effectively, to travel – do I have self-worth, self-esteem or self-confidence?

Once again, this course will be teaching you what to do – to gain or refine all these emotional skills.

So, as we come to the end of this video, let’s summarise; remember we are still in the phase of understanding what these conditions are and how they effect us, once we have this understanding we will be moving on to the “here’s what you do about it’ phase.

The reason I summarise like this after already telling you, is because this work is all about repetition to reprogram your subconscious mind, repetition, repetition, and more repetition – if you are not getting this by now you really need to go back to video 1 and rewatch until the penny drops and you can absolutely see this is true!

So, the headlines I want you to take away with you are:

OCD sits on top of anxiety – stop focusing on your symptoms and start exploring the causes, which are; thinking too much, emotional energy battery being flat, a conditioned brain to fear responses and low self-esteem.

Your OCD thoughts do not mean anything, they are just what your subconscious is using to try and trap you at home. What is important is what you do with your conscious thoughts to stay out of OCD.

Don’t try and stop your OCD thoughts, don’t try and answer your OCD questions, just ignore them or talk over the top of them consciously – I will be teaching you how to do this in just a few videos time.

When you are anxious sag or relax your body, don’t move in tense jumpy ways – try to trick your unconscious into thinking that because your outer body is calm, nothing scary is happening outside of you.

Consciously talk softly, slowly, gently, soothe yourself, soothe your unconscious nervous system, trick your parasympathetic nervous system into action to calm you down.

I know these are baby steps, but you have to start somewhere,
I will be showing you how to stop anxiety in its tracks in later videos.

And finally, your homework!

Go back to video number 1 and start watching these 6 videos again! Don’t listen to what your conscious mind says or thinks it knows, we are slowly reprogramming your unconscious mind.

Use these videos as your way to get a 25 minute meditation, a 25 minute battery recharge – plus, you are learning to keep your focus in one place.

One more behaviour I want you to consider is this; stop watching violent films, horror movies, psychological dramas, conflict ridden soap operas – stop playing computer games that are exciting or violent, stop arguing with others.

Remember your body can’t tell the difference between a dream or a film or a memory – what you see, think or experience your body thinks is real!

We want your body to be resting, your battery recharging. Begin to take sleep more seriously, go to bed earlier, don’t watch tv or use computers in bed.

Begin to think about healthier foods, more exercise and a more loving internal dialogue for your body, your pet!

In the next video, I am going to discuss depression, our chemistry, our biology and the amazing ways available for us to change our internal feelings.