Checking whether you felt anything at the funeral

At the funeral you were watching yourself, not the coffin or the family, and checking. Am I sad enough? Is this real, or am I performing sadness because it is expected? Why am I noticing what other people think of my face? And because you were watching rather than grieving, the grief was thin, and the thinness went into the file as evidence: cold, empty, a person who feels nothing.

The same at the good news, the birth, the moment you said you loved someone. Emotional temperature-taking is a compulsion of identity OCD that produces the numbness it is looking for, and I want to explain what it does to the feeling it is measuring.

Feeling and inspecting cannot happen at once

Feelings arise in the middle of experience, when attention is on the thing that produces them. Grief arises when you are with the loss. Love arises when you are with the person. Turn attention inward to measure the feeling, and it thins, not because it was not there but because measuring and feeling use the same attention, and you have just moved it. Try to check whether you are enjoying a piece of music while it plays and the enjoyment goes, because you have stopped listening to the music.

This is true for everyone. What is different in identity OCD is that the checking is constant, and the results are being used to decide what you are.

The audit manufactures its evidence

The doubt arrives: what if I am cold, what if I do not really feel things? You check, at the next emotional moment, for whether the feeling is there and the right size. The checking thins the feeling. You find less than you expected. The less becomes evidence. The evidence produces more doubt and more checking. Within months, a person who felt things perfectly ordinarily has become someone who cannot feel anything without inspecting it, and the inspection has produced the numbness that was feared.

And the trap closes from both sides. Feeling nothing proves you are cold. Feeling something proves you are performing. There is no reading on the thermometer that counts as innocent.

Why it targets the moments that matter

The checking is worst exactly where the feeling matters most: the funeral, the birth, the declaration of love. OCD goes after whatever you hold most carefully, and a person who values warmth will be audited for coldness at the moments warmth is most expected. The distress you feel about not feeling enough is itself a measure of how much you care about feeling, which is not what a cold person is troubled by.

What people actually do at funerals

Many people feel less than they expected at funerals. Grief does not arrive on schedule, and the day itself is often strange, formal and numb, with the real feeling coming later, unannounced, in a supermarket. Nobody who is not auditing themselves takes this as evidence of anything. It is just how grief tends to behave.

Stopping the check

In CBT with exposure and response prevention, the emotional temperature-taking is withdrawn like any other compulsion. The practice is to be in the moment rather than watching it: at the next funeral, the next good news, the next time you say the words, to notice the urge to check and decline it. The doubt rises, because the check felt like the only way to know. Then, given no check, it falls, and the feeling, no longer inspected, arises where it always did.

I will not tell you that you feel things properly. That would be reassurance, and it would last an afternoon. The question of what you are is not one I can settle and not one you can settle, because character is a pattern of conduct and not a reading on an internal gauge. What I can do is help the gauge get switched off, so that attention goes back to the people the feelings were supposedly about.

If you have been watching yourself at the moments you should have been living, there is more on how I treat identity OCD, and the temperature-taking is one of the first things we work on.