Lee Baer > Quotes

“Q. How can I be certain that what I fear will happen will never really happen?

A. Sadly, the answer is you can't be certain! If you suffer from OCD you probably want a 100 percent guarantee that you will never do anything dangerous or that no harm will ever come to you or your family members. Unfortunately, life does not work like this. If I think about it, I know that there is no guarantee that I won't be hit by a car coming home from work today - but somehow my brain automatically accepts the very small chance of this happening and so permits me to go on living my life.

More than two thousand years ago the Buddha (a great psychologist besides being a religious teacher) warned that one of the key things that makes us suffer is that we always want more than we will actually get - whether what we want is material like gold and jewels, or (my addition) in the case of OCD, more certainty than you will ever achieve. Thus the solution the Buddha might have offered you in northern India those thousands of years ago might have been something like this: "To stop suffering you must learn to accept that you will never achieve as much certainty as you want, no matter how much you pursue it; so it is up to you to choose: Either accept this truth and live your life happily, or fight against this truth and continue to suffer."

Let me say it again for emphasis: you will never be certain that you won't act on the urges you have, or that the terrible things you fear will happen will not actually happen - but I can assure you that the odds of these things actually happening are small enough that it is not worth wasting your life trying (in vain) to get 100 percent certainty. Better to trust in yourself, your religious beliefs, or in evolution having prepared us well for surviving in this world.

If evidence from brain studies better helps to convince you this is true, brain imaging studies of OCD sufferers now suggest that there really is something wrong with their "certainty system"; whatever automatically lets someone without OCD feel that things are OK does not function correctly in the OCD sufferer's brain (who then tries to convince himself that everything is OK, eventually becoming tired and frustrated when he cannot use other brain functions to achieve 100 percent certainty).”
― Lee Baer, Getting Control (Revised Edition

“Thankfully, as you will see, the two facts that, (1) you are upset by your bad thoughts, and (2) that you have never acted on them, are sure signs that you will never act on them.”
― Lee Baer, The Imp of the Mind: Exploring the Silent Epidemic of Obsessive Bad Thoughts

“The Imp of the Perverse will try to torment you with thoughts of whatever it is you consider to be the most inappropriate or awful thing that you could do. To illustrate this point, each of my patients whose thoughts are summarized below (many of whom you’ll meet in later chapters) told me that his or her particular bad thoughts focused squarely on whatever was for him or her the most inappropriate, awful, or shameful thing he or she could think of doing:3”
― Lee Baer, The Imp of the Mind: Exploring the Silent Epidemic of Obsessive Bad Thoughts

“Having OCD, and tending to see things as either black or white and in perfectionistic terms, as well as being overconscientious, he was extremely hard on himself and insisted that he somehow be guaranteed that he would not one day snap and act on his thoughts. At one point, Frank told me that he was now concerned that he was feeling too little anxiety, which made him think that perhaps he was a sociopath without a conscience after all and would end up like Jeffrey Dahmer!”
― Lee Baer, The Imp of the Mind: Exploring the Silent Epidemic of Obsessive Bad Thoughts

“The more he fought looking at attractive women, the more he felt compelled to stare at their private parts. This led him to try to avoid streets where he might see attractive women—and as I will explain later, avoiding almost any situation increases our fears of it. In short, Father Jack was trapped in a downward spiral that is common in our patients and is often what leads them to seek treatment with us. Fortunately for Father Jack, simply stopping thought suppression and no longer avoiding places where he would see attractive women were enough to tame his bad thoughts.”
― Lee Baer, The Imp of the Mind: Exploring the Silent Epidemic of Obsessive Bad Thoughts

“When he was an adolescent—although he was heterosexual—the worst possible thing Isaac could think of was being gay, which could cause relentless teasing by his classmates in school. So this is where the imp began his torment of Isaac. Perhaps he would stare at an attractive female classmate and feel pleasantly aroused; but the imp would lead him to think that perhaps it was really the boy sitting next to her that he was really attracted to. Soon, whenever he saw an attractive boy in school or on the street or in the gym, he would find himself scanning his body to try to feel certain that he wasn’t sexually aroused.4 “Was that the first tingling of an erection?” he’d ask himself. Of course, simply thinking about the area would sensitize it, which might be enough to convince him that he really was homosexual. He might then go home and lie in bed, depressed and thinking about suicide, certain that his classmates would soon discover the truth and begin teasing him mercilessly.”
― Lee Baer, The Imp of the Mind: Exploring the Silent Epidemic of Obsessive Bad Thoughts

“Ginny told me that, like Dr. Wisner's patients, her problem was not so much that she had an urge to kill her grandchildren, but rather a fear that she might somehow lose control of her senses. She put it this way: "The fear is not that in my current state I could do these things, but that I might slip into a state where I could do it. Right now, when I am thinking about it, I know it won't happen. But still it festers, it festers and lingers, and it keeps beating on you and beating on - like it's the villain, the enemy, the monster, the demon - it's a faceless devil."

With my encouragement, Ginny told her husband about the thoughts. She was relieved that his reaction was "he just couldn't even believe what he was hearing - he knew I'd never do these things, they were just bad thoughts." When I asked Ginny why she thought he has so much faith in her, she replied, "Because he sees me with people daily. He said he fell in love with me because I am kind. For example, he reminded me of a time when we were together in a cabin, and I noticed a bee trapped behind a screen and I told him I didn't want the bee to die, so he spent the first hour of our first weekend together undoing the screen to free the bee. He asked me, does that sound like someone who would kill her grandchildren? He also reminded me that I am soft and warm and very loving, and he would never worry about me doing the awful things I was thinking of." Needless to say, Ginny was relieved by her husband's reaction, since she had feared he would think she was crazy.”
― Lee Baer, The Imp of the Mind: Exploring the Silent Epidemic of Obsessive Bad Thoughts

“many of my patients, when they first experience violent, sexual, or blasphemous bad thoughts, believe that there is deep down in them—like the ruthless Mr. Hyde living deep within Dr. Jekyll and waiting to be unbound—an evil murderer or molester, their “true” self, whose appearance is heralded by the appearance of the bad thoughts.9 For my patients who come to this conclusion, thought suppression seems to them the only logical approach—that is, to block all attempts of their evil nature from forcing itself into their consciousness. Sadly, as we now understand, this makes a bad situation far worse (as do artificial attempts to suppress the thoughts by drinking or illegal drugs). Consequently, another rule of thumb in taming one’s bad thoughts is: Bad thoughts do not signify that you are truly evil deep down, and voluntarily suppressing these thoughts will only make them stronger.”
― Lee Baer, The Imp of the Mind: Exploring the Silent Epidemic of Obsessive Bad Thoughts