These higher-than-average levels of fear are entirely reasonable, understandable, and justifiable.
A solidier in an active war zone is reasonably unable to sleep out of worry about her safety. Someone who lives in a community with lots of crime might very afraid of crime, or she might have particularly valuable and irreplaceable possessions, such as family heirlooms, that she isn’t able to secure or that no amount of insurance could replace.Īn organ transplant patient with a compromised immune system should be very worried about avoiding germs. The requirement that obsessions are unjustified is unstated in the diagnostic criteria, but it’s worth making this background assumption explicit for our purposes.įear, anxiety, and intrusive thoughts about danger and potential loss are sometimes very reasonable. It is repeated pattern that creates a problem for the person. And, while any one obsession may be easy enough to dismiss or ignore, the pattern as a whole is not easily dismissed or ignored. What’s important to note here is that no one thought on its own is an obsession obsessions are part of a pattern of thoughts. For example, the thoughts may center on security and violation, or on death, on contamination of various sorts, on sex and purity, or, in the cases we’ll focus on here, on moral or religious violations or contaminations, on sin and spiritual or moral value. The thoughts don’t need to be always about the same thing, but obsessions will often be on the same topics. If the thought arises again, however, with the same accompanying anxiety, or if similar thoughts arise, or if the thoughts persist for longer, then the thoughts begin to look like obsessions. If the incident is isolated and short-lived, as we’ve described it, then, however disturbing it might have been in the moment, it’s not an obsession Opens in new window. It’s a fleeting thought, though: the thought and the anxiety soon go away without any effort on their part, and they go back to their ordinary life and thoughts.
However they imagine it, they immediately feel great anxiety that pushes their other thoughts off to the side. Maybe they imagine something sentimental being stolen or a loved one being assaulted. Maybe they’ve just been reading about another break-in, or maybe the thought springs to mind for no obvious reason. Some individuals might imagine their house being broken into. Now, let’s look at these feature one at a time. The requirements, then, are that obsessions are: