Key takeaways
- OCD treats uncertainty as a threat and seeks the 4Cs: certainty, control, and comfort through compulsions.
- Many everyday life experiences involve uncertain outcomes that people willingly face because of hope of a positive outcome, such as dating, job interviews, or travel.
- Uncertainty does not mean something bad will happen; it simply means that the outcome is unknown.
- The bittersweet truth is that uncertainty can feel deeply uncomfortable while also being the foundation of hope, possibility, and meaningful experiences.
Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes
Uncertainty is OCD’s nemesis
OCD desperately wants the 4Cs: certainty, control, and comfort all supposedly obtained through doing just one more compulsion…even though OCD’s game is all one big mirage.
When you have untreated OCD, anything that is uncertain can become an OCD trigger, and your whole life can end up revolving around one or more obsessions: what if I don’t love my partner, what if I have cancer, what if we’re living in a simulation, what if I’m harming my children? Because all these “what if” questions seem so dangerous and fear-inducing, we forget that uncertainty also has a flip side.
The other side of uncertainty
For instance, perhaps lately you’ve gone on a date. Bought a lottery ticket. Had a job interview. Given a presentation. Booked a trip. You did one or more of these things because you thought there might be a good potential outcome: finding a partner, winning a million dollars, getting a new job, etc.
What’s the commonality among all these things? The outcomes are uncertain, and yet we have hope that they will be good.
Or, perhaps you’ve recently had a life-altering medical diagnosis. Learned your company will be laying people off. Watched the news and found out about yet another armed conflict. Started couples therapy because you and your partner aren’t getting along.
These events are like the ones above in that they’re uncertain, and this group seems to have more downside than upside. But what keeps us going as we face them is the same as it is with the uncertain events above: hope. Hope that we can beat the odds or keep our job, or that a truce will be reached or that our connection with our partner will be restored.
On the flip side of fear lies the bedrock of hope
From OCD’s skewed perspective, uncertainty is always bad because OCD mistakenly equates uncertainty with the probability that something bad will occur. OCD doesn’t realize that uncertainty simply means that we don’t know.
This is the bittersweet truth about uncertainty: viewed from OCD’s perspective, it engenders fear. Viewed from the opposite perspective, it’s the bedrock of hope and the foundation from which we approach so many situations—both positive and negative—in our daily lives.
With this expanded perspective, you can now see that you do jump into uncertainty on a daily basis, even when it causes anxiety, because you have hope. You can use this same hope—this time, for the chance to reclaim your life from OCD—to jump into the uncertainty with your exposure and response prevention therapy (ERP) for OCD.
Learn more about taming OCD
To learn more about how I used ERP to tame OCD and live in a world of uncertainty and be happy anyway, see Is Fred in the Refrigerator? Taming OCD and Reclaiming My Life. Click here to purchase your copy.
