.png)
Reading through comments on a social media post can be a mixed bag, let’s face it. But there is something endlessly fascinating for me to read about how people think, especially their unfiltered, anonymous thoughts as they interact with my posts. It feels like a strange dance that we are both doing together, our psyches interwoven and connected by an idea I uttered into time-space... Anyways, all that to say that sometimes I’ll read a comment, and it’ll marinate in my mind to the point that it changes my entire perspective on something.
This happened when I got a comment to this effect: Autistic minds are good at identifying possibility but not probability. At first, I was like “huh?” But then I sat with that thought for days, weeks, months. And it just made so much sense for me. As an autistic person with OCD traits, I have been drowning in all the endless possibilities (all horrific, btw) since I was a kid. I would look at a tree branch and boom! Insert the thought “what if it falls on my head?” cue maladaptive daydreaming for the next couple hours.
After experiencing decades of this, I never had such a simple explanation as what that commenter offered me. Yes, my brain almost always gets stuck on the possibilities but doesn’t take into account probability. In fact, isn’t that the main issue with OCD after all? Our brains are looping over and over again on various possibilities which are technically true but realistically improbable? This doesn’t explain every OCD experience I’ve had but the vast majority of them.
Even though I love somatic work, I would not consider myself a somatic therapist. My brain loves the intellectual, the cognitive, the rich tapestry of thought and ideas. And that is where a lot of my healing generates from. Changing the way I see things through intellectual understanding has been extremely helpful to me. So, when my perspective changed based on this comment, I noticed improvement in my OCD process. Do I not meet criteria for OCD anymore? Well, I probably still do but the way my brain makes sense of OCD has improved based on this way of thinking and so I thought I would share about it.
Comments