193. When Colors and Numbers are Bad: Associations OCD Makes

Hello and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD with Carrie Bock. I’m a Christ follower, wife and mother, and licensed professional counselor who helps Christians struggling with OCD get to a deeper level of healing.

When I couldn’t find resources for my clients with OCD, God called me to bring this podcast to you with practical tools for developing greater peace. We’re here to bust through the shame and stigma surrounding struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories of healing and helping you replace uncertainty with faith.

I’m here to help you let go of the past and future to walk in the present abundant life God has for you. So let’s dive right into today’s episode.

My daughter, Faith, is three years old, and the first time that I took her bowling, she saw the candy dispensers that were in the bowling alley, and they had M&Ms and Skittles and Reese’s Pieces. You put the quarter in, you turn it, and you get a little bit of candy. She wanted some Skittles, and I said, “Hey, I’m not sure if I have a quarter. Let me see if I have one.” And then I told her, “Yeah, on the way out we’ll get you some. I’ll give you the quarter and we can turn it, and you can get a little bit of candy.”

Now, what happened after that is that the next time we went bowling, we were in the bathroom, and she says, “I want some skiles.” I didn’t know what “skiles” was, but then I started to think about it a little bit and I said, “Oh, you mean Skittles?” She said, “Yes, I want some Skittles.” And I said, “Okay, well, when we’re done bowling, we’ll get you some Skittles.”

So now it is a part of our routine. Skittles have now been paired with bowling. When we go bowling together and we’re on the way out, I’ll say, “Okay, let me give you the quarter.” I feel okay about it because she’s not getting an entire package of candy. She’s happy about it. It’s like a little fun ending celebration. So my daughter thinks that every time we go bowling, now we’ve got to get Skittles.

Technically, that’s not true, but hey, we’ve repeated the pattern a few times. It’s kind of ingrained now, right? And the more that you do things and the more that your brain pairs certain things together, the more it associates and believes that those things should go together.

We see this in negative habits all the time, right? And routines that people have. We talk about if you smoke a cigarette after breakfast every day and you’re trying to quit smoking, that’s gonna be really hard for you because your brain’s gonna go, “Hey, we just had breakfast. I think we should have a cigarette now.”

In order to understand this, I want to go back and talk with you about the Pavlov Dog Experiment. Now, some of you may be very familiar with Pavlov and his dogs, and what he learned. What Pavlov realized was that he had some dogs that he was doing research with, and he realized that they would begin to salivate before they had food in front of them, before they needed to even digest any food.

He was able to learn that he could actually pair something with that food in order to make the dog salivate. Hence, he was using a bell in his experiments. He would ring the bell before he gave the dogs food. And after a little while, he could ring the bell and not give them food. They would still salivate, right? Because their brains were classically conditioned, as he pinned, in order to salivate to the bell instead of the actual food.

Now, how do these types of associations and things get paired in OCD? And I will say too, that this happens in PTSD as well quite often. About a quarter of the people who have a diagnosis of OCD also meet criteria for PTSD.

So, if you’ve had trauma in your past, we want that to be on the radar for you if you’re listening to this episode and that resonates with you. Yes, I know that I’ve had trauma, and that trauma may be exacerbating my OCD symptoms or may be contributing to the specific themes that you’re dealing with. That will often happen.

For example, let’s say someone gets into a bad car accident on a Sunday evening. It was just getting dark outside, and it was raining pretty hard. Now those associations might be attached to that memory in terms of that trauma.

So this person goes to drive. They’ve recovered from the car accident, they’re doing fine, their car’s all fixed, or they have a new car. Theoretically it should kind of be a clean slate, right? However, in their brain, when they go to drive in the rain, they may start to feel anxious because their body remembers, “Oh, I remember that time where it rained really hard.”

Now, it might not just do it with any old rain. For example, we have those somewhat sunny rains where it’s pretty light outside, but it’s still raining. For this individual, they may not struggle with driving in the rain unless it starts to get to that dusk hour, like it was when they had the car accident.

Maybe they’re fine driving every other time in the day except for that time period, because that’s what got associated. And now the anxiety is coming back. The feeling of foreboding, the sense that something bad is going to happen—that has gotten paired with that memory.

It may be different for different people. Someone else that had a similar experience might feel they can drive any other time except for Sunday night. For some reason, Sunday evenings just feel like, “Nope, I can’t get in the car. I can’t go anywhere.” That has gotten paired with the trauma.

What OCD will do is OCD might come in and say, “You’re gonna get in a car accident. You’re gonna be irresponsible if you drive right now. Maybe you’re not in the best mental head space to drive. Maybe you’re gonna hit a pedestrian. You better watch out. What was that bump in the road? We might need to go back and turn around and see what that is.” You can see how these things pair together.

Maybe someone did actually have a driving incident. Not everyone that has those obsessions has, so I just want to make that distinction. There are plenty of people that obsess about hitting a pedestrian or maybe hitting an animal or something that’s distressing to them. They might turn back around and look. They may not have had any issues with driving, no major accidents, no major incidences on their record, because OCD will latch to things that matter to you or things that are important. But there doesn’t always have to be something that’s necessarily happened to cause a particular theme.

Now, food obsessions might be really paired with certain things. So if you have somebody that had told you, “This is a bad food for you, you shouldn’t eat this,” and then you’re obsessing if you happen to eat that food, this might also have been paired with a specific restaurant.

For example, maybe you knew—and OCD likes to use personal experience and hearsay—so someone tells you, “Hey, I got sick on those fries at Restaurant A.” And then you’re like, “Oh, that’s weird. I’ve never gotten sick from there.” But then you happen to go to Restaurant A and eat the fries, and then OCD is like, “Oh, remember so-and-so got sick from these, maybe you shouldn’t have eaten them. Is your stomach feeling a little weird now?”

Then the internal checking starts: “Ooh, maybe my stomach is feeling weird. What’s going on right now?” The more that I focus on it, the worse it gets. We call that living the fear in inference-based cognitive behavioral therapy. The more that you’re having these thoughts and then internally checking your body and focusing on it, and then having more thoughts, it just creates this whole spiral and storm of anxiety and negative thought process.

So in the example of the french fries, let’s say that you’ve convinced yourself that you can’t eat the restaurant french fries at Restaurant A, and you’re doing okay with that. “Okay, well, I’ll just avoid the french fries over there. Not a big deal. Who cares? There’s one restaurant I just don’t eat their french fries.”

Then the next thing you know, you go to Restaurant B on another social outing at another time, another place, and you decide to have the burger and the french fries. Now, OCD is telling you, “How do you know these fries aren’t tainted? How do you know they’ve been fried long enough? How do you know that these potatoes aren’t spoiled? That they cooked them right?”

Completely unreasonable stuff, right? Restaurants aren’t out there just trying to fry spoiled rotten potatoes. If they want to stay in business and continue to have customers, that’s not what they’re doing. It doesn’t matter. OCD doesn’t care. It weaves together these arguments, gets you really stirred up, and then says, “Oh yeah, I remember that time that you got sick on the undercooked chicken at home. It could be the same way with this place over here. How do you really know? You might need to stare at that chicken really hard and make sure that all the juices coming out of it aren’t pink.”

Then you’re doubting what you’re actually visually seeing. The more that you go deep into something like that—that’s a ploy of OCD, right? Just kind of go deeper into this: really look at it, really stare at it, really make sure that this is not gonna hurt you in some way. You have to be extra careful or extra cautious.

So how do colors and numbers and other things get thrown into this mixture? Well, it could be that you had a really difficult OCD day. Let’s say you have a lot of harm obsessions or a lot of sexual obsessions that you were wrestling with that day, and you happen to be wearing an orange shirt. Maybe other things that you perceived as bad happened that day—you spilled something on the orange shirt, you had a negative social interaction with somebody else.

Then the next time you go to wear that orange shirt, after you’ve washed it, you go, “Oh, what if I wear that orange shirt again and then I’m gonna have the same exact bad OCD thought day that I had when I wore it the last time?”

If you’re in a clear head space, you can say, “It doesn’t really matter what shirt I wear. I could have lots of intrusive thoughts, I could have few intrusive thoughts, I could have somewhere in the middle. My shirt is not really going to matter.”

However, sometimes OCD has you buying into these superstitious-type beliefs like, “Oh, well, because it happened last time…” That’s another big trick of OCD. “Well, because it happened last time, it may happen the same exact way this time.” Not “it may happen”—no, it’s “it’s going to happen the same way this time if I wear the orange shirt.”

That’s throwing in a little bit of magical thinking, not really based in common-sense reality of what we know to be true.

Then it could be the same thing with numbers. If you’re noticing, “Oh, well, I have to lock this door three times,” and there’s some type of reason that three feels good to your brain. “I can’t do it another time. I can’t end on an odd number. I can’t end on an even number.”

Sometimes those situations happen. Like, “Okay, well seven is a really good number, six is a bad number.” Things people tell themselves, but they may have some validity in what they were told. We have associations for whatever reason.

What do we do about these types of situations? I’m sure that’s what you’re all wondering, like, “Okay, well, I get that. I’ve done that, Carrie. I’ve made these connections between this fear and a color, or fear and a number, or fear and certain obsessions. How do you break this?”

Well, there’s essentially one of two ways of doing this. If you look at the ERP way, they would say, “Well, you grab the $66 receipt and you move on with your life, and you don’t ruminate about it, and you don’t keep thinking about all of those things. You just say, ‘Okay, well, I’m gonna continue to live my life and not go crawl in a hole because I’m convinced that the rest of the day is gonna be terrible, horrible, awful. I don’t have anything I need to avoid. I’ve gotta work through this anxiety.’”

What we’re doing in ICBT is saying, “Look, how did we get to this point in the first place? Let’s work what we call upstream. How did we get to this thought process? How did we get to this belief system that, oh, if I encounter the number six, or if I wear the orange shirt, or if I see orange in my environment—because then of course it likes to expand over time, right? It’s not just about the orange shirt. Then all of a sudden it’s, ‘Oh no, I see orange on that building over there, and then that’s bad.’”

When those types of things happen, we need to kind of break down and look at, what is it that I’m actually doubting in this situation? What reasoning process got me to this point?

That’s what ICBT does—it really explores and digs into, “How is my OCD brain working?” And then I can unravel something. It’s almost like if you’ve ever done any kind of knitting or crocheting, and you’ve done a little bit of it, and then you kind of can unravel it and you see like, “Oh, I understand how these stitches are coming together. I understand, okay, this loop fits into this.”

When you unravel it, then you go, “Oh, this is really just a piece of yarn. I don’t need to worry about this. It’s fine.” Versus when you’re just caught in that OCD cycle and that OCD bubble of obsessing and compulsing very rapidly, you’re not able to take almost like this third-party view, this very mindfulness-based view of, “Let me peel back the layers. What’s actually going on here? What am I at the core actually afraid of?”

Because I know I’m not afraid of the color orange. I know I’m not afraid of a particular number. I am afraid of something bad happening. Me making a mistake. Me somehow being “unlucky.” And you may not even believe in luck, but that’s the narrative going on for you.

I hope that this podcast episode—I know it’s a little bit shorter—I hope it’s been beneficial for you. Let me know if you’ve ever struggled with any of these things. You can always reach out to us online at kerrybach.com/podcast.

For those of you who don’t know, we have a really great search feature on our website where you can search different topics. It’s on the podcast breakdown page. Someone told me you don’t necessarily see the search line if you’re on a phone—you might more easily access it on a computer—but you can search different topics, scrupulosity, specific themes. We had a series where we went back through specific themes. We have personal stories of people who’ve struggled with OCD.

So if you find any of that content interesting, I would love for you to head over to our website and just take advantage of the great free resources that we have on there.

Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.

Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area.