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Study claims OCD stems from self fear

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A recent research study completed and published in Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, claims that people afflicted with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) may find that it stems from a direct fear of themselves. For those who suffer from OCD, what mental formations they have tend to stick with them and determine their behavior in the immediate future. For them, it tends to be about self loathing and feeling vulnerable about the kind of person they believe they may be developing into.

The research was composed of 76 people who had been clinically diagnosed with OCD. The participants were asked many questions about their affliction and were asked how they felt about each question; what each question revealed to them.

The were asked such questions as: “I often doubt that I am a good person”; “I am afraid of the kind of person I could be.”;  “I fear perhaps being a fierce crazy person.”

While the researchers did their study at a privately run clinic in Italy, they wanted to declare that these are only preliminary projections and that more work needed to be done. But, in the immediate sense, the researchers said that those they studied had a greater fear of self than those not afflicted with OCD and that their concept of their self tended to be more unstable. The affliction, for the most part, envelopes the afflicted in thoughts of fear that tend to be irrational, the researchers said, which quite often developed into obsessions in an effort to reduce the fear and to, perhaps, exert some sense of control.

For those with OCD, the researchers stated that they seemed to have trouble overcoming, or dealing with, thoughts that disturbed their sense of how they see themselves. The compulsive behavior is an effort to try and relieve the stress and anxiety, also, and the compulsions can develop from a fear of germs to obsessing over whether or not they locked a door or turned off a light.

The researchers stressed that their study would be ongoing and that their sample group was small and there also no control group used in the experiments. They hope to continue their research further into an affliction about which still quite little is known.

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