When you look at secular resources, you find a non-causal explanation of the role of rogue anxiety in OCD, which raises as many questions as it answers.
“People with OCD have an overactive amygdala,” they say. ”Their fight-or-flight system is hyperactive. They slip into survival mode at the drop of a hat. The activities of normal life trigger extreme danger signals, sometimes for no reason at all.”
I can tell you from experience that this is all very true. It is even helpful to give it a name. But the elephant in the room remains: why?
Research has identified some risk factors for developing OCD, but no clear cause. Genetics appear to play a role. Environmental factors like trauma seem to trigger OCD in some cases. Even so, the mechanism by which these triggers act is hazy.
I’m no researcher, so I can’t claim that I’ve isolated the OCD gene or figured out the exact trigger mechanism. What I can offer is an insight that comes from Catholic teaching. This insight, first shared with me by my Catholic therapist, gave me an entirely new perspective on my OCD.
As I mentioned yesterday, Catholics believe that one of the effects of Original Sin is the disordering of our passions (emotions, feelings, etc.). The result is that our passions are not subordinate to our reason, which is supposed to be the faculty calling the shots in our life.
Passions aren’t bad. They were designed to help us. If we didn’t feel afraid when we were in danger, we probably wouldn’t react quickly enough. If we didn’t feel affection, we probably wouldn’t be as motivated to care for the people we love.
The problem is that when Adam and Eve disobeyed God, whom they were created to obey, this destruction of the order of creation affected their internal order as well. No longer could they trust their passions to be proportionate to the outside world and obedient to the judgments of their reason. Their reason might realize they were not in danger, but they could still feel afraid. They could feel affection for the wrong things, affection that would tempt them to act against their reason. Anyone who has allowed infatuation to lead them into an imprudent marriage can testify to the truth of this.
Here’s the part that surprised me: fear and anxiety are passions too. That means they are not subordinate to reason. That means that just because you feel so anxious you think you might explode, that does not necessarily mean you are in mortal peril.
What this means in practice is that, when my irrational obsessions trigger anxiety, it’s just…disordered anxiety. I don’t have to act on it. I shouldn’t act on it, because that would be irrational. It’s o.k. to feel anxious, and it doesn’t always mean the danger is real.
I know this sounds simple. Believe it or not, I thought I had a clear understanding of the Church’s teaching on disordered passions, long before I ever encountered therapy; but for some reason, I had never applied it to fear and anxiety. Maybe I didn’t think of them as passions. Maybe I never stopped to think about the mechanism at work in OCD cycles at all. I don’t know.
Regardless, my reaction to this revelation was something along the lines of, “Are you serious? You mean all these years I didn’t actually have to act on my compulsions?”
Needless to say, it was a strangely freeing realization.
Of course, learning not to act on my compulsions didn’t come naturally, and even to this day it can be difficult. This perspective shift was just a starting point. But…what a starting point! Suddenly, I had hope. Everything made sense again. The truth was beginning to set me free.
Catholic and OCD 