by Jeff Bell
I leave Unity Village without reporting my door or my shower or the spider I killed.
I leave thinking this was the best investment—financial and otherwise—that I have ever made.
I leave knowing that I have found everything I was looking for here.
Three hours later I discover I was wrong. It seems there is at least one other thing I was supposed to find.
I am standing in a waiting area in the Kansas City Airport when I put all this together. I am killing time before my flight back to California, staring at a pamphlet on the floor and shaking my head. Thirty seconds ago this pamphlet had been ten feet away from me. Out of habit, really, I started wondering whether someone might slip on it and fall. I knew I couldn’t pick it up, not after all the progress I’d made this past week. But then I noticed the three words printed on its two-by-five-inch cover: The Golden Key. Intriguing, I had to admit after a week like this past one. I walked over for a closer look and discovered that this brochure was, of all things, a Unity reprint of an old Emmet Fox article. Fox has been my favorite “New Thought” writer for years. I have a boxed anthology of his work in my den, and I was rereading one of his books the very day I left Sacramento. So this is all a little too coincidental again.
Now, I want to pick up the brochure and read through its contents, but Doubt reminds me that it will then be my responsibility forever and ever. I certainly can’t put it back on the floor, and what if it belongs to someone who will be missing it soon?
Curiosity wins. I retrieve the pamphlet and flip through its pages, knowing in an instant that it was destined for me all along. How could it not have been? Here in my hands, in the most clear and concise language I have yet to run across, is what Emmet Fox calls a “scientific prayer” technique aimed at keeping users from dwelling on their worries.
The key, he advises, is to drive distressing thoughts out of one’s consciousness by replacing them, if only for a few moments, with thoughts of God (truth, wisdom, and love, for example). Big troubles, little troubles: it’s entirely possible, he says, to “golden key” them all with this thought-substitution process.
Damn. Isn’t this a spiritual application of the very same refocusing technique that Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz and other OCD specialists advocate? Is this not a practical means by which an OC like myself can manually do what my faulty caudate nucleus is supposed to, but cannot, do for me automatically—namely switch gears, move on, change the subject? And isn’t Fox’s essay, written way back in 1931, presenting all this as a simple, willful choice between thoughts of doubt and thoughts of what I’ve come to think of as the higher power behind a greater good?
For years now, I’ve been trying to reconcile my traditional OCD therapy with my slowly growing understanding of spiritual principles. I have struggled to explain to Jackie and other mental health professionals just how helpful “practical spirituality” has been for me in dealing with my obsessions and compulsions. Likewise, I have had only limited success making sense of traditional behavior therapy for Wayne and others in the clergy. Somehow it’s always struck me that the two professions are speaking different languages—describing similar principles, but in very different tongues.
As far as I’m concerned, this is the link that puts it all together. Perhaps I shouldn’t need this validation of my personal approach to my OCD recovery, but I do.
And now, it seems, I have found everything I went looking for in Kansas City.
twenty-eight
fast-forward 5 hours
Samantha and the girls pick me up at Sacramento International. Anyone watching the reception they give me might think I’ve just returned from a tour of duty in some foreign battle zone. In a lot of ways, I suppose I have.
It’s great to be back home, but as I begin unpacking my stuff and settling in, I can’t help noticing this weird time-warp phenomenon. A mere week has gone by for my family, but a seeming eternity has passed for me. My world has been turned upside down and back again, and it doesn’t seem possible that this has all happened in just seven days. I am not the same person my wife and daughters said goodbye to last Friday, nor will I ever be again. Yet nothing, nothing, has changed here at home. Sam and the girls look just the same, the weather is just as I remember it, the newspaper is following the same stories that I myself had covered before leaving, and the mail on my desk is right where I left it.
And then there’s the whole issue of attempting to convey my experience in Missouri. Do I even try? How does one go about telling someone—even his own wife—about a life-changing thunderstorm? Or about a pamphlet he found with The Golden Key? The short answer seems to be, you don’t. I reason there will be plenty of time later. It’s all right there on my index cards, if and when I ever have the nerve.
Cathleen calls a couple days later to see how I’m doing “back in the real world.”
I’m not sure. It’s been a tough adjustment, tougher than I’d anticipated, returning to all the chaos that is my daily life in Sacramento. My spirits are up. My attitude is in the right place. But any delusions I might have had about leaving my OCD back in Missouri are now ancient history. I’ve already battled my way though several episodes since returning and have caught myself reviewing a handful of tapes. Still, for what it’s worth, I’m finding that my checking drills now feel “wrong.” Any quick relief they bring me is more than countered by a sense of having sold myself short. I guess it’s the integrity part of my believing pyramid.
Carole and I kick all this around a few days later. She wants to hear every last detail about Unity Village. Carole may be the one person in my world who fully understands what my trip was all about. She herself has not traveled outside of Sacramento more than a half-dozen times over the past ten years. Too many OCD challenges, even with her husband, Bud, right by her side. If only vicariously, Carole wants to take in this magical place in Missouri she’s heard so much about.
She wants to make sure I’m getting it all down in print.
There’s nothing like counting days to make you appreciate the fleeting nature of time. Of the 365 I’ve committed to my project, exactly 265 of them have now passed and are recorded for posterity on the cards stacked in front of me. Some quick math tonight tells me a mere hundred days remain. This is sobering. It wasn’t all that long ago that a year seemed like an eternity, more than enough time to get a handle on my OCD and turn my life around. But now October 21 is staring me right in the face. The pressure is on, and I’m feeling it.
It’s time to get serious.
It’s time to put into practice everything I’ve been working on with my believing model—not just some of the time, but all of the time.
It’s time to start holding the line on my compulsions—the checking, the tape reviewing, the confessing, the hand-washing, the reassurance seeking—not only when I’m feeling strong, but even when I’m not.
It’s time to push myself harder with each passing day.
Notching up the discomfort—that’s what Jackie always used to call it. She’s thrilled to hear me using the term now in a phone session as I describe my plans for the coming three months. She’s also duly impressed when I recite my laundry list of accomplishments from the Kansas City trip.
“Good, Jeff!” she says, again and again.
In our three years together, I can’t think of a time I’ve felt better at the end of our fifty minutes.
I start counting down the days on my calendar. Ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety-seven, ninety-six … I force myself to go through an entire afternoon without playing back an aircheck in search of missed spots. I drag myself to the self-serve soda fountain and get my own drink. I leave the corner of a curled-up floor mat just as I found it.
Ninety-five, ninety-four, ninety-three, ninety-two …
I pass on my nightly “checking time” with Sam. I take a trip to San Francisco with Cathleen and several friends and survive five trips to public bathrooms. I invite a co-worker out to lunch and offer to drive.
One
hundred days become thirty before I know it. Now there is only one month to go. It’s time again to notch up the discomfort. I am still “cheating” too much, finding far too many clever and subtle ways to get my checking fixes, especially from Sam. So I pull her aside on September 21 and tell her I won’t be asking her opinion about anything for the next thirty days.
“Okay,” she says, more than a little amused.
“It’s the only way,” I explain.
“I won’t be insulted.”
I can tell she’s not taking me seriously.
“Just look away if I ask you about anything,” I tell her. “If I ask you whether you think I’m ready to tackle this or that, or if I ask you whether you agree I’ve handled something or another correctly. Even if I ask you whether my blue tie works with my pinstriped Oxford.”
“You got it,” my wife says, and I can only wonder what’s going through her head.
Later in my den, I make another commitment as well. I promise myself I will go out of my way to tackle at least ten OCD challenges every day. I will note them on the back of my index cards with little triangles, just as Nicole and her Girl Scout friends collect triangular “Try-It” badges on their scouting vests.
It’s another little game, but it quickly proves effective. Day after day, I fill up the backs of my cards with tiny triangles. I put one down for the piece of plywood I drive over without doubling back to check on. I put one down for the paperback I return to a shelf at Barnes & Noble after perusing with my germ-infested hands. I put one down for the small puddle of Pepsi that I don’t report to the guy behind the hot dog counter.
It’s not long before I’m running out of three-by-five space for all my index card Try-It notes.
On the first Saturday in October, the station throws a company picnic by the river, and the girls and I make what I figure to be a quick appearance. We eat hot dogs and chat with a few friends, then I’m ready to go. But Janice from accounting is walking around signing up people for the three-legged race. Sam, almost sarcastically, dares me to give it a try with her. She thinks I’m kidding when I take off after Janice to grab one of the ties. But five minutes later, there we are banging into everyone with our legs bound together. The wheelbarrow race is next and my kid-at-heart wife decides to push her luck. “How could it be any worse?” she argues. So I agree to give it a go.
We come in second. Smash into another tandem along the way. Laugh at the absurdity of it all.
Tangled up with me at the finish line, Sam whispers, “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were having fun.”
She’s right. And I can’t even think of the last time anyone might have caught me “having fun.” There just hasn’t been a lot of room for such a luxury amidst all of Doubt’s demands.
But maybe this is a turning point. Maybe I am back in the game in more ways than one.
twenty-nine
fast-forward 18 days
10:45 p.m., Day 365.
I am sitting at my den desk, agonizing over the precise words that should occupy the last fifteen square inches of lined white space in front of me. The right words to button up this big experiment of mine.
Nothing comes to me.
I take a minute to look around my den at my many treasured mementos of the past twelve months. On my wall: a framed color photo of Unity Village that Cathleen had enlarged for me. On my shelves: at least two dozen thoroughly highlighted new books covering everything from traditional psychology to practical spirituality, along with my dog-eared Emmet Fox treasure from the floor of the Kansas City airport. And on my desk: a well-weathered cardboard pyramid and thousands of neatly stacked and categorized index cards just waiting for one more to forever join their ranks.
I begin pulling out, looking over, and trying to make sense of my three-by-five cards. There are so many of them now, each like a thumbnail snapshot at a multimedia Web site—“Click here to watch a streaming video of this image.” I do this because that’s how my head works, and because that’s the only way I know how to process the events of my life. But my playbacks tonight are my own. It is I, and not Doubt, in charge of what images I see and how many times I choose to review them. Easily and without even a hint of anxiety, I shuffle from one scene to another—from my dip in the pool in Missouri to Nicole’s father-daughter dance, from the moonlit creek in Joy’s backyard to the recent company picnic. Sequence after sequence, I play back my tapes from the past 365 days, and then from the five years before them. The Boat. The bouncing body. The call to the coroner. Dr. X. Dr. Y. Dr. Z. Dr. Smith. Dr. Schwartz. Jackie. The pills. The exposures. My virtual asylum. My bargain with the stars …
My Bargain with the Stars—not much chance of glossing over that one on this night.
Oct. 20, 1998. And so ends one journey as another begins.
Now I have eight words on my index card, and it strikes me right away that they are not at all the ones I would have expected to wind up there. Day 365 was supposed to be about closure, not transitions; about walking out of a building into a field, not stepping through a narrow doorway separating one room from another. I know there’s another big project awaiting my attention, and I know it involves the very same cards now spread across my desk. I understand that what lies ahead is nothing short of a journey in and of itself, and I can now admit that I’m excited about that. But I guess it’s the “baggage” I’m taking with me that has me questioning everything. Wasn’t I supposed to be leaving all my obsessions and compulsions at the door marked Exit?
Wasn’t I supposed to be done forever with my OCD?
Sitting here tonight, I know this will not be the case, and for proof I need only look over the handful of items on my most recent episodes cards. I also know better than to be surprised. I understand, if only intellectually, that I can no more be cured of my brain disorder than a former drunk can be cured of his alcoholism. Much as he’ll always be one drink away from a night in the gutter, I suppose I will forever be one OCD episode away from my own personal hell. That illusory asylum of mine will always be waiting for me at the end of my virtual tapes.
I am, and forever will be, an obsessive-compulsive.
Ahh, so you finally admit it!
I’ve been waiting for Doubt to check in one last time during my project—waiting and challenging myself to hold my own on this all-important night. I know what’s coming.
Toss the cards.
I close my eyes.
Toss the cards and admit it’s all over. You failed.
No.
Admit it, you FAILED!
No.
This whole “project” of yours, wasn’t it all about getting over OCD?
Maybe not.
Yeah, right! Then what was it about?
I have the answer and I silently shout it: Maybe it was about learning to live with the “discomfort of uncertainty”—as Jackie had put it this morning at the end of what we triumphantly agreed would be our final phone session.
Maybe it was about coming to trust that there’s a “greater good” certainty and unlimited resources to help us find it.
Maybe it was about claiming my natural birthright of free will and using it to decide for myself who and what will direct my life.
Maybe it was about accepting that, while I cannot chase you away, Doubt, I can choose not to take my directions from you.
Silence.
Nothing now from Doubt, and this feels like such a sweet victory.
I grab my pen …
What was it I wrote one year ago tonight?
Something like “my outcome is certain
or my premise eternally flawed.” With
the same certainty I claimed back then, I
can now report that my premise—that we
have within us the “tools” to transform our
lives—is far from flawed. It is the greatest
truth I will ever know.
So here’s where I’m going to need to mess with time, to somehow morph the guy in my final 199
8 project tapes with the guy writing these words in 2006. I have to do this because after hours of trying to separate what I knew then from what I know now, I’ve decided I can’t. Not even with the help of virtual tapes and index cards. Still, I want to share with you this “greatest truth I will ever know.” The painfully obvious one about the “tools” we have to transform our lives. The one I came to understand that night. The one I have lived by ever since.
So simple, really: those tools, they are nothing more than our choices—the ones we make a thousand times a day, and the ones that, strung together, define our lives.
I know this because of all that happened during the 365 days of my crash course in believing. Nothing magic, in retrospect. Nothing even very profound. Just an application, really, of so many seemingly divergent approaches to dealing with uncertainty through the power of our choices. Jackie’s coaching. Cognitive behavioral therapy. Jerry Jampolsky’s dueling directors. Dr. Schwartz’s impartial spectators and refocusing techniques. My little cardboard pyramid. So many ways of applying the same fundamental principles of free will and belief. So many life lessons learned along the way.
The triumphs, the setbacks, the breakthroughs, the steps forward and backward on my road to recovery: all of them, I know now, were the results of my own willful application—or lack thereof—of the myriad teachings and resources made available to me. I also know now that out of the alchemy of my one-year project came a set of very specific tools I could use to cope with the day-to-day challenges of life with OCD, tools that have served me incredibly well for nearly a decade now.
