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Areas › Worry and anxiety › Obsessions and compulsions
None of this is about blame. A parent who checks the locks for their child, answers the same question fifteen times, or arranges the evening around a ritual is doing what love looks like from the inside. The accommodating is still part of what holds the pattern in place, so some of the work usually belongs to the household rather than to one person in it.
Obsessive thoughts and compulsions respond well to a specific kind of therapy. What is here is for understanding them, not for treating them by yourself.
whether they be jinn or people (Quran 114:6). Some of what whispers at a person has been picked up from those closest to them, which is worth knowing without holding it against anyone.
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A modelling study of families found that when relatives take part in a child's rituals or arrange life around them, that accommodation tracks with more severe symptoms and works against the goals of treatment. It is a snapshot rather than a trial, so the direction is not settled: more severe symptoms also draw more accommodation out of a family.
Caporino NE, Morgan J, Beckstead J, Phares V, Murphy TK, Storch EA. (2012). A structural equation analysis of family accommodation in pediatric obsessive-compulsive disorder.. Journal of abnormal child psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Every time someone else completes the ritual, the fear is told again that the ritual was needed.
What the thought is about matters far less than what happens next. Germs, illness, something too silly to say aloud: the machinery running underneath is the same in each case.
If you are stuck on whether having a thought makes you a bad person, that question is a symptom and not a case waiting to be settled. Name it as scrupulosity and let it stand unanswered.
Try not to talk the worry through in detail, even with someone kind. Going over the specifics feels like sorting it out, and it is closer to watering it.