OCD and Worldview

In our more honest moments, I think many of us with OCD have found within ourselves an anger, and at some point harbored (or even now harbor) a somewhat pessimistic view of the universe. Emotionally, I consider myself a realist, even an optimist. But I think I have developed what I’ll refer to as an intellectual pessimism. I derived this term from a passage in C. S. Lewis’s book Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life.

...there was in me a deeply ingrained pessimism; a pessimism, by that time, much more of intellect than of temper. I was now by no means unhappy; but I had very definitely formed the opinion that the universe was, in the main, a rather regrettable institution. I am well aware that some will feel disgust and some will laugh, at the idea of a loutish, well-fed boy in an Eton collar, passing an unfavorable judgment on the cosmos. They may be right in either reaction, but no more right because I wore an Eton collar….As to the sources of my pessimism, the reader will remember that, though in many ways most fortunate, yet I had very early in life met a great dismay. But I am now inclined to think that the seeds of pessimism were sown before my mother’s death. Ridiculous as it may sound, I believe that the clumsiness of my hands was at the root of the matter. How could this be? Not, certainly, that a child says, “I can’t cut a straight line with a pair of scissors, therefore the universe is evil.”…I was not comparing myself to other boys; my defeats occurred in solitude. What they really bred in me was a deep (and of course, inarticulate) sense of resistance or opposition on the part of inanimate things. Even that makes it too abstract and adult. Perhaps I had better call it a settled expectation that everything would do what you did not want it to do. Whatever you wanted to remain straight, would bend; whatever you tried to bend would fly back to the straight; all knots which you wished to be firm would come untied; all knots you wanted to untie would remain firm. It is not possible to put it into language without making it comic, and I have indeed no wish to see it (now) except as something comic. But it is perhaps just these early experiences which are so fugitive and, to an adult, so groteque, that give the mind its earliest bias, it’s habitual sense of what is or is not plausible.

Lewis, C. S. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early
Life. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1955.


That passage resonates with me. For example, especially because of my OCD, my experience with inanimate objects and their nonconformity to my will has bred in me a sort of anger…an anger against the object, an anger against the laws of the universe, an anger against God. More than once, while in a fit of hand washing, the soap has slipped out of my hands, bounced down around the plunger, and settled on the floor at the base of the toilet. To someone without OCD, this might be a comic scene. “Oops! I dropped the soap! How clumsy of me!” But to me, it is infuriating. Not only did I feel compelled to perform my secret washing rituals in the first place, but now I have to get a new soap and start all over - not to mention having to get my hands dirty by picking up the now contaminated soap. It’s times like that when I want to (and sometimes do) say to God, “You like that? You enjoy watching the little obsessive-compulsive girl suffer like that? What, no people to kill with tidal waves, so You have to go around and torment the ones who are already at a disadvantage?” I think to Him, You’re the Creator of the Universe. I would think that you would be able to stop something meaningless like this from happening. What good will come out of me dropping the soap? There’s no lesson to learn, no turning it into good. Why not just step in and stop this from happening?

Do any of you ever struggle with that kind of anger?