How To Finally Conquer Your OCD
By: Aaron Quist
Tags: Mental Disorder, Healing, Ocd, Mental Health, Obsessive Compulsive

How To Finally Conquer Your OCD

Learning how to detach, observe, and surrender will set you free.

Photo by Alex on Unsplash

My Morning Ritual With OCD

When I was a freshman in high school I had such a crippling case of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder that it sometimes took me upwards of 40 minutes to put on a t-shirt each morning. Because of this, I would routinely forfeit my time to eat a healthy breakfast and proceed into the rest of my day so worked up with frustration that even the smallest task felt like an unmanageable knot that I couldn’t even begin to unravel.

During this period of my life, my morning routine for putting on a shirt consisted of opening the closet door in an extremely specific way, with the right pace, gentleness, and overall smoothness of motion. If something in my brain detected any one of these things to be insufficient, I would have to hurriedly close the closest’s bi-fold doors and try again…and again…and again.

When I finally did get the door to open “correctly”, I had to take a shirt off of its hanger and gently drape it over the chair behind me in the most painstakingly symmetrical of ways so I could “inspect” it. This meant that if I draped the shirt over the chair with one side even a millimeter more to the right or left of the chair’s center, I had to pick up the shirt and try again until I got it right. If one sleeve ended up tucked beneath the shirt, no good. Too many wrinkles, nope. I had to try again…and again…and again.

Next, it came time to actually slide the shirt over my torso. This was often the most difficult and time-consuming part because it not only involved getting the shirt to slide down both sides of my torso in a perfectly symmetrical manner, but also required me to flawlessly drape the shirt back down over the chair should I “mess up” actually putting it on my body. You can imagine this too had me repeating the process again and again.

These types of behaviors and patterns utterly controlled each and every morning for me, as well as the rest of my day. My OCD not only interrupted the way I put on my clothes, but with things like brushing my teeth, washing my hands, showering, walking, writing, schoolwork, interactions with friends, pushing buttons on a remote, turning on/off lights, eating, etc.

I did some truly bizarre things for “reasons” that I couldn’t easily be able to explain to someone who’s never experienced the disorder firsthand.

How Severe and Weird OCD Can Get

I like to use my example of putting on a shirt because it’s one that people who’ve never had OCD themselves can follow and comprehend the “reasoning” behind with relative ease. And it’s also one that anyone genuinely struggling with the disorder can relate to in one way or another. But in reality, my experience (and many other’s experiences) with OCD was much weirder as a whole.

For example, one of my strangest idiosyncrasies had to do with an illogical fear of being “possessed by the devil”. I say my fear was “illogical” not only because of the obvious “illogical” nature of OCD itself, but because my OCD gave me this fear despite the fact that I considered myself an atheist at this time in my life. This is how powerful a disorder that OCD can be. It literally makes you think and do things that are in complete misalignment with who you are or what you believe, all the while leaving you somehow unable to objectively question the logic of such behavior.

Because of this, my mind would routinely be invaded with thoughts such as the following:

— If you don’t clench your muscles as tight as you can right now, you’re going to be possessed by the devil. — If you don’t hold your breath for the next 10 seconds, the devil will get inside you. — If you don’t exhale and/or blink a certain amount of times during this commercial, the devil is going to get you.

And I would do it, 100% believing that I genuinely would be possessed if I didn’t, despite not consciously believing in such things. If I had to guess, these type of thoughts would randomly pop up in my mind at least 50 times a day.

I also had a bedtime “mantra” that I had to say perfectly in my head before I could go to sleep. On nights where I struggled to recite this mantra exactly the way my mind needed it, I would lie awake for god-knows-how-long while saying it over and over again in my head until something finally clicked.

This “mantra” required me to go over a specific checklist of the ways I was “improving”. I even had to ascribe “points” to each category of improvement. For example, I would say something such as “I’ve improved my appearance by 3 points”. It was truly bizarre, almost reminiscent of the way you can add “points” to a customizable character’s “skills/abilities” in an RPG video game. I don’t remember the exact list, but there were many things on it and reciting it would take quite a few minutes to do so, not including the amount of time spent starting over when I inevitably “messed it up”.

Another of my bizarre behaviors would require me to “inhale the energy” of an inanimate object and reallocate it to the corners of whatever room I was in. I would look at the object that was “unsettling” me — although in a nondirect manner, making my vision go blurry by tensing my eyes — and literally inhale until I couldn’t anymore. I would take this held breath and blow it into the nearest corner of the room I was in, often where the corner met the ceiling. I couldn’t even begin to tell you why I did this or how this behavior originated, but I had to do it…or else.

I would also do something similar with certain people I saw in public. If I caught someone I found to be “unclean” looking at me, I would subtly “inhale their look” and blow it out of the corner of my mouth so as not to be noticed. My brain told me to do this because it would “keep me clean”. Again, I couldn’t even begin to tell you why, but I had to do it…or else.

What that “else” was in most cases — ones in which I wasn’t going to be explicitly “possessed by the devil” for example — I also couldn’t say if I had to. There are no words that could possibly explain it logically. It merely felt like something unspeakably bad would happen if I didn’t follow my rituals or give attention to every compulsively negative thought that randomly entered my mind on a day-to-day basis.

I could go on and on with the things my OCD required me to do or say to myself, but the few examples I’ve discussed above are some of the most bizarre and revealing of what living with the disorder can be like when the disorder gets to be severe enough. I also want to make it clear that while my own experience with OCD was what I would consider to be more severe than the average person’s, that it also doesn’t even come close to being as difficult and weird as some of the most extreme cases I’ve read about online. For that I’m grateful.

Getting Better

In retrospect, my behaviors and thought processes during my time with OCD were obviously weird and unsettling. However, when you’re actually experiencing these things firsthand while struggling with OCD, they seem crystal clear, logically sound, and you feel a weird desire to “support” it at all costs. It feels necessary to living. Despite all of the suffering and frustration that OCD brings you, you find yourself feeling that you need it and want it in your life. It’s almost as if you’d do anything to keep it alive in this paradoxically illogical and fearful way despite all of the stress it’s causing you.

That is until you reach an intense breaking point, an absolute bottom of the pit. There is something inside of you that cries out desperately for help and feels like it would do anything in order to finally get some relief from the onslaught of invasive thoughts and mind-bending ritualistic patterns of behavior. And yet, you still find yourself washing your hands to the point in which they hurt. You still find yourself plagued by scary and invasive thoughts. And you still paradoxically find yourself relinquishing your control to the disorder.

But there is a way out…

And despite it sounding absolutely laughable and non-practical when reading about…it truly works. I’m a living testament to this fact, and it’s all I had to do in order to slowly, but surely, begin crawling my way back out of what felt like an inescapable pit of compulsive and controlling behaviors. Again, the solution I’m about to suggest sounds cliche — and is easier said than done — but once you actually give it an honest and fullhearted try you’ll realize that it truly is this simple: detach, observe, and most importantly, surrender.

Surrender

I want to start with the most important step of the OCD healing process: surrender.

When you feel utterly trapped by mental loops in which there seems to be no possible way you could ever ignore an invasive thought or stop doing a repetitive/ritualistic behavior, it is absolutely imperative that you say to yourself, “so fucking be it”. Out loud is most effective.

So. Be. It.

In my case, this meant finally “letting the devil possess me” like I discussed above. Something in my brain snapped one day and I simply couldn’t take the pressure of yet another of these invasive thoughts. I found myself weeping, at last giving in to it. I thought to myself, “alright devil, let’s do this”.

I can’t take anymore. You win.

But to my surprise I found that “the devil” didn’t win. I didn’t clench my muscles. I didn’t hold my breath. I didn’t say or do X, Y, or Z to appease it. I didn’t do anything to keep it at bay. I didn’t do anything to defend myself. I just surrendered, and it let me be.

I want to make it clear that I wasn’t miraculously cured after this one victory. On the contrary. The thoughts and compulsive rituals still crept in each day for quite a while afterward, and I would still give in to most of them. But this one instance of surrender, this one little victory, started a domino effect in my mind. This one little moment of surrender got my highly illogical brain to begin thinking about the validity of my obsessive-compulsive worries and thoughts. It got me wondering what would happen if I surrendered more often.

And this is exactly what I did.

I began challenging myself to just not do whatever obsessive-compulsive thing my brain was telling me to do — vaguely horrifying consequences be damned. Again, this is easier said than done — I realize that anyone struggling with a severe case of OCD will probably laugh at this solution because I know I would have laughed myself during the majority of my time spent with the disorder. And again, I know it sounds cliche.

But it works.

As someone who lived with an OCD that utterly devastated and controlled my life for nearly a year and a half from the ages of 13–14, I can promise you that if you can get yourself to surrender to, and to therefore break, at least one of your obsessive-compulsive rituals and idiosyncrasies, that you will then be able to gradually start doing it more and more. It won’t happen overnight. There is no instantaneous-panacea for OCD. You have to give yourself time and you have to give yourself the freedom to slip back into old habits. You have to repeatedly get your brain to prove to itself that it is malfunctioning.

You have to repeatedly get yourself to see that whatever the “bad” thing you keep telling yourself will happen if you don’t do your rituals (whether it be something as existentially frightening as getting possessed or something as mundane as getting sick from germs), has an incredibly unlikely probability of actually happening. You have to repeatedly gain little victories over that little voice in your head telling you to say or do something illogical and damaging to your health.

Each victory, each surrender, no matter how small (even if this means washing your hands 32 times in a row instead of your usual 33, you still broke the pattern), will compound and start to become easier. Hell, after a while, each individual moment of surrender will start to become fun, because you’ll be able to witness your old self coming back into being. You’ll smile at feeling a way you probably can’t remember even being a possibility at this point in your struggle.

Detach and Observe

Detaching and observing are merely supplements in helping you surrender. By “detach”, I simply mean that you have to try to separate the “real you” — the “you” before OCD — from the person you only think you are because of your disorder. This means literally remembering and visualizing the healthy way you used to behave before OCD began controlling your life. This means closing your eyes during the times you are struggling most and visualizing yourself not doing whatever ritual or compulsive behavior that is controlling you.

So, if you have a ritual requiring you to put the same shirt on multiple times each morning like I described above, this means visualizing yourself putting your shirt on just once and then going about your day. This means visualizing yourself breaking a pattern and walking away unscathed, with a smile on your face after doing so. So, if you struggle with invasive or unwanted thoughts, this means visualizing yourself simply ignoring them. This means visualizing yourself smiling despite their existence. They will begin to shut up. All of this fear will begin to leave you alone.

And by “observe”, I simply mean trying to “pull the camera back” so to speak and watch yourself from a distance. Visualize your consciousness, or a “higher” you, literally floating overhead. Visualize a sort of “out-of-body-experience” during the times you find yourself caught in a loop and watch how illogically you’re acting as if you were watching someone else do it in public for all to see. I promise that if you can start watching yourself from an external and objective point of view while you fumble around with your rituals and compulsions, that you will be able to start laughing at yourself.

You will begin to see just how bizarre, harmful, controlling, and unnecessary all of these obsessive-compulsive behaviors and thoughts truly are.

If you detach and observe, you’ll be able to see your disorder and yourself in a completely new light.

If you detach and observe, you’ll be able to surrender.

And if you surrender to all of this, you’ll be able to heal and get on with your life, completely liberated.

Getting Better All The Time

As someone who’s been where you are, and as someone who’s fought their way back out of the grip of OCD, I promise you that it will get better. If you take my suggestions, it will at least help get you started on the road to recovery. You may still need to talk to a therapist. You may still need to take medication. You may still find yourself struggling with a problematic behavior or invasive thought even after you’ve recovered from time to time. But the important thing to keep in mind is that you are not helpless. You have more control over your OCD than you can possibly imagine.

If you detach, observe yourself as objectively as possible, and surrender to your fears, you’ll inevitably find yourself healing.

It is possible.

This I promise you.