I want to start a little motion in our heads. It’s an idea about how we would feel without OCD.
This is going to be a brief burst of thoughts that could help you get started in dealing with your OCD.
What would it feel like to not have intrusive thoughts or the need to engage in compulsions? Let’s imagine together.
You wake up in the morning feeling nothing in particular. There are no nudges to do things. You simply lie in your bed and enjoy the moment. You wake up and go to the bathroom without any specific compulsion. The only habits you notice are when you open and close the door or when you switch on the light in the next room you enter.
You brush your teeth, contemplating your day ahead. There are some thoughts about yesterday, but you feel alright. There is no need to do anything other than brush your teeth and think about the day ahead.
You put on some clothes without getting caught in any particular habit. You are in the flow, gliding through the mundane tasks of your life. There is no need for anything more than that.
You breathe the way you want and go about things the way you want, and there is nothing else demanding your attention throughout the day. Your tasks are in front of you without much else happening.
You end your day by reading a book and reflecting in your journal. There are no urges to do anything else. The flow continues until you fall asleep.
Ah, this is something so beautiful… for someone who suffers from OCD? Definitely!
Let’s take a look at what we can do to help us get to a better place.
Let me share my experiences of how I began to cope with my OCD so far.
What a beautiful life it would be if we didn’t suffer from OCD, right? How would we fill the time that we would gain from not coping with compulsions? Oh, it sounds like music to my ears. It would be a seamless flow of movements, like effortlessly flying. I would enjoy every minute of it.
You know what’s funny? I could imagine myself without OCD, but I wasn’t able to experience it firsthand until I tried affirmations and manifestation. I visualized myself without the compulsions, realizing that even though intrusive thoughts occurred now and then, I could easily dismiss them. I not only saw it in my mind, but I also felt it. And let me tell you, this imaginative visualization with feeling made a difference. (First, I began with a breathwork session to calm myself and enter a deeper meditative state. Only after that did I proceed to my affirmations and manifestation phase.)
I haven’t fully recovered from OCD, but I’m on my way. There’s more to it, but these two concepts—imagination and feeling—have helped me begin to cope with OCD. I have become able to share my struggles for the first time in my life despite feeling nervous. By doing so, I lessened the power of OCD over me. Imagining and feeling the outcome of not having Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and then sharing my experience marked a significant turning point in my problems. I become more liberated each day.
It’s a conscious choice, not something you can do passively in the background. If you’ve been grappling with OCD for years, as I did, obsessions and compulsive habits are deeply ingrained in you. You probably perform them unconsciously. To change them, you must be present. It’s not an easy task initially, but once you become accustomed to creating new habits, you’ll be on your way to a more mindful life where OCD doesn’t dominate everything. Let me tell you that once you find a method that works for you, you’ll be on the path to freedom. It takes time and effort, as anything worthwhile does.
This was the first step—imagining what it would be like to be free from OCD. I felt the liberation, and it led me to the second step.
Bury It
What worked for me was burying my old self, the “I” that was so compulsive. I mourned for days as if someone had died. It was difficult and painful, but it allowed me to start afresh with my new self, my “new I.”
You have a blank page, and it’s up to you what you want to write on it. What directions will you choose? What identity do you want to embrace?
I reached this phase because I was tired of being obsessive and compulsive. I despised it to the core.
It’s not as if I no longer have any compulsions or intrusive thoughts. They are still there. However, I am better equipped to cope with them now than ever before. I can manage myself because I am new. The shift in identity is crucial. We undergo an identity shift when we have a near-death experience or when something truly significant happens in our lives. In this case, it’s something we create to break free from this rut.
Try preparing your new identity. Write it down on a piece of paper, allowing your brain to organize your thoughts as you write. There’s no need to rush on the keyboard. Let your hand move slowly with a pen. Your brain will appreciate it.
Sometimes, we seek out possible solutions and believe that there must be something deeper that can change our lives. But it doesn’t have to be necessarily true.
Try it for yourself, and see what unfolds for you. Try writing your day in life without OCD on a piece of paper. You’ll feel good about it. Then, implement the necessary steps to have such a day. For me, it was a burial of my old self. After all, we are all unique, and that’s the beauty of it.
That’s it. That’s my secret to start coping with OCD. Oh, I almost forgot about the phase of overcoming fear, but you can read about it here.
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I consider this blog a calling. I never realized that before. But now I know what my calling is, and I want to continue to improve and help us better manage our OCD. I know how limiting OCD is. I’ve lived with it for more than 24 years. It’s time to learn as much as we can about this disorder to not only cope with it, but to actually get better.
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