How to Tell Others You Have OCD: The Power of Social Support
Part 1 of a 6-Part Article Series on Revealing Your Diagnosis
If you have OCD, maybe you’re avoiding telling others about your diagnosis out of a fear of being shamed, judged, or misunderstood. If you have already told others about your diagnosis, perhaps you hesitated a long time before doing so and when you did finally open up, you didn’t divulge the full picture of your experience with OCD. Maybe it’s even difficult communicating within yourself about your own OCD diagnosis because accepting the reality of the disorder can be uncomfortable and confusing.
Whatever your experience has been, I hope I can provide helpful ideas about how to navigate the often difficult conversation of revealing your OCD diagnosis to someone else. In this 6-part article series I will explore different interpersonal challenges and communication strategies that relate to sharing one’s OCD diagnosis with others.
Getting clear on your whys
First it’s important to understand why you want to talk about your OCD diagnosis and whom you want to talk to about it. The “why” often relates to the “whom”. Here are some common examples:
If you’re wanting to tell a family member, partner, or close friend, you may be seeking much-needed emotional support.
If you’re wanting to tell someone you’re dating, you may be trying to see if they have the ability to accept and understand you, as such knowledge will indicate if they are a good fit for you or not.
If you’re wanting to tell a healthcare provider, you may be seeking guidance and treatment.
The importance of social support
Social support is a foundational factor of healing for any disease, injury, or disorder. For example, if you have diabetes, you’ll need support from others close to you for the planning and preparation of meals so you can regulate your blood sugar. If your leg is broken, you’ll need to rest while others assist with completing practical tasks for you, like grocery shopping, driving to and from appointments, and bathing. While the social support needed for people with OCD may be subtler than the examples I just provided, it’s just as important for recovery as it is for healthfully living with diabetes or healing from a broken leg.
Instead of needing support regulating blood sugar (as with the previous diabetes example), a person with OCD may need help regulating their anxiety. Or instead of needing to be driven around (as with the previous broken leg example), a person with OCD may need patience while they complete tasks that trigger an obsessive theme. Outside of the practical day-to-day assistance someone might need when dealing with a given condition, the power of being compassionately understood and validated cannot be overstated. In other words, emotional support is just as valuable as practical support and both are necessary for healing.
It’s important to note OCD is included in the World Health Organization’s list of top-ten most disabling conditions, which includes orthopedic, physiological, and psychiatric conditions [1]. Unfortunately, it’s often quite hard to notice how disabling OCD can be due to the poor societal understanding of the disorder, the invisible nature of neurobiological dysfunction, and the fact OCD symptoms can be hidden relatively well compared to the symptoms of other top-ten disabling conditions like low back pain, cancer, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Balancing social support with personal responsibility
As is the case with any disabling condition, recovery is a combination of personal responsibility and social support. Depending on the situation, achieving balance in recovery sometimes requires a proportionally greater amount of personal responsibility, and at other times requires a proportionally greater amount of social support; it’s a fluid process that changes over time based on the needs of the individual. While progress is not linear, true recovery involves an overall trend toward personal responsibility over time.
What’s to come
In this introductory article, I’ve laid the framework around the necessity of social support for OCD recovery. But how does one with OCD obtain that social support? The first step is talking to others about your disorder. Over the next 5 weeks I’ll post a weekly article where I’ll get into the specifics of how to reveal your OCD diagnosis so you can connect with others in a way that is healing for you.
Below is a retroactive inclusion of all parts of this article series
References
World Health Organization. (1999). The “newly defined” burden of mental problems. Fact Sheets, 217.