In case you haven’t heard it said recently: Your intrusive thoughts, feelings, sensations, and urges do not reflect who you are as a person. But if you have obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), you might feel like they do. In the thick of the OCD cycle, guilt, shame and fear can make it seem as if the upsetting content of your intrusive thoughts or the fact of their existence defines you, and that the only way to atone for them or prevent disaster is through compulsions.
For some people with OCD, this can look like an urge to harm themselves emotionally or physically through self-punishment. Like all compulsions, self-punishment can seem like a way to alleviate the distress of obsessions. Ultimately, however, it only fuels the OCD cycle and leads to more suffering. In this article, we’ll discuss how self-punishment can be tied to OCD, how it reinforces the OCD cycle, and how a specialist can help you learn tools that reduce the intensity and frequency of these symptoms.
What is self-punishment?
Everyone is hard on themselves sometimes. You might make a mistake at work and then bemoan the error to a friend over dinner, or spend a series of late nights doomscrolling, only to continue to berate yourself about it in the morning. But self-punishment in the context of OCD can be a compulsion—a physical or mental ritual the person feels the urge to carry out to prevent a dreaded outcome from occurring, alleviate uncomfortable emotions related to obsessions, or try to neutralize or “solve” those obsessions.
Often, self-punishment as a compulsion is carried out to alleviate or neutralize guilt or shame stemming from obsessions. Sometimes people with OCD believe that they cannot “move on” from the obsession unless they’ve punished themselves. Self-punishment can include both physical self-harm behaviors and emotional self-harm behaviors.
The compulsion to self-punish is scary and can be painful. Self-punishment can be obvious and noticeable from the outside, especially if it results in visible wounds or leads to significant consequences in your life, but it can also be subtle, creating secrecy and isolation that can perpetuate the behavior while also feeding into your shame about it.
It’s important to note the function of the self-injury, as it can be tied to suicidality for those experiencing suicidal ideation, compensating for food eaten for those with eating disorders, feeling something for those struggling with the numbness of depression, etc.
This article will focus specifically on the compulsion of self-punishment as a means of relieving the guilt or shame related to OCD, not as a manifestation of suicidal intent. That being said, all intentions of suicide or self-harm should be taken seriously. If you or someone you know has reported an intent to self-harm, please call 911 or contact your local emergency room number immediately. In the United States, you may also call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 or text the Crisis Text Line at 741741. This line is available to you all day, every day.
What does self-punishment look like in OCD?
Self-punishment behaviors vary widely. Some people might physically harm themselves through actions like cutting, burning, or hitting themselves. Others emotionally punish themselves with persistent negative self-talk, like telling themselves “I’m a disgusting monster” over and over again.
While some forms of self-punishment can be apparent to those around you, other “quiet” self-punishment behaviors are often less noticeable. These compulsions might include skipping or restricting food, delaying or denying pleasurable activities, not sleeping, overworking yourself, and so on. Behaviors like these can make it less likely that your loved ones will notice that you’re struggling and offer you support. They can also be harder to acknowledge as harmful in a society that often, wrongly, celebrates overwork and food restriction—but behaviors that hurt you don’t help prove that you’re a “good” person. Instead, they cause physical and emotional pain, and intensify your OCD.
Why does OCD make me feel so guilty and ashamed?
People with OCD experience repetitive, intrusive, and unwanted thoughts and images that they do not align with. The intrusive thoughts of OCD are ego-dystonic, meaning that they directly oppose your values, desires, beliefs, and self-concept. OCD tends to seize on the things you are most repelled and frightened by and creates intrusive thoughts and images that are especially alarming and threatening. This could be obsessions about anything from losing control and harming others to being attracted to family members.
To repeat it once more: Your intrusive thoughts, feelings, sensations, and urges do not reflect who you are as a person. But OCD makes you feel like they do. Enter: irrational guilt and shame.
Anxiety is not the only emotion associated with OCD. Guilt, which says “I did something bad,” or shame, which says “I am bad,” are common and often not fleeting feelings. They can persist and feel like evidence that you have done something bad or are bad when, in reality, feelings are not facts. The guilt and shame are irrational. Though you might feel the emotions, you have done nothing wrong by having a thought. You are not bad for having thoughts.
As with anxiety, people with OCD can engage in compulsive rituals to neutralize or alleviate the guilt and shame. They might feel like they’ve committed a crime through thought, and the only way to move forward and “pay for” the crime is to punish themselves physically or emotionally. They might worry that if they haven’t punished themselves, they aren’t showing their brain that they disagree with the thought (even though you can both not agree with a thought and do nothing about it).
Engaging in compulsions to achieve a feeling of “redemption” may bring relief, but any relief you may feel is ultimately fleeting, and the cycle begins again.
How self-punishment reinforces the OCD cycle
The OCD cycle is the continuous loop between obsessions and compulsions. In the face of an obsession, your distress begins to mount as you seek a way to quell the rising panic and guilt, to neutralize the obsession, get rid of those painful feelings, or prevent something bad from happening. Compulsions seem like the answer to the issue, promising fast relief. But that relief isn’t lasting.
In the end, self-punishment—like all other compulsions—is far from a permanent solution to feelings of guilt and anxiety. Instead, it just strengthens the habit of responding to distress by harming yourself, while your intrusive thoughts become more intense and demanding.
That’s because punishing yourself to rid yourself of guilt or shame doesn’t actually rid you of the emotions. It reinforces them. Berating yourself emotionally or punishing yourself physically is telling your brain that you have something to feel guilty or shameful about, when the opposite is true. Like any compulsion, self-punishment also reinforces to your brain that the obsessions are dangerous and meaningful. Around and around you go in the OCD cycle.
Getting better means learning you don’t have to “pay” for your thoughts
Your intrusive thoughts don’t make you bad. Even if you purposely brought on the thoughts as a checking compulsion or through exposure, they’re still just words in the mind. There’s no need to atone for them, even if OCD makes you believe otherwise.
Instead, evidence-based treatment techniques can help you engage differently with unwanted thoughts and feelings, and unlearn the idea that you should suffer because of them. Exposure and response prevention (ERP) therapy is a specialized form of therapy created to treat OCD. This treatment helps end the OCD cycle by giving you the tools to recognize and resist compulsions.
ERP works by exposing you in a planned, controlled way to things that trigger you, while teaching you to consciously note your reactions and build up the resilience to change them. This experience can help you practice experiencing distress and obsession without engaging in a compulsion. Pursuing ERP with a specialty-trained professional can be life-changing.
If you’re experiencing the urge to self-punish compulsively, understanding the function of self-punishment is the first step. If you believe that you have done something bad or are bad, thinking differently about those thoughts and feelings can be helpful for changing your behavior. Does another story exist besides the unfounded one your brain has created? Hint: yes!
Self-compassion—extending loving kindness to yourself—can be a powerful antidote to shame. This is often difficult for people with OCD who believe they’re bad. Thinking about how you would treat someone else experiencing your symptoms can be a first step. Imagine how you’d treat a loved one and treat yourself that way.
Resisting the urge to self-punish will become a part of an ERP plan with your ERP specialist as either ritual prevention and/or exposure. For example, if you have been avoiding foods you enjoy as a means of self-punishment, nourishing yourself with those foods might become an exposure. If you’ve been engaging in non-suicidal self-injury to “pay” for your intrusive thoughts, resisting that in the face of a thought will become response prevention. All this will be done gradually and at a safe pace with your therapist.
It’s important to note that physical self-injury can lead to infection if not cared for properly. A thorough assessment of self-injury, as well as a plan to manage it (which might include seeing a doctor and other kinds of aftercare), may be necessary.
You don’t need to keep punishing yourself—you are not your thoughts
All that self-punishment does is hurt and scare you, while reinforcing the very cycle that you’re trying to escape. Hurting yourself, emotionally or physically, won’t turn you into a good person because you’re not a bad person. Working with an ERP specialist, however, can help you become a person with more understanding of your OCD, and gain back control over your life.
If you’re struggling with this, you are not alone. At NOCD, you’ll find specialty-trained, non-judgmental OCD specialists who deeply understand all themes of OCD—including those that are taboo, aggressive, sexual, or violent in nature—and can help you take the power away from your intrusive thoughts with exposure and response prevention (ERP) therapy, the most effective treatment for OCD. You can confidentially DM your therapist through the NOCD app, and they’ll respond at least once per day within 24 hours.
Schedule a free call to learn more about NOCD’s accessible, evidence-based approach to treatment, and how it can help you start taking intrusive thoughts out of the driver’s seat.
