“It’s hard to admit something we thought was correct, a belief we held for years, is wrong. Or worse, that we might have been making light of something that was horrifically painful to someone else.
All we can do is educate, love, and have a little compassion for ‘The Giggler.‘”
So often when I’m at a bookstore talking to readers about the memoir I wrote with my oldest child about living with clinical OCD and intrusive thoughts, You’re Not a Murderer: You Just Have Harm OCD, I’m met with “The Giggler.” Who or what is The Giggler you might ask. The Giggler is the person who hears the term OCD and immediately starts to giggle or smile. This is usually a very clear indication that they don’t know what it truly is. People who have experienced actual, tormenting OCD, the kind that has had them in tears, despair, and therapy, won’t be giggling.
I don’t necessarily blame these people, even though I’ve sat on a cold bathroom floor and rocked my sobbing child who was hanging on by a thread as her hands bled and intrusive thoughts and compulsions robbed her of her childhood, and, I feared, would take her life. The reason I don’t necessarily blame them is that we live in a society that has spread this misinformation so thoroughly and imbedded it so deeply into its fabric that those of us who actually, truly know what OCD is, have to weed out this misinformation with surgical precision. People won’t let go of it easily either. It seems that some folks, no matter how kindly I explain it, will even argue that their tendency toward neatness is indeed OCD.
“Does the organizing torment you/your daughter/spouse?”
“No! They love it! It just drives the rest of us crazy! Ha! ha! Ha!”
“Well, it likely isn’t OCD then. Organizing these things wouldn’t make them feel better. It would likely make it worse and never be enough. They’d need to do it again and again with increasing anxiety.”
“No! No, I know they have OCD. Ha! Ha! Ha! Everything is color coded, and she doesn’t want anyone to mess with it.”
They start to get annoyed with me, and I get that too. After all, no one wants to be told that something they have believed for a long time, something they thought was more a cute quirk, is not. When all is said and done, all we can do is plant the seed. Offer correct information about what OCD is truly like and hope that despite the giggling, the stubborn desire to believe the social media, white washed, cute meme version of OCD, that the seed we planted will bloom later. Just because they left the bookstore stubborn doesn’t mean they stayed that way. It’s hard to admit something we thought was correct, a belief we held for years, is wrong. Or worse, that we might have been making light of something that was horrifically painful to someone else.
All we can do is educate, love, and have a little compassion for “The Giggler.”
Harm OCD: You Are Not Alone 