The trains at my station

There’s a little metaphor I often use with my patients with OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) to illustrate the different ways they treat “ordinary thoughts” and OCD thoughts (obsessive thoughts), and the consequences of behaving that way. That difference in treatment stems from not accepting obsessive thoughts, because the person wrongly interprets them as threats. And when someone sees a threat, they either fight it or run away from it.

Imagine we’re in a train station, OK? Well, your mind is the station and your thoughts are the trains.

When a train you like, or simply don’t care about (a non-obsessive thought), arrives at the station, the train stops, some passengers get off, others get on… and when it’s time to go, the train leaves the station on time to reach its destination. All good.

However, when a train arrives that you consider has come to the wrong station (an obsessive thought), you want to get it out of there as soon as possible. Instead of leaving it alone, letting the passengers get on and off… and letting it leave on time… you force the engine because you want it to leave early; you don’t like having it in the station. It bothers you. You force the engine to make it leave ahead of schedule, and in the end all you achieve is breaking the engine. As a result, instead of the train staying a few minutes, it stays for days, getting in the way at the station.

People with OCD “force the engine” because of several mistaken beliefs about how our mind works and about what OCD’s obsessive thoughts mean. Some of the main mistakes about control and overestimating the importance of obsessive thoughts would be:

• I can completely control my thoughts. What goes through my head and what doesn’t is always my choice. Wrong.
• If I think it, it says something about me (often something that was supposedly hidden deep inside them and that OCD “reveals”). Wrong.
• The more I think about it, the more likely it is to happen. Wrong.
• If I think it, it must be important (and therefore something I need to pay attention to). Wrong.

I also often use another, somewhat extreme example (quite deliberately) to show the same thing in a different way. All roads lead to Rome.

Imagine that I, Sara Llorens, am on my way to the practice one ordinary morning. Today, in fact. And on my way here hundreds of thoughts have gone through my mind, including these two:

1. I need to buy tomatoes for dinner tonight.
2. What if I slit my grandfather’s throat?

Bearing in mind that tonight I’m having people over for dinner and I’ve promised to cook a special dish with tomatoes… and bearing in mind what you may know about me, about my personality…, and if I also tell you that I have the feelings most grandchildren have for their grandfather, that is, I love him and have no intention whatsoever of hurting him, tell me: if we had to choose one of the two, which thought is more important?

We know that one of them, the tomato one, will have consequences in reality if I don’t buy them in time for dinner. More or less important consequences, but consequences in the real world. The second one, knowing me, none at all. So?

A very typical answer is: “Well, put like that, the tomatoes, but the grandfather thought also has consequences in the real world, because it would make me really scared and stressed”. Careful: it makes me scared and stressed because I interpret it as a threat, and that’s where the emotions come from. Not the other way round. And the reason I give it unjustified importance is the four mistakes we mentioned above.

We need to work on correcting those mistakes about control and overestimating the importance of obsessive thoughts, so that we can see them for what they are, not for what we fear they are.

After all, trains are just trains.