PAY ATTENTION

Hello:

Rather than pointing to a genetically determined mental problem in itself, --- OCD can indicate that one is not using one's mind as efficiently as one should.  Obviously, order is always preferable to chaos.  

For the OCD sufferer, it is the inability to maintain one's attention on the present that causes the problem.   As an example, one of the symptoms of OCD is the need to repeatedly check something such as locking a door.

While it is said that a genetic flaw or a chemical imbalance is responsible for such behavior, I beg to differ.  I say that it is caused by poor mental habits.  Some achievements seem to be so simple that only a small portion of one's attention is required to successfully complete the task.

The OCD sufferer must learn to pay more attention to the locking of the door and not unduly allow his or her attention to wander in other directions. 

The fact that you must check again to see if the door is locked indicates that you did not pay enough attention to this simple achievement in the first place.   

Simply put then, --- we are dealing with a behavioral problem.  The individual who is suffering from OCD must pay more attention to what he or she is actually doing; rather than "day dreaming" about other things.  

FREUDIAN FABLES

Hello Everyone: 

In the final chapter of David Adam's book called, --- "The man who could not stop"; a very strange sentence appears.  It must be a result of David's meetings with a psychiatrist who favored Freudian principles.  

On Page 279 David is listing the possible reasons for his OCD behavior.   The last two lines contain the following words:  “The psychological conflict that I suffered and buried when I was cruelly separated from my faeces [feces] when I was potty trained.”

The above words represent the most flagrant non-valuable information that I have ever encountered from a psychiatrist in his attempt to help his patient.  To David Adam’s credit, earlier in the book he does write about the dismissal of most of Freud’s ideas in modern psychiatry.

The above two lines of offending advice seems to have survived in David’s mind in spite of his previous warnings.  David could not have come up with these words on his own, only a Freudian style psychiatrist would use them.

Indeed, if separating an individual from his or her stools when one is potty trained constitutes the beginning of psychological conflict and suffering then, --- 99.9999% of us have such problems.

I suppose if the patient states that he was chastised or physically abused when he or she made a mistake in the "potty training" period, then the Freudian-leaning psychiatrist would state that this was the reason for his or her unresolved psychological problems and hang-ups.  In other words, the Psychiatrist can not be wrong.

Actually, this conclusion on the part of the psychiatrist is more in keeping with his or her desire to make as much money from their patient as they possibly can, --- rather than help the patient personally.

The real cruelty would occur if the individual in question was never trained to control his or her solid waste removal.   It appears altogether likely that Freud himself had problems with potty-training and decided that this was an important aspect of the maturing process.  It certainly is important but it does not mean that this one achievement can become the tipping point towards normal or abnormal behavior.

Freud used this type of reasoning in far too many instances and it usually took him into a dead end.  Unfortunately some of those dead ends were suicides by his patients that were not being helped but rather hindered by Freud’s disjointed meanderings.

As I state rather forcefully in my book called, --- The Human Mind, --- life is nothing more or less than an unending series of achievements each one of which has the potential to activate the emotion of fear. 

If one’s failed attempts at success in too many of those achievements leads to a conglomeration of distorted fears, then indeed ones behavior is affected adversely and someone, usually a psychiatrist, might label you with one of an expanding list of problems that indicate that you are mentally ill.  This nonsense has got to stop, --- yesterday if possible.       

LOOKING AT OCD FROM A DIFFERENT ANGLE

Hello:

I have just finished reading David Adam's book called, ---   The man who could not stop.   He gave an account of his own problems with OCD.   

It became obvious that fear was the root cause of this problem but the --- "almost impenetrable maze of defense mechanisms" --- makes the solution to these problems seem like more than I can handle at this time.  

However, one thing seems perfectly clear.  Those who suffer from this problem are not facing reality.  They want a guarantee that their continued existence will be totally and completely safe.   There is no such guarantee for any of us.   Overcoming this delusion seems to be an important step on the way to recovery. 

That sounds more sensible than the mumbo-jumbo that you will get from many of the methods that are currently in vogue for this problem by the psychological community at large.