In-house #13: Teens with OCD

I am challenged by two Obsessive-Compulsive teenagers who think all the time. All the time. This is the undercurrent, for most or all OCD sufferers, to any particular compulsive thought or act. Always thinking about something. The girl thinks above the lyrics of songs. I am about to learn if she must think even when listening to classical instrumental music. Shouldn’t it be enough just to feel this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhLunFajgwg.

Beneath the thinking and beneath the self-soothing and depressing felt-need-turned-ritual is fear and insecurity planted in earlier childhood. All people tend to have an active head. Some of those who have fear or a natural-born bad feeling will run away from that feeling into word-thought explanations. Feeling is to be stabbed, gutted and drowned. Know­ing and solving is to be on elevated dry land, a safe little desert island, like children leaping to or touching a safe place during tag.

One difference between teens and adults with OCD is that the kids, frustratingly enough, really endorse all the thinking. It feels right and necessary, and may be their self-esteem, and they are not sick and tired of it yet as one would have to be in his thirties or forties or fifties. And beyond that, imagine what it would be like for a teenager – troubled, unsolid – to evacuate her thinking. She would collapse back into the inchoate, shell-less egg of her pre-self, her clueless infant.

As I see it, there is hope in the child’s incompletion, her still being in formation. Try to smell some roses without thinking about them, simply breathe in their meaning. Lie back and let only the heart part of your mind know the music. Feel a friendship, hug a friend, only with the wordless emotion, not with anxiety or self-consciousness or worries about her loyalty. Let yourself be confused about the state of the world, not cleaving to the news stories and the immigrant cause or the prefab disdain for white privilege or carrying banners about reparations or climate change or bad Supreme Court decisions. And let the confusion be a feeling. A teen, you will be able to sink in many emotional states without drowning. This will give you back your life. It’s not too late for you.