Kids, OCD, Anxiety, and Implications for Adult Recovery – Ep 331

The Difference Between Kids and Adults

When you ask a young child with OCD why they’re doing a particular ritual, you often get a surprisingly simple answer. “I don’t know, it just feels weird if I don’t.” They report vague feelings of unease or discomfort. They can’t always articulate what they’re afraid will happen. They just know something doesn’t feel right until they perform the compulsion.

Ask an adult the same question, and you’ll get something completely different. Adult brains spin elaborate narratives about danger, responsibility, and catastrophic consequences. We build complex belief systems around what our thoughts mean, what we’re responsible for preventing, and what horrible things might happen if we don’t engage in compulsions or rituals.

This isn’t a small difference. It’s represents a big change in how the same disorder gets experienced at different developmental stages, and how it impacts therapy and treatment in adults.

The Meaning-Making Machine

The key to understanding this difference lies in cognitive development. Very young children focus on immediate, reality – what they can see, touch, and directly experience. They’re not yet wired for the kind of abstract, hypothetical reasoning that comes later. There’s very little story-telling and narrative building. Just experiences.

As kids mature, the capacity to think abstractly, reason hypothetically, and engage in “what if” scenarios emerges naturally. Suddenly, the brain can consider possibilities that don’t currently exist. It can look at an intrusive thought or uncomfortable sensation and build elaborate scenarios about what that experience might mean and what catastrophes might unfold. As we grow up and mature, our brains learn how to make meaning out of our experience which is quite helpful … until it isn’t.

As Natasha and I discussed, this is where adult anxiety disorders really take hold. We don’t just experience uncomfortable thoughts and sensations. We automatically feed those experiences into what a “meaning-making machine” – our brain’s developed capacity to interpret, analyze, then and assign significance to every internal experience. Worse, we get tricked into believing that the narrative is describing real risk or threat when often (in the case of anxiety disorders and OCD) it simply isn’t.

What This Reveals About Recovery

Here’s why this matters for anyone struggling with OCD or an anxiety disorder, regardless of age:

If children can learn to overcome OCD by tolerating discomfort without an attached narrative about danger or treat mitigation, what does that tell us about the stories we construct as adults? It suggests that the core problem isn’t the thoughts and sensations themselves. The problem is what we do with them – how we interpret them, what meaning we assign to them, and what we believe they’re telling us about danger or responsibility.

A child feels the urge to tap something three times. It feels uncomfortable not to do it. So they do it. That’s the base experience – the thing that’s actually happening at a neurological level.

An adult has the same urge, but now that urge gets fed into a sophisticated meaning-making system. “Why am I having this urge? What does it mean? Is something terrible going to happen if I don’t do it? Am I responsible for preventing something bad?” The intrusive thought or uncomfortable sensation hasn’t changed. What’s changed is the brain’s capacity to spin elaborate interpretations, which makes it hard for adults to really engage in acceptance and exposure based treatments because that interpretation feels like risk or danger.

The Smokescreen Effect

During our conversation, Natasha used the term “smokescreen” to describe this phenomenon.  The elaborate narratives we build as adults – all the catastrophizing, the responsibility beliefs, the “what if” scenarios – they feel incredibly real and compelling. They seem like they’re telling us something important about actual danger.

But the experience of children with OCD reveals something crucial: those narratives aren’t reflecting reality. They’re the result of a human brain doing what human brains do – trying to make sense of experiences, find patterns, make predictions, and assign meaning. This capacity is normally useful for navigating a complex world, but when it gets misapplied to our own internal experiences, it creates and maintains anxiety disorders.

Taking a Lesson From Kids

This doesn’t mean you can just “think like a child” and your anxiety will disappear. Your adult brain’s meaning-making capacity is there, and you can’t simply turn it off. But what you can practice is noticing when you’re following what your adult meaning-making machinery is telling you.

When you notice anxiety, can you observe the urge to figure out what it means? Can you notice the pull to analyze whether you’re in danger, whether you’re responsible for something, whether this feeling is trying to tell you something important?  Can you look through that story to the actual experience – the actual sensations, thoughts, or emotions you’re experiencing in a given moment? Learning to do that can help you go into the exposure/acceptance context you find it so scary to jump into.

If you’re stuck because the perceived risk feels too real to challenge, remember that children without fully developed abstract reasoning overcome OCD every day by learning to tolerate discomfort without the story. The narrative that tells you something horrible will happen if you do an exposure or don’t perform a ritual isn’t giving you accurate information about danger. It’s just your brain doing what developed human brains do – and what you’re learning in recovery is how to have those thoughts without treating them as meaningful predictions.

Listen to the full episode to hear more of my conversation with Natasha about how kids experience anxiety differently, what that teaches us about recovery, and how parents can support children struggling with these issues.

More Detail on My Substack

If you’d like to read a more detailed essay on this, you can find it on my Substack.

Links Of Interest

Natasha’s Links:

• https://atparentingcommunity.com/
• https://hillchildcounseling.com
• https://instagram.com/childocdtherapist

OCD and the Brain website

• My Substack
• Find my “Practical Mindfulness for Anxiety Recovery” Groups
• Low cost anxiety/recovery educational workshops
• My Panic and Agoraphobia Recovery Guidebook
• Follow me on Instagram
• My YouTube Channel
• Disordered – With Josh Fletcher

Disclaimer: The Anxious Truth is not therapy or a replacement for therapy. Listening to The Anxious Truth does not create a therapeutic relationship between you and the host or guests of the podcast. Information here is provided for psychoeducational purposes. As always, when you have questions about your own well-being, please consult your mental health and/or medical care providers. If you are having a mental health crisis, always reach out immediately for in-person help.