OCD

I should probably take more time on this post but hearing Tuppence Middleton speaking about her OCD I realised there are some important attitudes to OCD we need.

(1) Separate your OCD into actually problematic and trivial. By which I mean deciding if the light is off, or the gas is off, or you really cleaned the cupboard properly, or you hands are clean, or the house is locked, or the glass on the street you kicked to the side may still cut a kid, or you touched someone with AIDS and now you have it, and now you have AIDS you have passed it onto someone, or on your drive home you may have hit someone and forgot, or maybe while out last night drinking you killed someone and were too drunk to remember, or perhaps in your youth you killed someone and you forgot etc all these can go straight in the bin. Try and leave your lights on, leave your house open, leave the gas on and try to blow it up, deliberately mess the cupboard up and close it in a mess, don't wash your hands after the loo or after touching something bad (yup you'll be surprised you will survive), put glass in the street and try to hurt people, be disappointed that you didn't kill someone in your youth or in your drive home or when the police don't call to arrest you for killing someone in a fight last night while you were drunk or the number of people you have transferred AIDS too is actually zero really hurts.

This kind of OCD is one for the bin. The fact you are worrying is because you don't want any of these things to happen. So wish they happen and just get over it. None of them matter. Be reckless and absolutely do not compromise.

(2) The other kind of OCD is more difficult. These are the thoughts that you need be a bit careful about. The sudden realisation you can jump out of the window in your flat, or you can push someone onto the railway tracks, or you can molest a child, or you can take this knife in front of you and actually kill yourself or someone else. Now these I will call existential OCD. This type is right now and the tools of your obsession are right here now.

So if we get reckless I wonder if there is an issue. If we are standing on a ladder and we think "I can just throw myself off and die" and then we go "wow that is a real thing not a thought" and then we go "OMG why am I thinking this? I must be about to do it", "oh no I can feel it I'm about to jump", "here is the adrenalin rush I'm actually doing to do it", "mega panic, shut down, shut down, you are a bad person, you are going to do something evil, you see it all the time on the NEWS you are this bad person it's going to happen, this is how suicide happens, everyone will hate you for it, but I am a bad person, this is what bad people do, I can't believe I'm about to jump." So this crazy rollercoaster of fear and anxiety and existential dream and panic and adrenalin if you think about it from the outside is quite thrill ride. People pay money for this kind of thing. But it is definitely not funny it is catastrophic it is the collapse of everything, my world is destroyed , I can't be relied upon, I am mad, I am worthless, everything is worthless.

Now in here is "some truth" and "some issue" but the hard thing is getting perspective. We can't quite be totally reckless as throwing our self off a ladder is possible and it is bad. However back in the room, this is such bullshit. We ARE NEVER GOING TO DO IT. If we were we would just do and not worry about it. Same approach as above. Do really suicidal people stand on the bridge and worry about whether they are going to do it or not? They may struggle with whether they can handle their life and whether jumping is the answer, but they do not struggle with whether they are going to do it. So murderers stand their with a knife like Richard III and go through an existential soliloquy about whether they are really going to do it. No they discuss whether it is the answer to their problems or not. Do child molesters go through a deep existential enquiry into whether they will do it or not? Action is hard in the best of cases, it does not happen in these circumstances. This is OCD.

Now it is even OCD to grab a knife and sit in a locked room for hours going over whether we will use it or not.

It's a bit scary but if possible turn that around to thinking about how many people we are planning to kill. we will quickly find out this is not our real motivation and we probably can't be bothered.

Now it is possible that we really do want to kill people. But this is a REALL DUMB thing to say in a post on OCD because 99.999999% we do not want this. But even saying this is a problem because that 0.000001% is enough to become the certainty that we are heading out to commit mass murder. In OCD we are looking for 100% certainty we are not going out to kill, but be realistic no one is 100% sure and the problem here is OCD it is nothing real.

Yet I make light of this but these thoughts and doubts are completely debilitating. But the secret is good diet including plenty of fish and a health bit of recklessness and Punk irreverence and a massive dose of so what! 

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How to fix OCD?

So apart from challenging OCD intellectually and realising it is an illusion how to defeat? Well people say many things but one that will definitely work is 30 mins vipassana meditation for a month. That means sitting quietly and watching mainly the evolution of my breath - like the heart beat a central but mostly overlooked part of our life. BUT also as the mind get more subtle and can see other things like distracting sounds, or feelings or thoughts or anything and then just note they are there and return to watching the breathing. Okay big deal how does this help? Well with practice our mind gets really good at being clear on things. When we watch our breath we watch our breath, when we watch a bird flying overhead we watch a bird flying overhead, when we watch some thoughts turn up we watch some thoughts turn up, when we watch a feeling arrive we watch a feeling arrive. Okay and so what is the deal with this? Well to do this our mind is clear and sharp and that means it can see things "as they are." Compare this with OCD mind, which is confused and panicked always on the verge of Amygdala Hijack never quite sure whether the lights are on or off, overwhelmed by the history and thoughts surrounding things: did I hit someone driving home? Why am I thinking about this? It can only be because I hit someone on the way home? Wait a second no I didn't but now I'm not so sure? With a clear mind we just look at this nonsense and go: what evidence is there we hit someone? Did we stop? If we hit someone why didn't we stop? Maybe we are evil and did it secretly? Is this likely? How many other people have you hit? DO you even know what a hit and run is like? Do you recognise this instability and shallow, fuzzy, panicky, cloudy head feeling? Does this feel like the crystal clear waters of the mind of someone who is in touch with what is going on? Isn't this just OCD. But once we meditate the mind into subtlety we can see without any question.

Gotachas

But no so simple. OCD is tricky. We can turn meditation into yet another compulsive behaviour. I haven't meditated today, I am not ready to face the world. If I haven't meditated then I will get an OCD attack and perhaps this time I will kill someone... or whatever panic we have. But at the same time meditation will pull us out. So balance it between meditation to get clarity of mind, and recklessness and doing no meditation to step out into the world as a dangerous unreliable person and face the what-evert we need to develop to face OCD.

Odd possibility. One weird one is "Breathing OCD." It is possible to get obsessed with the breath itself and think that if we stop watching the breath our breathing will stop and we will die, so we obsessively start watching the breath thinking it is necessary to stay alive. Well struggle with that one as much as you want, you won't die! Eventually you'll get bored and you can only panic so long. This is a 1st category OCD straight for the bin. The 2nd category like jumping out of a window is slightly worth paying attention to because we definitely don't want to fall out of a window (which is why we are obsessing about it), and so we definitely won't throw our self out of a window no matter how much we feel we are going to, but we may need to keep a slightly careful and non-reckless mind as we do actually need to stay inside a window, just a practical thing. SO like anyone there is an obvious level of care and attention we need near an open window, but ring fence this from all the OCD nonsense. So its not quite level 1, we do need some level of respect for the object of obsession. A Level 1 OCD is literally nonsense: try and catch AIDS if you are afraid and obsessing about it... its actually very hard! That is a level 1.