When Reassuring Your Child Can Cause More Harm than Good!
OCD, or Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, is a mental health condition that can affect both children and adults. It is characterized by experiencing intrusive and often upsetting thoughts followed up by a safety behavior (otherwise known as a compulsion). Children can experience many kinds of OCD and often engage in many different kinds of compulsions. Some of the most common compulsions include checking, rumination, confessing, counting, cleaning, mental review, and seeking reassurance.
So, what exactly do I mean by reassurance, and how can this be problematic if your child has OCD?
Reassurance is something that often comes naturally as a parent. We reassure kids that they will do well on a test, have fun at a new sport, or that nothing bad will happen when they express their fears. Reassurance feels not only natural but helpful. It can be hard to understand how this actually hinders a child’s ability to manage fears.
When your child has OCD, seeking reassurance from you or others is an attempt to neutralize the threat of the intrusive thought. By providing reassurance, you are unwittingly engaging in the cycle of OCD and only providing temporary relief from their fear. Any parent who has lived this experience will tell you that the reassurance must be given over and over again, and that their child can be relentless in seeking it.
Does This Sound Familiar?
Your child asks if they locked the door when they left home, and you tell them “yes, you did.” They continue to ask if you’re sure they locked the door over and over again, regardless of your initial answer. Let’s look at a common OCD cycle for Moral OCD and reassurance seeking.
OCD Looks for Certainty
OCD seeks certainty and knowing “for sure” that a bad thing won’t or didn’t happen. By providing reassurance, parents are unwittingly participating in the compulsion, which further legitimizes and confirms the fears brought on by intrusive thoughts. Even though a child might logically know that an intrusive thought is extremely unlikely this doesn’t change the urgency and stressful nature of these thoughts. Teaching your child to sit with and tolerate uncertainty will help them to more easily manage and dismiss intrusive thoughts in the future. Utilizing “uncertain statements” can be used by both you and your child to help them practice tolerating distress and avoid engaging in the compulsion of reassurance.
Uncertain Statements in Practice
Your child asks “Am I a good person?” Before you jump to reassuring them that “of course you are!” take a pause and consider these possible statements:
“Maybe you are, maybe you aren’t”
“You are most likely a good person”
“You are probably a good person”
Or simply offer an “I don’t know”
This likely feels very counterintuitive and even mean to say to a child! When modeling this skill in a session I first educate and explain why I am not going to give reassurance, and why it will not help their distress.
So before attempting this, your child needs to know that when they seek reassurance, the OCD wants to be in charge and that by not reassuring them, you are trying to not respond to the OCD. It is important to also approach this practice with a lot of empathy and validation (i.e. I know this is frustrating to hear, I know it’s upsetting I won’t just reassure you). I even give children permission to be mad at me, and joke about how annoying I am!
You Won’t Be Perfect
It is also common for children to experience OCD in many areas of their life which can mean a lot of reassurance seeking throughout the day. It is overwhelming and unrealistic for parents to stop all reassurance cold turkey. Your child could become too upset battling all those compulsions at once. As a parent, you may not even recognize every compulsion when you already have so much going on in your day. I encourage parents to pick one area to decrease giving reassurance, or only allowing for a certain amount of reassurance during the day. This is called the “middle path” and it is a great tool for making goals more realistic and sustainable. Instead of doing it all or doing nothing, do as much as you feel able to do! Every little bit of effort is meaningful.
Decreasing reassurance is a marathon, not a sprint! Parents and other support people in a child’s life deserve to give themselves patience and self-compassion throughout this process. Just as OCD can unreasonably seek perfection, parents can place themselves under intense pressure to not mess up or “make things worse”. Validating and empathizing with your child’s experience is the most important, everything else will get better with practice!
Speak with a Professional
OCD can be sticky and tricky. If you need more education, support or help with your child, we are here to help. By working with a trained OCD Therapist, you can get the support you and your child deserve. Reach out today!