Resist, and persist: Tackling OCD through Shadow mechanisms
Widely used as a synonym for neat and tidy, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is a popular identification in public consciousness. Like all behavioural patterns, it’s also a spectrum: from perfectionism to diagnosis (OCD) to Cluster C personality disorder (OCPD). But there are clear distinctions along this path. Notably, with OCD, there’s an awareness in sufferers of how much their symptoms impose on and restrict their experience compared with OCPD.
For patients with OCD, the sense of the mind being besieged by itself is a genuine reality. In many cases, both obsessive thoughts and outward compulsions are at work. The latter are rituals to relieve the pressure of the former: there’s a belief that something bad will happen and that carrying out the compulsion will prevent it. But that’s nowhere near the full picture. Compulsions can be performed for their own sake, without a sanctioning belief. Some sufferers don’t display any compulsions at all (patients with ‘Pure O’, or Obsessional). But such folk almost always experience mental compulsions to engage with the obsessions in the first place.
To make things more complex, resistance is futile. The Thought-Action Fusion phenomenon, or TAF, is the equation of thoughts and actions as one: thought leads to action as an absolute certainty. OCD patients are known to experience an increase in this pattern. But distinguished research by Eric Rassin suggests that those who take more responsibility for their thoughts actually increase their intrusions:
“There is experimental evidence to suggest that an inflated sense of responsibility may contribute to obsessive behaviour. In a series of studies, Ladouceur et al. (1995) manipulated perceived responsibility and then examined its effects on checking. Results showed that inflated responsibility, indeed, leads to an increased frequency of checking behaviour.”
In effect, patients who assume responsibility for their thoughts, i.e., believe it’s within their power to control or stop them, actually end up doing the opposite of what their attempts at control are trying to do. Jung’s concept of the shadow works in a very similar way. Repressed, unintegrated parts of the self, which the individual wishes to relegate to the back of the room, become autonomous. These aspects will find a way to get a person’s attention, whether they like it or not. As the psyche is compensatory, the more one resists something and prevents it from unifying, the more that thing fights against separation to achieve wholeness.
In this sense, the ultimate weapon against intrusive thoughts is the realisation that they’re not under the patient’s control. In his exceptional 1995 work ‘Private Myths: Dreams and Dreaming’, Jungian analyst Anthony Stevens guides us to opening the door:
“[In] learning to live on good terms with ‘the enemy within’, what happens to the ego’s relationship with the shadow is a transformation from the agonic to the hedonic mode: instead of controlling (repressing) it or running away from it (denial), the ego initiates dialogue with the shadow and, by confronting it and making efforts to befriend it, enters into a hedonic bond with it.”
By fully accepting and not demonising them, sufferers of OCD can undercut the power of obsessive thoughts significantly. In believing that it’s the author of those thoughts, the mind gives them more faculty than they actually have. It then works harder to justify this allocation of resources to prove that it was right all along. Over time, disidentification from thoughts results in patients being able to welcome intrusions while feeling on a deep psychic level that they’re tired of their contents. When this happens, the energy spent on engaging with the thoughts and trying to control them gradually diverts and becomes, as Stevens concludes, “available to the total personality”.
