Compulsive rumination is subject to a person’s control. Therefore, if someone knows how to stop ruminating but isn’t stopping, it means they aren’t making a clear decision to stop. Put another way, they’re conflicted: On the one hand they desperately want to stop, but on the other hand they feel it’s urgent that they keep trying to figure it out.
You can’t have it both ways
A crucial starting point for addressing justifications is recognizing that you can’t ruminate and not ruminate at the same time. While this might seem obvious, many people who ruminate imagine that they can somehow stop ‘obsessing’ while continuing to figure it out. They don’t realize that these processes are one and the same, and that if you want the relief of not thinking about something, you will have to give up on whatever you hope to accomplish by thinking about it.
This would theoretically be a very difficult decision to make. However, in the vast majority of cases, rumination won’t actually accomplish what a person hopes it will, and recognizing this makes it much easier to stop.
Therefore, once you know how to stop ruminating, it’s useful to identify and challenge your justifications for ruminating, especially if you are having trouble making the decision to stop. What follows is an algorithm for challenging the utility (or at least the necessity) of rumination. The first challenge is:
Is the question (whatever it is that you’re trying to figure out) logical?
Are you trying to answer a question that contains a logical flaw or that is otherwise unanswerable? For example, is your question predicated on the idea that there is an ideal or correct choice where none exists, or on another false dichotomy?
An example of this would be a person ruminating about what the right or ideal city is to live in, when there is no ‘right’ answer, and each of their options has pluses and minuses. Another example would be a person ruminating about whether they are a ‘winner’ or a ‘loser,’ when really they contain elements of whatever each of these titles represents.
If the question is illogical, no matter how hard you try, you will definitely not find a satisfactory answer to it.
But sometimes the question is logical. For example, let’s say a person is trying to figure out if they have cancer; there’s nothing inherently illogical about that question. When this is the case, move on to the next challenge.
Does it make sense that you would be able to answer this question just by thinking about it?
Even if the question itself makes sense, it might not make sense that you would be able to answer the question just by thinking about it. Trying to figure out if you have cancer is an example of this. Another example is trying to figure out what happened or what is going to happen in a given scenario, when there’s no way you can know. There are also subtler examples of this, like trying to figure out where one’s OCD symptoms originated.
If there’s no way that you could figure it out just by thinking about it, there’s obviously no point to ruminating.
But sometimes you are ruminating about a question that, at least theoretically, seems like something you should be able to figure out by thinking about it. For example: Are you gay? In theory, you would think that you might be able to answer this question by reflecting on it internally. When this is the case, move on to the next challenge.
Has it worked in the past?
Even if it seems like you should be able to figure something out just by thinking about it, take a step back and think about how long you’ve been trying to do so. For example, has a person spent the last decade trying to figure out if they were gay? So while it seems like it should work, it obviously doesn’t. And even though each time it feels like this will be the time when you finally figure it out, how many times have you felt like that before?
If it hasn’t worked in the past, it’s not going to work now, so there’s no point in ruminating.
But sometimes, ruminating has actually helped a person figure it out in the past. For example: Let’s say a person’s research on treatments for a medical condition has yielded helpful directions; or let’s say a person’s ruminating about a creative pursuit has yielded new ideas. When this is the case, move on to the next challenge.
Is there a different way to accomplish whatever has been accomplished by rumination (or what you hope to accomplish with rumination)?
Even if ruminating has accomplished something in the past, it might still be possible to separate out the constructive elements from the compulsive ones. For example, a person might determine that looking at Google Scholar is constructive, but looking at WebMD isn’t. Or they might determine that they can accomplish the constructive elements in an hour a day, and that nothing additional is gained by ruminating about it all the time. (Notably we would only encourage you to schedule time for thinking, if you deem that thinking constructive and you actually want to be doing it.)
If you can separate out the constructive parts, it makes it a lot easier to let go of the rest.
But sometimes, it isn’t possible to separate out the constructive parts. For example, let’s say a parent says that by constantly looking out for potential dangers, they have protected their children from harm in the past, and that there is no way to separate out the functional aspect of this from the compulsive one, since the more they pay attention the more likely they are to catch something.
When this is the case, move on to the next challenge:
At what cost?
When you can’t argue with the utility of rumination, you actually have to weigh the costs and benefits of rumination. For example, maybe looking out for potential danger really does protect a person’s kids. But does it have downsides, such as making them a less present parent, or making their kids anxious?
Obsessive-compulsives often have an unconscious assumption that if something is right or good, it must be right or good in all ways. Confronting the downsides of the right or good thing can help you to be more realistic.
(On a psychoanalytic note, if you feel irrationally guilty about letting go of a compulsion, you might wonder if there is an ‘identification with a bad object’ at play. In other words, is the thing you feel so guilty about, e.g. failing to protect a child from a certain type of harm, actually something that someone else did to you, but that you haven’t yet formulated as part of your experience).
Notes
I want to emphasize that addressing justifications for rumination is only relevant once a person knows how to stop ruminating. If a person doesn’t yet know how to stop, addressing justifications is not relevant, because no matter how much they want to stop, they won’t be able to if they don’t know how. We therefore teach people how to stop ruminating before we address justifications.
I also want to note that RF-ERP is meant to be practiced within an integrative treatment that assumes there are both conscious cognitive-behavioral and unconscious emotional factors that contribute to a person’s symptoms. Thus, while this article focuses on the cognitive factors that prevent a person from exerting behavioral control over their symptoms, the goal of treatment is also to address the underlying emotional factors that make them feel compelled to ruminate in the first place. While we want to empower people by showing them that they can, indeed, stop ruminating, we are not asking them to settle for having to continually control their symptoms by exerting behavioral control. For further discussion, see OCD as a Defense Mechanism.