Magical Thinking OCD: What it is and how to treat it
Everything you need to know about magical thinking OCD, including stories, causes, and how to treat it to live life you want.
Magical thinking OCD is often very alarming to children, who worry their thoughts might seem strange to their friends or family.
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Introduction
“Knock on wood, but things are looking up!” “Fingers crossed!” “Break a leg tonight!”
Superstition is a part of our everyday culture, and luck and magic are a typical part of growing up. A teenager may wear a lucky pair of socks every time she plays in a big soccer tournament, or a child may have a rabbit’s foot tied to his backpack that he likes rubbing before a test at school.
However, when it comes to magical thinking OCD, superstitions go beyond something silly or fun. For people with magical thinking OCD – a type of OCD that centers around superstitious thoughts linked to something happening in the future – what started out as a small superstition may turn into a high-stakes, time-consuming set of actions they feel they must take to keep themselves and their loved ones safe.
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What is magical thinking OCD?
Magical thinking OCD is marked by an unusual or troubling thought entering a person’s mind and leading them to feel that they have to do something – either physically, or in their minds – to make sure something does or doesn’t happen in the future. For these children, there’s an illogical connection between their thoughts and the future, both their own and the future of others in their lives or the world at large. Kids and teens often tell me that they like there’s a lot of responsibility riding on their shoulders.
How this looks differs person to person. The thought could be something good – “I want to do well on this upcoming test!” – or something bad – “my parents are going to get in a car accident!” It could be specific – “I won’t be able to fall asleep tonight” – or more general – “something really bad is going to happen.”
To try to get these scary thoughts out of their minds, people with magical thinking OCD engage in rituals or compulsions, meaning some a mental or physical action that’ll make the thoughts go away, at least for a moment. Rituals related to magical thinking anxiety can be extra hard to pick up on as a parent because a lot of times, they don’t necessarily connect. For example, when it comes to a kid with harm OCD who is afraid of hurting their brother, it makes sense that you’d see him avoiding being in the same room with his brother as a way to keep his brother safe.
Magical thinking OCD symptoms, on the other hand, can present in many different ways. A child might tap his pen 5 times at the start of class to get a good grade. Another may tell her parents “Goodnight, I love you!” every night in a specific way, believing that if she doesn’t, something will happen to her parents overnight. A teen may re-walk through a doorway if she has a scary thought while she’s walking into a room to “erase” the scary thought.
An important thing to know is that people with magical thinking OCD may or may not logically believe that these things could come true – something that can be extra confusing when parents try to talk through what they’re seeing with their kids!
Some kids genuinely believe there’s a link between these thoughts that pop up and the actions they do – maybe, for instance, that they really will fail a test if they don’t do their pencil tapping. On the other hand, some kids are fully aware that these connections don’t make sense, and they might feel a lot of shame and think they’re “weird” or that something is wrong with their mind. However, as many people with magical thinking OCD tell me, the feeling is so strong, and the anxiety so intense, that it doesn’t feel like it’s worth the risk.
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Magical thinking OCD examples
(Note: As with all clinical examples, I use fictional names and compile information from multiple clients to protect client confidentiality.)
If you’re a little confused about this topic, you’re not alone – magical thinking OCD can be tricky to understand! Let’s explore some magical thinking OCD stories based on kids and teens I’ve seen in my practice.
Ryan is an 8-year-old male who is very worried that something bad will happen to his parents. It’s mostly a general feeling of “something bad” happening, but sometimes, something specific pops up, like his dad breaking his arm or his mom getting a serious illness. If Ryan has a thought come into his mind about his parents, he has to do some sort of hand move – either rubbing his hands together, tapping something around him, or snapping his fingers – to make the thought go away. While one hand move used to do the trick, now he finds that he has to do a bunch of them – but only in odd numbers (3, 5, 7…), since even numbers are unlucky for him. Ryan now avoids some of his favorite books and movies that include parents in them, and he dreads when a friend casually mentions their parent, because any time he hears the word “parent,” his magical thinking anxiety kicks into gear and leads to a bunch of hand moves. Ryan is exhausted but feels like if he doesn’t listen to OCD, something bad will happen, and it’ll be his fault!
When Ryan and I talked about his thoughts and his hand moves, he said that he was stressed all the time and tried as hard as he could to push the thoughts out of his mind, since his hands were starting to hurt him. The moves also kept interrupting him while he was drawing, his favorite thing to do in his free time.
Ryan told me he wasn’t totally sure if the thoughts could come true or not – he told me he was about 75% confident that they could – but he said that, regardless, he thought it was his responsibility to keep his parents safe. No matter how much his parents reassured him that they were okay, Ryan didn’t feel like he could stop his hand moves, and the pressure he felt grew and grew.
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What causes magical thinking OCD?
I’ve written before about how diagnosis of OCD can be a relief to kids and their parents, and I’ve seen this especially to be the case in magical thinking. A child who thinks they are “crazy,” or that they have to follow some magical spells to keep themselves and others safe, finally has a framework to understand their thoughts and actions. After diagnosis, the next question is often – what causes magical thinking OCD?
We don’t know exactly what causes OCD, though scientific research points to a result of a combination of life experiences, biology, and genes. Some OCD experts suggest that magical thinking OCD may be more likely in individuals who come from cultures in which superstitious behaviors and rituals are more common. However, they also highlight that someone’s background doesn’t cause OCD on its own and point out that it’s still unknown why some kids with OCD develop magical thinking OCD as opposed to other types, like harm OCD or scrupulosity OCD.
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Magical thinking OCD treatment
(Note: The therapeutic techniques described in this section are for educational purposes only and do not constitute advice or therapeutic recommendations. Don’t try these techniques on your own, but please contact me or another qualified provider if you’re interested in learning about how OCD treatment could help you or your child.)
Can magical thinking OCD be cured? When beginning OCD treatment, we aren’t exactly searching for a “cure,” and our question is less, “How do I stop magical thinking?” Rather, it’s learning how to detect when OCD is setting off a false alarm and trying to give a child responsibility for things that they can’t actually control – much less with a single thought, movement, or ritual. Fortunately, we have treatments that can help us detect such false alarms and give us confidence to trust our own thinking – namely, Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) and other complementary treatments (e.g., Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy).
You’ve seen me discuss ERP before in other blog posts, but as a refresher, ERP is a treatment that can be used for all types of OCD and anxiety to help us learn, through experience, that we can handle that scary feeling that OCD throws our way and that the things we thought were linked may not be after all. We start by setting up exposures – I sometimes call these “challenges” or “experiments” with the kids and teens I work with – to the things we’re afraid of, which means we’ll face our fears on purpose, starting gradually with less scary scenarios and increasing to more challenging ones over time. For example, a child may try thinking, “I might stub my toe today,” and over time they may try out, “I bet I’ll get an F on this quiz and fail my class.”
At the same time, we’ll make sure we’re practicing response prevention, meaning that we will make sure not to do any rituals after the exposure that would cancel out our experiment. For example, a child might have an urge to say, “I won’t really stub my toe, though,” or perhaps to do some ritual for good luck to make sure they don’t fail the test.
Here are a few exposures that I did with Ryan:
Watch a clip from his favorite TV show featuring the main characters’ parents
Eat 4 potato chips (to challenge his “unlucky” even numbers)
Say, “I hope my mom bumps her funny bone tomorrow,” followed by “I hope my dad’s flight gets delayed”
Say, “I’m really excited to go to the zoo with my parents on Saturday.” This one might seem odd at first, but a lot of kids and teens tell me that their OCD really doesn’t like talking about fun plans in the future, in case that “jinxes” them. OCD is sneaky, but we have the tools to tackle it!
It wasn’t easy, but over time, Ryan learned that, even when he brought up these thoughts and feelings on purpose, he didn’t need OCD rituals to feel confident about the future or about his parents’ safety. He started to let go of the idea that he was solely responsible for what happens in the world around him, which made it much easier for him to get through his day. What fun it was for Ryan to get to actually spend time with his parents, draw, and do other things he liked to do, rather than spend his time doing what OCD wanted him to!
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Frequently Asked Questions
What about power of positive thinking? I’ve always taught my child that it’s important to think positively, so it feels wrong to have them think negative thoughts on purpose.
Some of my clients and their families have shared that they ascribe to the law of attraction, or the idea that positive thinking can manifest positive outcomes in their lives. Other OCD therapists have explored the connection between magical thinking OCD and the law of attraction in more depth. These thoughts are often very scary, and it makes sense that the instinct would be to push them out or replace them with positive ones!
One thing that I like to highlight for the families that I work with is the difference between optimism and encouragement, versus magical thinking OCD. When we think about encouraging our loved ones, we can see how positive statements can help build confidence and motivation. For example, we may tell our child, “I know it’s hard to resist this OCD ritual, but I’m so proud of how hard you’re trying!” Or our child may learn to tell themselves, “I know I can stand up to OCD even when it’s playing tricks on me!”
On the other hand, magical thinking OCD is all about chance, and rather than building up a person’s confidence, it leads them to feel that they’ve “lucked out,” or that they got away with it this time. Encouragement leads to increased feelings of agency and strength, while magical thinking leads to feeling captive to OCD’s always-changing rules.
Our family has a lot of superstitions! They seem harmless to me - like little rituals we do before a big game - but are these harming my kid with magical thinking OCD?
Superstitions can seem fun and can lead to a sense of bonding for family members. However, when a child is struggling with magical thinking OCD, even seemingly harmless superstitions can carry a heavy burden. I often encourage family members to challenge themselves to go without their superstition, modeling for their child that they are going to try to skip their superstitious behavior even though it’s a challenge for them. While this can be hard, your child will appreciate the feeling that you’re both on the same team challenging OCD.
So what if my child says something bad might happen…and then it actually does?
The threat of magical thinking OCD coincidences happening can be scary for kids and their parents. Is it possible that something bad might happen after a child thinks or talks about it? Yes. Is it possible that the specific bad thing mentioned during the exposure task might happen (e.g., that my mom might hit her funny bone)? Also yes. However, we are not trying to teach a child that something bad won’t happen – we are helping them learn that something bad won’t happen because they think it.
One experiment that I like to do is to flip magical thinking on its head, and rather than figuring out how to stop magical thinking, we try to use magical thinking for our benefit! For example, we might say, “Someone is going to knock on my office door and bring in a unicorn right now.” Most kids find this pretty silly, and they are very confident that a unicorn won’t be walking through my office door. However, this exercise helps us break down OCD’s tricks and push back on this link that our thoughts alone can make something happen.
Conclusion
Magical thinking OCD can be very frightening and confusing for children and their families, and kids can feel overwhelmed feeling like they are responsible for everyone around them. Fortunately, we know how to treat magical thinking OCD and to how to help children learn to recognize and ignore OCD’s tricks, and trust in themselves instead. If you or your child is living with magical thinking OCD, let’s work together to see how treatment can bring your child and family understanding and relief.