Radical Hope for OCD

Three quick and easy strategies to recenter when OCD strikes.

Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

Key points

• No matter what type of OCD you have, radical compassion and curiosity brings you back to your center.
• When OCD strikes, be an empathy detective and befriend your bad feelings.
• When your OCD triggers you, use your curiosity to find the nuance.

You begin to obsess about whether your significant other is truly "the one." You start to worry that you didn't wash your hands after taking out the trash. You fear that you may give your own child a sickness from which they may never recover.

When your OCD mind circles the drain, you can feel it. Here's your three C's approach to recenter: radical compassion and curiosity about context.

1. Radical Compassion: Be an Empathy Detective

Accept and befriend your feelings, especially the ones you automatically judge as bad.

With relationship OCD, you're not just afraid to lose your partner because they are the best person you've ever dated, you also feel guilty that:

• I don't feel more grateful for them. Bad.
• I don't love every side of them. Horrible.
• I don't want to remember the horrible relationships I've witnessed in my childhood. Terrifying.

Be with all this "bad" stuff with openness, just as you would when talking with someone you love. You have the right to feel these feelings, and you deserve permission to be with them more compassionately.

2. Radical Curiosity: Get to the Nuance

If your contamination OCD gets triggered, see if you can circle back and get curious (and compassionate too).

Was I just feeling great and now I'm worried that the world is going to ruin the perfection of it? Am I feeling overloaded and overstimulated? Have I been giving too much of myself away and need to create a healthy boundary?

OCD will short-circuit you straight to the negative instead of opening up to the nuance. When we get curious with our OCD, we relate to it as a messenger rather than a bully, a frenemy rather than a mere enemy.

OCD is trying to tell you something in an over-the-top and completely exaggerated way. By moving into your feelings with compassion and curiosity, you better decode what OCD is trying to say.

Don't worry, doing this isn't going to take you down a rabbit hole or provide toxic reassurance. Why? Mindful self-compassion and curiosity enlarge the context of our OCD so that we have a better handle on it so we don't even need reassurance. We get back to the center of ourselves, and that's where begin to trust again. That's how you feel empowered again.

3. Context Is Everything: Perform Upside Magic

OCD performs a sleight of hand that distracts you from both your feelings and the nuance you need to find yourself again. But, if you look at the context, you also discover that surprise, surprise, OCD is also trying to focus you. That's what I call upside magic!

During the COVID pandemic, I had a health OCD spike where I worried about a toothache that might send me to the dentist and inadvertently kill my family. I obsessed that I might catch COVID if I got it taken care of or that I'd catch something else if I didn't get it fixed. Talk about a catch-22!

I used upside magic—compassion and curiosity—to find my center again. I tuned into the feelings I was avoiding and suppressing.

I wasn't just profoundly afraid, I felt sad and guilty too. I was sad to watch my 3-year-old son growing up in this scary time and felt guilty that I couldn't make it better for him. I also felt selfish that though I lived close to the epicenter of the outbreak, I was enjoying the joy of missing out sides of the pandemic too.

Once I focused in with compassion and curiosity on the context of my OCD spike, I found myself again. Even better, I felt enlarged.

This is the radical hope and heart you can bring to your OCD whenever it strikes. And that's where you'll find yourself again, no matter what OCD throws at you.

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