This isn’t the answer you were looking for…
“So am I a bad and undeserving person, or not?”.
How many times have you had this obsessive thought, in one form or another, and felt desperate to find a final verdict? That fundamental question haunted and debilitated me for years. Sometimes it felt like I’d give up a limb just to know for sure.
I’ve been lucky enough to work with a wonderful therapist for over 10 years now. And in that time, I couldn’t tell you how many times I have tried to elicit an answer to some version of that question – usually in some covert way. Whenever I have descended into a load of confessional detail about some perceived wrongdoing, he has calmly listened to me, taken a pause, rejected the invitation to give his opinion, and instead invited me to notice how I’m feeling in my body.
Feeling? Feeling?? Why can’t you just give me a straight answer and relieve me of these obsessive worries? For a long time, it blew my already-overworked mind that this was his response to my doubts. Eventually, I came to realise that he was giving me an incredibly respectful and helpful gift: he was refusing to collude with OCD by giving reassurance or analysing with me.
He was inviting me to step out of my intellectual defence mechanisms and take a wider, more embodied sense of my self and my emotions. To reflect on the patterns and conditioning which led me to feel this deep sense of shame. He knew that developing a more accepting and open attitude to my feelings would do much more than trying to answer an unanswerable question – it would weaken the urge to distract myself with the question in the first place.
In my book, I offer a range of tools of OCD recovery which, on their face, have nothing to do with directly answering the intrusive doubts and fears which are plaguing you. When you’re embarking on REOCD recovery, I encourage you to open your mind as far as it will go. We OCDers can be afraid to try things out which don’t make immediate logical sense, and we might be afraid to experiment. One perverse gift of OCD recovery is that there may be several hours in our day which we used to spend in compulsivity, which can now be repurposed as time to practise recovery tools.
My REOCD recovery isn’t dependent on finding a definite answer to the question of whether I’m bad or should be punished. The best way I can describe my experience of recovery is that I might feel an occasional whisper of an old intrusive thought or image, think to myself ‘oh, I forgot to have that thought for a while”’ and feel grateful for the relatively serene time which has elapsed in between. Recovery has never come to me by thinking harder – it has come by putting my attention into into positive, holistic actions, and through some higher intelligence the problem of obsessive thinking has somehow been eased.
When you embark on REOCD recovery, or perhaps talk with a therapist, don’t be surprised if the responses and tools (outside of more confrontational approaches like ERP) offered to you seem alien or unsatisfactory. The compulsive, certainty-craving part of your mind might wonder “how the hell is meditating or walking in the park going to confirm whether I’m a bad person or not?”. It won’t. But treating yourself with love and care every day may well make that question seem less urgent or important, in time.
