Automatic subconscious risk scanning is part of OCD and anxiety

Over the last two decades, there have been huge strides in understanding OCD and anxiety. I remember the days when anti-depressants were the first and immediate line of treatment about 20 years ago and it was much easier to medicate the issues than to treat them in a more holistic manner. Thankfully, this is changing and talking therapies are having a much more prominent role in the treatment of both anxiety and OCD.

Having a range of choices in the treatment of OCD and anxiety is ultimately a good thing, and not everyone reacts the same to therapeutic treatments. This is why choice and variety are important. 

One of the core pillars of managing anxiety and OCD is understanding the root of where they may come from and being aware of behaviours that may be attached to them. Therapy is not only fundamental and integral to this, I argue that it shines a light far deeper into events that have been traumatising or where abuse may have taken place.

Through client work, I have come to see a consistent pattern in people who have anxiety and OCD. As someone who trained in neuroscience and now as a therapist, the autonomic nervous system contains the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems that can speed up or slow down systems, or cause them to constrict or dilate or release or reduce chemicals like hormones. I am oversimplifying here, but it is a starting point in understanding the two systems.

These two nervous systems can be triggered by a range of things and at the heart of it, traumatising events - be they marriage breakdowns, psychological or physical abuse or direct threats to life, trigger the autonomic nervous system. Threats will therefore trigger the sympathetic nervous system and parts of the limbic system in the brain and train both it and the brain to scan for danger and get ready to fight, run or freeze.

Repeated complex-post traumatic stress incidents will leave the sympathetic nervous system in a perpetual state of ‘risk-scanning’ which may lead to severe anxiety, panic attacks, agoraphobia and OCD. It is akin to the sympathetic nervous system becoming stuck in fourth gear and with it, various parts of the body become over-sensitised to the risk scanning process. 

Clients I work with who suffer from PTSD and complex PTSD tell me that from the moment they wake up, they feel that there is some form of internal and external risk or threat. This could be in the form of feeling ‘something bad happening’ or in the form of a general fear that flits between topics and themes. 

This ‘risk scanning’ demonstrates that a maladaptation to stress and trauma has taken place and whilst an individual adapted to cope with the traumatising situation at the time, this adaptation as the couples therapist Terry Real says, is now a maladaptation. It is this automatic subconscious risk scanning process that OCD and anxiety sufferers exhibit on waking that then leads them to get stuck into giving weight and meaning to the negative thoughts that they encounter. Correspondingly, this then loops them into the obsessive ruminations that they suffer. It, therefore, becomes a double-edged sword. 

Working with clients so that they become aware that their bodies are simply trying to defend them against historic experiences, traumas and events helps some people to manage their fears and to develop self-compassion for themselves. This is the start of a healing process rooted in self-compassion. It is on this cornerstone that further work can be built on.