by Jeff Bell
The catch with OCD coping skills is that they’re entirely individual. Because of the wide spectrum of OCD challenges, and the unique life circumstances that each and every obsessive-compulsive brings to recovery, I’m not sure there can ever be a one-size-fits-all approach to battling this disorder. With that said, though, I do want to share with you here my own personal approach to living with OCD—first, because it’s such an integral part of my story, and second, because I’m convinced the core strategies and principles I’ve drawn on are fundamental to any OC’s recovery efforts.
So here goes:
Keep Perspective.
Take Initiative.
Release and Have Faith.
Keep Perspective.
OCD obsessions are irrational, and they’re the result of false messages sent by malfunctioning brains. This is fact. But try convincing an obsessive-compulsive in the throes of some horrific episode! In those critical moments, our fears—whether killing off swimmers in a pool with dye leaked from a thread, or causing a pedestrian landmine with a piece of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup—are very, very real to us. It’s only by cultivating perspective that we’re able to step back and see how illogical our concerns are. As any OC will tell you, this is no easy task.
Fortunately, there are some powerful, proven techniques for gaining this perspective. Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz, for example, advises OCs to recognize and “relabel” obsessions and compulsions. So when I run over a pothole and begin imagining that I might have unknowingly plowed someone down, I should force myself to say (out loud or in my head): “I am obsessing that I’ve run over some poor soul in the street” and “I’m fighting a compulsion to loop my car around to look for signs of an accident.”
Next, Schwartz suggests OCs “reattribute” these challenges, to acknowledge that they’re the medical result of biochemical issues with the brain, and not a rational concern needing our attention. While this technique is far more easily said than accomplished, it is, with time and practice, an amazingly effective tool, and it has worked wonders in my own recovery.
Perspective, too, is an OC’s means to another important end: understanding the real motives behind our compulsions. As Jackie was so skilled at pointing out to me, Captain Hazard’s seemingly magnanimous gestures to save the world were, far more often than not, nothing more than feeble attempts to save himself from future agony. Take the time I reported a few drips of water from my umbrella to the gal behind the Safeway checkout stand, prompting a code-seven alert for aisle three. After attempting to convince Jackie that it wasn’t that strange that the kid with the mop couldn’t find the “puddle,” I had to concede that, yeah, I guess I inconvenienced the store crew; and, yeah, I guess I did it so I wouldn’t have to replay tapes of the whole thing later on.
For me, finding perspective with OCD also involves a much bigger picture. It’s about coming to understand that there’s a “greater good” in every situation, and that in pursuit of these bigger-picture ideals, sacrifices (most notably, in comfort) often need to be made. When I “broke through” the stuck door at Unity Village, for example, I knew I’d obsess about potential damage later. But I also knew that a triumph this big would go a long way in helping me get my life back on track, and therefore would help me become a better husband, father, friend. Time and again, keeping sight of a greater good has allowed me to find inner strength I didn’t know I had.
Take Initiative.
Here’s an unfortunate but important reality about battling OCD: It’s hard work. Really, really, really hard work. And there are no shortcuts. Period.
This is a lesson I’ve had to learn for myself, and I suspect that’s the case with many, if not most, OCs. I spent at least a year sitting in Jackie’s office week after week, taking in her advice and nodding my head, then all but ignoring that advice between our appointments. Cognitive behavioral therapy works. I know this for a fact today. But no amount of therapy, no matter how proven, can really do an OC any good, until he or she is ready to take the initiative to implement its techniques.
What’s so significant about my Unity Village trip, I’m now convinced, is that it marked the beginning of my serious commitment to “do the hard work.” I may be the only person ever to have gone on a spiritual retreat with dozens of peace-seekers, only to stress myself out intentionally. But then again, I now know that I too was working on my own peace, albeit one near-panic-attack at a time.
At the core of OCD behavior therapy is the practice of exposure/response prevention (ERP) which, as I described earlier, centers on the notion of working to prevent compulsive responses to obsessive thoughts by delaying them in increasing durations. Without calling it out as such, I spent my week in Missouri doing just this. By exposing myself to one OCD challenge after another, and refusing to give into my compulsive urges to get Sam’s phone reassurance and report my concerns to the retreat staff, I sat with the discomfort long enough to get past the worst of it. Again, as the experts point out, it’s a desensitization process. Start by getting through one day without reporting the dripping faucet, then challenge myself to get through the week. In the end, I never did feel the need to give Wayne Manning my list of all the items I’d “broken” at the Village.
Delaying and limiting compulsions is tricky business and takes an unbelievable amount of conscious initiative, especially with a compulsion as easy to slip into as mental checking. As I’ve learned from Dr. Schwartz, active refocusing is definitely the key (the “golden key,” as Emmet Fox puts it). When I’m compelled to sit in a room and replay tapes of a lane-change, for example, I force myself to engage my mind in some other activity—usually tackling some writing project. (For years, it’s been working on this very book that has saved me time and again!) There is no OCD coping practice that I work with more in my day-to-day life than this one.
Another harsh reality of OCD treatment is that it’s not enough to simply react to challenges as they come. ERP is most effective when it’s done proactively. Trust me, the last thing an OC wants to do is spend time between episodes creating new ones; but that, I’ve learned from Jackie, is the only way serious progress is made. Over the years, Jackie sent me home with numerous homework assignments, from driving down narrow streets to putting myself in situations in which I couldn’t wash. Only when I finally started doing my homework did I begin to learn my own capabilities. Challenging myself is an ongoing process I know I’ll never be able to stop without risking relapse.
Like finding perspective, taking initiative in battling OCD is, in my mind, a very life-affirming process. It’s claiming and exercising one’s innate freedom of choice, and I’ve learned a great deal about the practice from so many authors who write not about mental health, but about spiritual growth. In his book Your Sacred Self, Dr. Wayne Dyer talks extensively about taking initiative through our “willingness” to pursue our goals. Following his lead years ago, I wrote down for myself a series of “willingness commitments” based on my belief model, and I’ve tried to take the initiative to recite them every day ever since. When I think about Strength, for example, I remind myself that I must be willing to “resist reassurance and sacrifice comfort” and “find the courage to meet every challenge.”
Willingness and initiative, I’ve come to understand, go hand in hand.
Release and Have Faith.
One of the great ironies about learning to manage OCD is that to battle your obsessions, you’ve got to accept them. Anyone who’s ever taken the challenge to avoid thinking about, say, purple elephants knows that it’s impossible, and that purple elephants will, in fact, consume your mind as you try in vain to do this. Such is the case with obsessions. The more we OCs attempt to fight them off, the more they’re certain to lodge themselves front and center in our heads. The answer, I have learned, is to acknowledge, label, and accept obsessions, and in so doing, allow ourselves to release our attachments to them. Seemingly paradoxical, it’s another powerful exercise, but it also takes a great deal of faith.
A
s I explained earlier, obsessions feel very real to OCs. To release them requires that we move past chemically based emotion to some deeper level of knowing. For me, this has meant coming to understand that there’s a greater good in every moment, and that by tapping into some inner source of strength and comfort (my inner-believer), I can find the faith to move beyond faulty physiology.
Release, for me, is also very much about letting go of the past and the future, maybe the toughest challenge for OCs or anyone struggling with uncertainty. Director Doubt wants me to obsess over past mistakes and what horrific things they’ll mean for the future. Only through release can I attempt to find peace in the present. Sometimes it takes a bolt of lightning (literally, as I found in Missouri) to snap us back to the present, but with meditation and other exercises, mindful awareness of the present can also be learned. It’s taken me all these years to put this together, but I’m now convinced that the real reason radio studios have always been such safe havens for me is that because, in them, I have no choice but to focus on the moment. There’s simply no option other than to give my full attention to what I’m doing live on the air.
There is one final aspect of my releasing and finding faith practices that I want to mention here, and it’s one that you might not tend to associate with either: medication. As you’ve now read, I long fought the idea of taking an SSRI or any other pill known to help obsessive-compulsives. I couldn’t see this back in the ’90s, but I now know there were two successive reasons for this. Initially, like many OCs, I was worried about losing that much more control of my life (by being “drugged”) and my identity (by losing my non-pill-popping status as a “normal” person). Then later, as I became determined to understand the mechanics of belief, I somehow concluded that taking medication was a spiritual cop-out, for lack of a better term.
I was wrong, very wrong, on both counts.
Medication is not a panacea in battling OCD, nor is it a substitute for the all the requisite work. It can, however, be an extremely effective tool for OCs to gain—not lose—control of their lives, by medically helping in the biophysical process of releasing stuck thoughts. Call it another OCD paradox.
As for the notion that taking pills somehow shows a lack of faith in a higher power, I’m now certain that notion is seriously flawed. At the risk of offending anyone with differing beliefs, I must say that I’ve come to believe that science and spirituality are much like our own two feet, each dependent on the other to move us forward. By accepting this idea and all that modern medicine has to offer, I now know I can do so much more to serve my own greater good.
Keep perspective, take initiative, and release and have faith. These are my coping strategies to this day, and I know that together they are the real gifts of my year-long project—an experiment in believing of which I will always treasure each and every minute, including the last…
11:59 p.m., October 21, 1998.
It’s so still in the room now that I can hear the hands on my wristwatch meet up at the twelve. I can hear the click of my illusory tape recorder running out of tape.
Never before has “This Is It” felt more true.
I write the three words on my index card, and just to make sure I get the very last word in on Doubt, I whisper two more:
I believe.
epilogue
fast-forward 7 years
March 21, 2006. It’s a Tuesday morning and I am headed out the door of our new home in the North Bay hills, overlooking the outer reaches of the San Francisco Bay. The skies are overcast and about to open up, so I decide it’s best not to drop the top of my Mazda Miata. No problem, though; I no longer need to.
Buying a used pint-sized convertible had been part of my strategy to get myself back behind the wheel of a car on a regular basis. Without a roof over my head, I’d reasoned, I could see and hear everything around me that much better. I was right, and for well over a year, in all weather conditions, I drove almost everywhere with the top down, eliciting some rather interesting looks and comments along the way.
“Dude, you must be freezing your ass off,” shouted the guy in the big 4-by-4 next to me at a red light one frosty winter morning.
“No, really, it’s not that-t-t-t bad,” I yelled back through chattering teeth.
I can’t help smiling as I think about all this now, driving—top and windows up—to the nearby ferry terminal, where I’ll catch my boat to San Francisco.
I pull into the ferry parking lot with a mere five minutes to spare. I grab my backpack and allow myself one quick inventory. Parking brake. Locks. Lights. Windows. One, two, three, four/I can leave I know the score. I walk away without a single glance back.
Fifty minutes, a cup of coffee, and a San Francisco Chronicle later, I arrive in the City and walk to a nearby Peet’s for another cup of coffee. I hand the barista a five, realizing I never did wash my hands after that sneeze (into my sleeve) on the ferry ride over. I’m okay.
Crossing the busy Embarcadero next, I join the pack of office workers and tourists who step off the curb before the walking light officially turns green. I have broken the rules. And I’m okay.
Now I’m feeling cocky, so I make a point of stepping on every manhole cover and sewer grating I pass along the ten blocks to work, even pausing to say hello to a friend under the scaffolding just outside our building. My pulse is rising quickly at this point, but I’m okay.
Finally, I arrive at 865 Battery Street. San Francisco headquarters for the CBS Radio and Television Network. I take the elevator to the third-floor newsroom, where soon the easy part of my day will begin, as I join my partner in Studio A and spend five hours co-anchoring afternoon drive, as I’ve been doing every weekday now for a year and half.
Like most days, I’m tempted to pinch myself, or at least to take a minute to remember just how blessed I am: To be back at KCBS. To be back in cars. To be back inside crowded places. To be back at Christmas tree farms and around children again. To be back as a husband and father.
To be back.
March 21 is a good day. Not all my days are so chock full of OCD successes. Truth is, my battles with Doubt are never-ending. More often than not I am strong enough to defend myself. But not always. There are still those moments of weakness when I get stuck at a sink, or loop my car in a circle, or check and re-check a door or a parking brake, or play back a portion of the airchecks I have yet to stop myself from recording.
The difference now is that I know my way out of Doubt’s grip. I know how to believe beyond the flawed processing of my own physical senses. And I also know how to accept the many gifts of support available to me. I have learned to put stubborn pride aside and ask for help, from Jackie and others, when I need it. And, as I’ve attempted to explain, I have made peace with medication, coming to understand how it helps me function, and thereby helps me serve my greater good.
I am awed by, and forever grateful for, the way in which my project has influenced not only me, but also so many others in my life. Nicole and Brianna, now fifteen and twelve, have grown up with their own handmade belief models on their nightstands, and for years Samantha and I have used the twelve “pyramid words” to give our family a common vocabulary for talking about the power of believing—in ourselves, in others, and in life. The dozen words also adorn a bathroom mirror at my sister’s home, and her daughters too have grown up talking about such principles as Passion and Integrity and Faith and Release.
For nine years now, Carole Johnson and I have met often for coffee, to share our OCD triumphs and challenge one another to take that next step. For Carole, it’s been travel, which she’d given up at the demand of her own Doubt monster. And for me, it’s been finding the courage to move this book forward. Today, Carole is taking cruises, and I am gearing up for book tours ahead. We both tend to shake our heads in disbelief that much more with every get-together, one of the most recent of which included a quick ride in the Miata. “You drove me, Jeff!” Carole marveled as we pulled back into my driveway—just before s
he got out of the car and closed the door very deliberately, with a huge smile on her face. It took me a minute to figure out what she’d just done: shut the door not three times, but only once!
And then there’s the magic of what this book project has done to bring the family I grew up with together again. For the first time ever, we’re talking about the elephant in the room, the scarring perfectionism that so often drove us apart. We are all committed, as parents and grandparents, to seeing that none of our next generation ever feels pressured to do anything “just right.” The brutal honesty of all this is uncomfortable at times, but no one has encouraged me more than my father to tell my story just as I remember it: to hold nothing back that might be helpful to others. That, and our renewed friendship, are two of the greatest gifts I could ask for.
We in the news business sometimes opt to “sit on” a story, which is to say we occasionally choose not to report on something if there’s a compelling reason to keep it under wraps.
As my voice of doubt points out to me daily, there are at least a thousand reasons—all of them compelling—why I should sit on my story.
But I can’t. I owe far too much to far too many.
My OCD story is hardly a typical one, if there is such a thing. I have battled a more severe form of doubt than most obsessive-compulsives I’ve read about. And I have taken an especially circuitous path to recovery, drawing on resources both inside and outside the traditional mental health field. What worked for me might very well prove entirely ineffective for another OC. Still, I know firsthand the power of shared stories, and I wonder to this day where I’d be if not for the personal accounts I read in The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing, and the tales I heard from a handful of recovering drunks and addicts determined to make something of their lost years. It’s in this spirit that I am committed to sharing my own story, hoping it might, in whatever small way, help not only other OCs, but anyone who’s ever struggled with doubt.
