About the author: Jenna Overbaugh has been treating OCD and anxiety since 2008, and has had it basically her whole life. She’s worked with some of the most severe, life-consuming cases out there, quit her job in 2023 to teach people all over the world how to be their own therapist, and has a book coming out in 2027. She’s been terrified for most of her life and keeps doing the things anyway, and she’s going to show you how to build a life so big and so bold that OCD and anxiety just can’t keep up. She runs on chai tea and the conviction that this is possible for you, too.
When I was five or six years old, I was convinced I was personally responsible for the safety of Isaac, Taylor, and Zac Hanson.
If you don’t know who Hanson is, first of all, who even are you, and second of all, they were an ABSOLUTELY ICONIC band in the 90’s, they were my entire world, and there were three of them. I actually wrote to them as a kid and advocated to be the fourth Hanson band member, because I’ve always been a dreamer, ya know.
Somewhere in my little kid brain, I developed this certainty that if I didn’t do everything in threes (go through a door three times, tie my shoes three times, write something again three times), something terrible would happen to the Hanson brothers. I didn’t know what the terrible thing would be, I just knew that I, a six-year-old in Pennsylvania, was responsible for the wellbeing of three teenage boys from Oklahoma who had absolutely no idea I existed.
For the record: the Hanson brothers are fine. I think. I’ve seen them in concert a few times since then (see below). Turns out Zac Hanson did not need me to survive and thrive.
This is actually the least embarrassing picture from the night, I’ll spare you the videos of me scream singing.
Growing up, my obsessive-compulsive tendencies came up in other ways, although, of course, I didn’t realize it was OCD at the time. I also couldn’t step on cracks (y’know, my mother’s back), couldn’t walk under ladders, was afraid to raise my hand in class because I was convinced something weird would fly out of my mouth the second I did. I was a quirky kid, but I didn’t think any of it was wrong. I thought it was how the world worked, I thought the thoughts I had were legitimate, I thought the outcomes were my responsibility, and that was the damn deal.
Nobody told me otherwise until I was in college.
If you grew up with intrusive thoughts and nobody told you these five things, hi, this is for you.
I cannot tell you how many times I’ve worked with people who think their particular set of intrusive thoughts are going to send me running for the hills. They’re always so convinced they’re the only person in the entire world who’s had these thoughts. I remind them that I’ve seen it all, none of it rattles me, and then urge them to try and surprise me and they can win a prize if they do.
They never win the prize.
Most of the time, based on our previous conversations, I can already predict the thoughts they’re going to tell me, anyways. OCD is wildly predictable like that when you know its patterns and tricks.
Afterall, we’ve already determined that everyone experiences intrusive thoughts, they’re human nature. In fact, researchers took two lists of intrusive thoughts (one from people who have OCD, one from people who don’t) and gave them to professionals. The professionals could not tell which list belonged to which group.
DO YOU KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS?!
gosh i love this man, as well as any opportunity to include him as a gif in anything i create
Other people are having the same thoughts as you! Yes, they’re having the taboo ones, the harm thoughts, the fears of doing something unforgivable. They’re thinking of punching that grandma in the face, they have that random thought that says maybe they looked at their naked baby for too long, they’re thinking they may not totally 100% love their partner, they have brief flashes of terminal illness.
People who have never been diagnosed with OCD are walking around having those same thoughts and shrugging them off. They’re simply the ones not treating the thoughts like emergencies.
I sat with a 35-year-old woman once (two kids running around in the background, successful career, absolutely gutted by OCD) and told her some version of this. I talked to her about how her brain generates thousands of thoughts a day and that not every one of them comes from her or says anything about her character. She was floored, like, truly floored. She could not comprehend that a thought could pop up, not necessarily of your own accord, that a thought could exist in your brain without being a confession or evidence of something wrong with you.
She cried because she had been carrying the weight of every thought she had ever had for her entire life. I think it was a bittersweet moment for her. Like she’d been led astray for so long, like someone had ~forgotten~ to give her a very vital piece of the puzzle, but it was, at the same time, so.. simple?
The difference between you and all those other people is not the type of thoughts you’re having. What sets you apart from people who don’t have OCD is your reaction to the thoughts. You’re fused to the thoughts - you think they mean something. When you realize they can be random brain nonsense - AKA brains braining - you make space for a world where maybe you’re not a monster, after all.
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