Episode 9: Teatime with Your Gremlin/s

In today’s episode, I offer insight into how we who live with OCD closely identify with our thoughts. I then give you an opportunity to practice reconnecting with your true nature and reclaiming the seat of the observer in your mind.

In Brain Lock, Jeffrey Schwartz uses the phrase, “It’s not me, it’s my OCD.” What does that mean? Well, when it comes to OCD, it’s important to remember that it’s actually never you generating the obsessive thoughts you’re experience. As overwhelming and all-consuming as what happens in your brain might feel, the very predictable drama unfolding there over and over again has nothing to do with you or your true nature. You’re just in the audience, receiving what your brain offers! The thoughts you experience might trigger you to feel certain ways in the same way good actors in a play make you feel fear and anxiety, but your brain activity is not a reflection of you or your reality any more than acting on stage is. Neither are your feelings. This is the reality, yet many remain closely identified with their thoughts and feelings. And we who have OCD are the ones who leave our seats in the audience, get up on stage, and start battling with the actors. Later, we exit the theater in a trance, lost in the drama and forgetting who we really are.

I think the first step to changing the brain is pulling back and reclaiming your position as the observer of the activity there instead of the one directly involved in the activity. You don’t have to stay pulled back all day long if that feels overwhelming. You can do it for just a moment. At first, it might feel really awkward and unnatural, like learning to play an instrument. With practice, however, you will be able to detach from your brain’s activity more easily and stay detached for longer. Okay, so when you deconstruct things using your logical, rational brain, maybe you can see that your obsessions have no relationship whatsoever to your personal values, which are probably love and not fear based. You can see that your OCD mental formations are unrelated to your purpose, creativity, unique way of serving the world, and sense of self. Maybe when I said the words “sense of self” and “purpose,” you had to mentally and emotionally squint to get in touch with those vibrations within you. Unfortunately, obsessions and compulsions take up so much time and energy that they they can leave us feeling unclear as well as disconnected from ourselves and the world around us. Right now, you might feel really fused with the drama in your brain, and asking to step back even for just a moment feels impossible. Well let’s start restoring your clarity right now. Remember that it was you— not your OCD—who got you listening to this podcast, and it’s you who can do the work you’re going to do in this episode and beyond. And that work involves a combination of zooming out and seeing bigger pictures as well as digging in and looking more closely at deeper truths—all in ways that support recovery.

 I want you to consider something for a moment. Is the voice characterizing your obsessions even your own? Chances are it’s not. For me, my ruminations speak to me in a young, fearful voice that makes my pulse quicken. It’s like a really chaotic, anxious, and demanding kid who comes out of nowhere, doesn’t stop talking, and who I’m not even getting paid to babysit. Unsurprisingly, I used to go as far as to speak in this fearful, child-like voice that’s not my own when I’d do a common compulsion called “telling, asking, or confessing.” It’s a voice that’s very different from the one I hear when, in my mind, I form an impression about something I observe in nature, contemplate a positive or neutral experience, or formulate an idea for a project. It’s different from the voice I hear right now, speaking to you—an adult voice that’s calm, even and cool. In other words, my voice—Simone’s voice. By the way, to help know if a thought is a me thought or an OCD one, I pay attention to the sound of its voice in my head. This trick might work for you, too.

Do you know the difference between the voice of your OCD and your own voice? Maybe, recently, you’ve had so few you thoughts that you’ve forgotten what the voice of your essential self sounds like in your head. Maybe you’ve lost connection with your true nature as the calm, stoic observer. Stoic not meaning emotionless but rather contented. That’s okay. Remember, you’ve had at least one you thought today, because it was you and not the childish circus director in your brain who thought, “Hey, let’s listen to a podcast on OCD so that we can be experience higher states of consciousness and being.” So that’s a “win” for you right there. It got you here, and that’s enough to build on. Just keep listening, stay committed, and things will inevitably shift. As John Maxwell says, sometimes you have to act your way into feeling something different instead of waiting to feel something different to take action. In other words, fake it until you make it.

Now I want to do a little exercise that will help you start reconnecting with yourself right now. You can also use it on your own as a somatic, mindfulness tool not only to get in touch with your true nature but also to delay rituals and give your system the opportunity to habituate to the anxiety accompanying obsessions. I want you to take a moment and, unless you’re driving, close your eyes. Either lie down on a yoga mat or sit in a chair with a straight spine and feet flat on the floor. To begin, let’s do a few rounds of Alternate Nostril Breathing (nadi shodhana), which is a pranayama breathing exercise used in yoga for grounding. Breathing is excellent preparation for any kind of meditation. I’ll include a link below about this particular breathing exercise, and we’ll also discuss its benefits in a future episode. For now, just take your right hand and close off your right nostril with your thumb. Inhale through the left nostril. At the top of the inhale, close off the left nostril with your ring finger, open the right nostril and exhale through the right nostril. Then, keep the left nostril closed off and inhale through the right nostril. At the top of the inhale, close off the right nostril and exhale through the left. Repeat the cycle inhaling through the left. Do a couple more rounds on your own.

When you’re ready, relax your arms by your sides and continue to breathe in and out by the nose normally. I invite you to willfully direct your focus back to your thoughts. Imagine you’re sitting at a window in a room watching them. Where are the thoughts in relationship to you, and how do you see them moving? Are they simply strolling by at a distance like people on a street, and it’s like you’re watching them from the window above? If so, what do you notice that you feel while you watch these passerby? Is it disinterest or curiosity or a combination of both? Are there any sensations in your body? Alternatively, is it more like your thoughts are in the room with you, swinging from the furniture like monkeys swinging from vines so that you feel like you need to duck left and right to stay safe? What do you noticing feeling, being in such close proximity with your thoughts? Next, what do your thoughts sound like to you? Are they quiet and muffled like passerby on the street, or are they high-pitched and shrieking? Are they loud and booming like howling monkeys? What else, if anything, do you notice in the room or when you look out the window on the street below? What color are the walls painted, and is there sunlight? I’m going to be quiet for a moment to give you time notice. There are no right or wrong things to notice here.

Now, sitting at this window, if your OCD isn’t already triggered at the moment, I invite you to remember one of the last times you were triggered. In your body, conjure the familiar sensations of when your thoughts move chaotically and repetitively in what feels like close, threatening proximity to you. I understand that you came here seeking an exit from your obsessions, but what if I told you that the only way out is in? Remember that you’re here because you want to learn a new way of being. You’ve tried escaping your obsessions and anxiety enough times without finding freedom from them, and you feel ready for a new approach to extricating yourself from the circus in your brain. You’re aware that there’s a self in you that’s separate from your OCD and totally worth extricating. If you weren’t aware of this self, or it didn’t exist, you wouldn’t be here. That being said, please feel free to consciously take a break or skip ahead to the next episode at any time. You can always return to this part of the episode, perhaps the next time you’re triggered. All of this is a mere invitation. You’re the one who makes the choice to be here and develop your skills for tolerating discomfort, and it’s that deliberate choice that will help you change your brain. However, our capacity for doing this work varies depending on the day.

Now let’s continue. Just for a few moments, I invite you to do the opposite of what your fear tells you to do and to stay with the physiological sensations that arise instead of searching for an exit. What do you notice? Are your hands beginning to sweat? Maybe you feel your blood pulsing in your temples, or you notice a tightening in your chest or throat. Perhaps there’s pressure building in your head. Now imagine ushering these sensations along with the thoughts that produced them to a table that’s in this room where you’re sitting. Invite them all to sit for tea, where you’ve prepared your favorite tea in your favorite pot. What does your favorite tea smell like? Now lean into these thoughts and sensations and, as if they were your guests, welcome them. Open your mouth, and say, “Hello again.” I want you to actually say it out loud. What does your voice sound like to you?

In this moment, can you see that you’re not your thoughts or bodily sensations? Can you feel that you’re the one having tea with them as well as the one picturing yourself having tea? Are you aware that it’s you and not your OCD who is doing all this noticing? Yes, that’s you. Hello, and bienvenue.

Nothing about these sensations you’re spending time with is new. It’s what you experience whenever you have a thought that produces intense fear and anxiety. It’s what you feel whenever you have the urge to react to the reaction in your own brain in an effort to decrease the sensations in your body. Once you get involved in the drama by doing whatever the actors in your brain command you to do it, you always feel the same temporary relief followed by a return of the thought, fear, and urge to ritualize. The relief never feels like total relaxation, as it’s always tinged with its own kind anxiety. After all, you know it’s only a matter of time before your brain returns to the same obsession or produces a new one. And then the cycle repeats. The content of your thoughts changes, but the feelings and the obsessive-compulsive dialogue are always the same.

Okay, now bring your awareness back to the feeling of your feet on the floor beneath you, the coolness or warmth of the air on your skin. Tune into the sound of my voice and any other sounds in your immediate environment. Good. How do you feel now? Maybe you still notice the familiar sensations of anxiety, but there’s only a residue of them. Maybe you brain is a little bit less focused on the content of the obsessions. Something has shifted. You’ve made a connection with YOU and what’s around you right now. You were the one who courageously held yourself in the sensations and noticed them instead of ritualizing or otherwise distracting yourself. You were the one who refocused on the sound of my voice and the sounds in your environment.

Changing how we look at and talk about the circus in the brain helps us start to create a little bit of order out of the abstract disorder. A little bit of ease from the disease. And I’m not talking about the kind of order your OCD Gremlin might love, where all the hangers in the closet are arranged exactly two finger’s width apart. By the way, this is a ritual I used to do. I remember staying awake all night in a hotel the night before a college track meet and, while my teammates slept, arranging the hangers that had nothing on them in the closet over and over again. When I say making order out of disorder, I’m talking about moving from mental chaos to a sense of peace, clarity and understanding.

So how can you get started on your own? Of course, whenever you have a sticky thought, you can practice pausing to become aware of the sensations in your body and connect with your essential self through observation. Alternate nostril breathing followed by picturing yourself in a room welcoming them for tea is always available to you. At first, the exercise might indeed feel unnatural, especially if you feel like you’re standing in the middle of a dangerous circus where you need to protect and defend yourself. You brain has deep grooves in it that you’ve carved out over the course of many years, and this practice is going to feel a bit like forging a new path with a lawn mower that has never done anything other than go up and down in straight lines in the same field. There’s going to be some resistance. But practice pausing, breathing, and noticing your thoughts anyway. Do it over and over again. After becoming aware of the sensations in your body, you can always check in with yourself and see if you still want to ritualize. Maybe you do, maybe you don’t, but either way, you still trained your brain that the feeling isn’t an emergency and that the ritual could wait. And you might find that, by giving your body a chance to feel the anxiety first and get used to it a little bit, your fear decreases. You’ve sent signals to your brain that the anxiety isn’t dangerous, and the urge to ritualize might feel less intense.

 No, this isn’t any kind of magical antidote that will instantly make your obsessions and compulsions vanish and help you live happily ever after. Disentangling from what’s happening in your brain and then changing your brain doesn’t happen overnight. You can’t go on Amazon Prime and order a brain with new neural pathways that will get delivered to your doorstep tomorrow. That would be like somebody who hasn’t worked out in twenty years expecting a strong, balanced body after one or two workouts. You didn’t get to where you are in a day, and you’re not going to get to where you’re going in a day either. But the regular practice of shifting your focus away from the content of your obsessions to the sensations in your body can be incredibly powerful on a number of levels. Little by little, your OCD tolerance muscles will get stronger, and you’ll feel closer to yourself.

To conclude today’s episode, let’s shift back into logical, rational mode. It always feels more or less the same when you experience the intense urge to ritualize and then you do it, doesn’t it? No matter what the ritual is. Isn’t this evidence that you’re not reacting to external events, situations, or realities themselves? When you break it down this way, using reason and intellect, sort of like a scientist, you suddenly feel less afraid and a little bit more in control—the feelings you were looking for by ritualizing in the first place. Because you see that hey, this is the very specific thing that seems to always happen in my biochemistry in this very specific way. It helps you see that the anxiety you experience is totally unconnected to your external reality or to who you actually are. If it was connected to that reality or to who you are—a creative, nuanced human being—wouldn’t it be less formulaic? Like, wouldn’t needing to put toothpaste on your tongue a special way until you gag feel very different than needing to check your ex-boyfriend’s Instagram page every three minutes even though he hasn’t posted anything since 2019? All rituals I used to perform, by the way. Like, I actually used to sleep with a tube of toothpaste in my bed. 

But you know what? I’m not ashamed, and I know it wasn’t me, it was just my OCD. I also had really fresh breath in the morning. On that note, that it’s for today. Talk to you next time!