OCD: You Do Not Have a Monster in Your Brain

If you or someone you know has ocd behavior, please do not refer to this behavior as an OCD monster. Why did anyone come up with the idea that having a monster in your brain would help make anything better?

Instead of a monster, how about a metaphor like:

It’s just a random radio station that you’re picking up, and you’re thinking it’s broadcasting just for you, but really, it’s not for you.

It’s just the stuff your brain has recorded from all the tv shows and movies you’ve ever seen, combined with all the conversations and experiences you’ve ever had, all strung together randomly, and your attention is making it mean something based on whatever mood or belief you happen to be having about yourself in the moment.

Feeling stupid? Well what you’ll pick up from that radio station is all the stuff to support that. Feeling guilty? Welp, you’ll sift out all the stuff from that station to support whatever you think you should feel guilty for. A terrible person? Same thing. Unlovable? Yup. Same thing.

The more you listen to that station for support or evidence, the more you’re going to keep revisiting the station to see if that evidence is still there, and the more you still see it, the more you’re going to think you’ve got an enemy within because guess what? That broadcast is never going to change... And why won’t it ever change? Because it’s not actually made for you, anymore than the radio in a car is made for you. It’s just streaming noise.

So the work to disempower the behavior called OCD is not to battle any monster. It’s to reframe the messages. It’s to teach the suffering person that THEY are the meaning-maker, that THEY are the listener and that THEY can also learn to be their own broadcaster.

You might think, “Well, let’s teach them to change the channel!” Brilliant. Except that they can’t exactly change the channel bc they don’t have another channel yet, but... they can begin to create one by practicing being a broadcaster.

And the way to become a broadcaster is to develop one’s voice.

There are so many ways for a person to develop their own voice. One way is for the person to listen to that original broadcast from a new context—a context where the person asks, “I wonder where all this stuff came from?” And begin to contemplate the answer...

“Maybe this particular thing I’m picking up is a coping mechanism I came up with to deal with a traumatic experience I had... Let’s investigate...”

“Maybe this voice is something I internalized from some unkind thing someone said... Let’s investigate...”

“Perhaps this stream of stuff is simply the random associations my mind has strung together because I’m so damn creative and I never even realized it before! Wow—I could be making art instead of imagining these random associations are trying to tell me something horrible about myself!”

Again, for a person to create a new channel, they need a new voice to broadcast new content. And the name of the new channel being broadcasted might well be called, ‘Unravelling The Upsetting Stuff With Understanding And Compassion To Make Sense of It.’

And by practicing being the broadcaster, the person begins to get used to their own voice making sense of what’s happening in any given moment—which is called developing one’s own perspective.

Meaning, the voice they hear themselves using is the voice that gets to say what kind of meaning they’ll make from now on, when they hear whatever they hear on the inside of their brain or out there in the world.

At some point, when the person gets used to hearing their own perspective, they will begin to trust their own perspective, and even rely on their own perspective. And they might begin to notice something else. Something very interesting. That all the other noise in the background has lost its inherent meaning.

Because without our assigning meaning to it, it really does begin to sound just like a bunch of white noise. Like a channel that’s lost its reception. In fact, it might even remind you of the sound of your breathing when you notice you’re breathing.

One’s breathing is very closely related to one’s voice. In fact, even when the voice of the broadcaster gets tired and goes off-air, the breath is still there with you—going in when it goes in, and going out when it goes out—until the moment you die.

Once a person realizes they can count on these anchors within—the voice of their perspective and their breath—they will begin to realize how sacred these things are.

And once a person begins honoring the sacredness of their perspective and their breath, it gets a lot easier to pause before internalizing and making meaning of the random noise of the world because it no longer has anything to do with the incredible person they now know themselves to be.

We can’t keep the world ‘out there’ separate from the stuff inside us, but we can choose what meaning we give it.

It takes a lot of practice to develop and trust one’s own voice. But goodness gracious, it’s not going to take as long as expecting to win a battle with a monster in your brain. Because who can relax when there’s a monster in your brain?

*This is not intended to shame anyone. Or replace any medical advice. And I would never make any assumptions that these ideas will work for everyone. (Sometimes it takes medication to soften the glue of one’s attention in order to shift its focus to something new. And sometimes, OCD is caused by conditions that cause brain inflammation, which requires a lot of additional support other than just shifting lenses through metaphor.) These are just some things I’ve learned from experience.

—JLK