Your Doubts, Normal Or Obsessive?
At one point or another in our lives, we all have doubts. Doubting can be a very valuable capacity of the human mind because it makes us reflect on what is happening to us in the present, on what happened in the past and on what will come in the future. This is so as long as these doubts are realistic, do not occupy too much time in our lives and do not pose a problem at the social, work, couple, etc. level.
Like everything, doubts can also become pathological and that is when we talk about obsessive doubts. Obsessive doubts are characterized by being ideas based on future possibility instead of focusing on the present, the here and now, which constitutes our true reality. When we speak of future possibility, we also speak of fiction since it has not yet happened, and therefore does not exist.
Obsessive doubts, as we have pointed out, are based on imagination, and as we know, imagination often has no limits. Thus, obsessive people can predict as many negative consequences derived from their obsessions as their imagination allows them.
Obsessive doubts and fruitless compulsions
People who suffer from obsessive doubts carry out certain acts, usually of a motor nature, although they can also be cognitive or mental, designed to neutralize that possibility of which their obsession speaks to them. For example, in obsessive compulsive pollution disorder, the patient may have an obsessive doubt as to whether or not he has become contaminated by touching a doorknob.
To get rid of the anxiety that doubt, which is very unpleasant, the person will carry out his compulsion, which in the short term will generate the security and tranquility he needs. The compulsion can be to wash your hands in a certain way, with a specific ritual for a certain time.
Although in the short term the compulsion may work, in the long term it becomes a powerful negative reinforcement. Thanks to that act, the anxiety has disappeared. In turn, the doubt is reinforced and the person trusts it even more, which makes the disorder persist over time. Thus, the decrease in anxiety supposes a reinforcement for compulsive behavior.
If we realize it, the person is acting in two different ways: reality and fiction. On the one hand, your doubts are based on the unreal, on your own imagination; on the other hand, your compulsions are being carried out in the present reality.
How to get rid of obsessive doubts?
The only possible way to get rid of obsessive doubts is to stop carrying out the compulsion that accompanies them, whether mental or motor. What consequences can this have? The first is that the patient must begin to accept and tolerate his emotion of anxiety, disgust, anger … which also, in the early stages of treatment, may increase.
Accepting negative emotions is extremely difficult since no one likes to feel bad. We all want to be well and calm for as long as possible, but we know that this cannot always be the case and that negative emotions exist and we will suffer them sooner or later.
The prevention of compulsions must always be done gradually, because we cannot pretend overnight to stop behaving as we have been doing for a long time. Both the thinking and the way of acting are automated, and become ingrained habits that are difficult to combat.
Another strategy to get those obsessive doubts out of our minds is to question them. To do this, we must first realize that they are based on our imagination and that they are not real and then, question them through Socratic questions that help us modify them by ideas based on reality, in the present and in the five senses.
If those doubts have never ended in a solution and you do not remain calm, your doubts are obsessive because you are acting on the real level when you think on a fictional level.
