You first have to realize where rituals come from and why they exist. The rituals that we conjure up are a response to a certain stimuli and then a subsequent belief and thought about that stimuli.

So we basically form rituals that help us cope with what is going on around us. If you look at a child who was just denied her request to have an ice cream, you can see that she responds in a manner that makes it obvious to you that she is not happy.

This reaction from her is her response to the stimulus of not getting the ice cream. Then if the mother were to hand her an ice cream cone, most likely her demeanor would be much more happy almost instantly.

This happens because the little girl tells herself that she cannot be happy until she gets what she wants, or in this case, an ice cream cone. We can see that she could have chosen to be content and happy during the whole event. It was in fact a choice.

Once you realize that you actually have a choice to change the way that you react to stimuli, you will start to realize the power and control that you really have over your OCD.

The girl did have a choice to not have a tantrum when she did not get what she wanted? Was this possible? She could have responded any way she wanted to, but in this case, she threw a fit. When she was growing up, she learned that when she had a tantrum, she found that she usually got what she wanted.

Having developed this association in her head, she forms what appears to be a "natural reaction" to the stimulus of not getting her ice cream. In reality, this set of actions and behavior were learned. If when she was a baby, she only got what she wanted when she stopped crying, then that is how she would "naturally respond."

What If find really interesting about all this is the fact that a lot of us just want to be lazy and think, "I cannot control how I react, I just react naturally.So you can see from above that you don't really have a "natural reaction" but in fact that it was learned.

People act similarly to each other, but not exactly as one another. People react similar to similar situations so we can see that there are trends that we can study. One of the most wonderful things about this is that once we realize how our behaviors are formed, we can use that information to create a system to cure many maladies and have most certainly with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.