Ego is the name of the Game

The subject of OCD matters to the sufferer because it feels like confirmation that they are fundamentally unlovable and unwanted—as if even existence itself doesn’t want them. They feel like an error, carrying a deep sense of guilt and shame, as if they were inherently wrong. They suffer from low self-esteem and a deep internalized shame, because long ago, they were fragmented and learned a pattern of fundamental distrust—especially self-distrust. But the real trouble doesn’t come from the content of the most vile or taboo thoughts. It comes from the fact that the sufferer lacks self-love. That’s why, when you begin to walk the road to recovery, you’re taught unconditional self-acceptance—because that’s what all sufferers of OCD have in common: if you aren’t 100% sure, if there isn’t absolute certainty, the doubt will continue to attack you and your core values. It will make you doubt everything—even your own aversion to the thoughts. You have to relearn how to trust yourself—not because you accept that you might become a murderer someday—but because you enter a deep state of acceptance about who you truly are. It’s not about becoming a monster at all. It’s about making peace with what lies at the root of the fear. Making peace with the guilt. With the shame. Making peace with yourself and the person you fear you might be. Because that fear is not rooted in reality. It’s not rooted in any true desire to act. It’s rooted in your identity—specifically, in what might threaten it. That’s what confirms the belief that you are fundamentally wrong. And OCD fuels that belief by using intrusive taboo thoughts to attack your very sense of self. But then I wonder: let’s say, for example, someone fears being or becoming a sexually dangerous person—how could that person practice unconditional self-acceptance? I would never accept myself if I were to harm anyone—the thought alone makes me want to cry. I know it’s not about whether or not someone acts on the thought. It’s about the core fear underneath it. So how do you accept yourself when the thoughts—and the feelings around them—feel so completely unacceptable ?

We who live with OCD are really good at one thing. We can ruminate for hours. We can even make up false memories and believe them to be true. But above all, we are good at attaching meaning to our thoughts. Where the average mind naturally shifts forward to the next thing, our minds crave certainty, and that craving drives us to assign significance to nearly every thought that passes through. Whether it is trying to make peace with a thought through rumination or trying to deny it outright through suppression, these are all what we would call compulsions. But beneath that label, they are really just reactions to the meaning we have attached. It is like a smoke alarm that goes off in the kitchen every time you make toast. The alarm is not broken. It is just hypersensitive. It reacts as if there is a fire when in reality there is no danger at all. OCD is like having that alarm wired directly into your mind. Thoughts that are harmless or uncertain set off the siren, and our compulsions are the frantic rush to put out a fire that does not exist. From birth, and more intensely for those with OCD, our minds were trained to attach meaning to every thought, feeling, and sensation. OCD, at its core, is compulsive meaning attachment: the inability to stop assigning significance to thoughts that are uncertain, unknowable, or meaningless. What I have been discovering in my own journey is this: yes, it is important to stop engaging with compulsions. But there is a deeper step too, which is learning to stop attaching meaning in the first place. Letting the thought be just a thought. Letting the toast cook without grabbing the fire extinguisher. I am not here to hand you a 10-step miracle cure. If there was one, we would all take it in a heartbeat. But I am here to share what has been working for me, and how by loosening the grip on meaning itself, I have found a surprising amount of peace.

I am learning to shift my center of awareness from trying to control my obsessions to observing my obsessions…the art of detachment. When it comes to OCD, we need to no longer identify with the mind and instead zoom out as the observer…not a critic or judger of the mind who needs to figure it out, control it, fear it, feed it, but simply observe it. From there, our freedom lays. This is the gift of developing sacred presence. Not losing ourselves in intrusive thoughts, but transmuting them into presence, awareness, and choice…the choice of compassion in the face of compulsion, courage in the face of uncertainty, and love in the face of fear. Anyone else practicing this type of detachment from the intrusive thoughts and shifting into the observer of the mind instead of prisoner of the mind?