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Something happened. It didn’t feel right. And your mind — possibly your infant mind or adolescent mind — said, “That was awful. I’m never going to let that happen again.” Then it tried an array of potential solutions to ensure that that traumatic event never occurs again.
Now it is 10 or 20 or 30 years later and the problem is gone, but your younger mind’s solution still exists.
And that “solution” — those compulsive behaviors and obsessive thoughts — has been pathologized and given a name: it is now called Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. It is a dis-order. Orderly minded people do not suffer from it. If your mind were ordered correctly, or correctly ordered, it would not operate like this.
We agree that there is no gene that causes people to check their stoves or the locks on their doors hundreds of times before leaving the house — correct? OCD is not something that anyone is born with. It is a reaction. It is your younger mind’s best shot at allaying or resolving a traumatic situation.
For me, the narrative is as follows: I was 18 years old. A hole had been drilled through the top of my tibia to pull my knee down from my hip and straighten out my mangled leg using a 40-pound pulley. (For those who managed to escape anatomy class, the tibia is the large bone below the knee inside of the leg; it is located under the skin and cartilage, so you can imagine the amount of spurting blood caused by a power drill going in one side of a leg, through the bone, and out of the other side.) Aside from being in agonizing pain from multiple fractures of my femur, for one week, I had to suffer the humiliation of not being able to get out of traction and the hospital bed to go to a bathroom. I was not in control. My health and safety and cleanliness depended 100% on an array of people dressed in white smocks being rung to bring me bed pans.
I believe that my mind said, “This is awful. I am not in control. I cannot even perform basic bodily functions without calling for help. This is humiliating. There’s no privacy. I am never going to let this happen again.”
I became hyper-vigilant. Deep in my subconscious, I reckoned that if I controlled all controllable aspects of my life, my femur would never be shattered again.
Later, I began to notice symptoms diagnosable as OCD: repeatedly checking door locks, adamantly believing I left the stove on, highly intense organization and labeling of files, overzealous cleaning, paying all bills as soon as they were received and well in advance (830/850 credit score — yippee!).
From all of my academic studies over the past 40 years, I feel confident in stating that the past does not exist, no longer exists. There may be photos, memories, recordings, and even scars, but that week 42 years ago, when I was physically incapacitated, has not existed for a long time. In fact, today I practiced yoga, then rode my bike to the sauna, then went for a swim, then rode my Vespa to dinner at my favorite restaurant: not possible for someone immobile in a hospital bed.
And yet, the defense mechanisms that my mind created to try to stave off another incapacitating situation has occupied a disproportionate amount of my mental life for many years and upset friends who had to wait in the street while I checked my stove and front door lock again and again. (On the other hand, my landlord in Paris didn’t seem terribly dismayed when I paid my rent two years in advance.)
When patients come into my office complaining about similar compulsive behaviors or obsessive thoughts, I ask them to assume a meditative posture and then we gently walk their minds backwards until they find when these “solutions” first appeared.
Then we discuss what was going in the patient’s life at that time and find anything that a young mind might find traumatic — their parents’ divorce, a betrayal, an abandonment, a fall, the death of a loved one, a supposed failure, a humiliation, a car accident, a loss — and discuss all of the feelings around the event.
Then we temporarily create a narrative about the origin of the obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors. Then I ask a series of often absurd, rhetorical, and thought-provoking questions to demonstrate that the event and trauma are long gone and the younger mind’s “solutions” are now trying to solve a problem that no longer exists.
Finally, we create a phrase or mantra such as “I am safe” that the patient can employ whenever the obsessive or compulsive solutions re-appear.
And if that doesn’t work, photographing the dials on the stove and videotaping yourself locking the door are also excellent ways of reality-checking.
