Rev Left Radio - My Struggle with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

Episode Date: June 10, 2024

Breht opens up about his lifelong struggle with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder in the hopes that it might help others. He discusses developing contamination OCD as a child after a traumatic event, reflects on how his OCD has morphed over the years and taken on different forms, and offers words of encouragement, loving compassion, and hope for those dealing with this condition.  OCD Interviews to watch: Interview with Kate Interview with Steve the Clown OCD books to read: The Mindfulness Workbook for OCD: A Guide for Overcoming Obsessions and Compulsions Using Mindfulness and Cognitive Behvaioral Therapy Rewire Your OCD Brain: Neuroscience-Based Skills to Break Free from Obsessive Thougths and Fears Other OCD Resources: OCD Recovery Youtube Channel OCD and Anxiety Youtube Channel (liscensed therapist) Reid Wilson, PHD (OCD specialist) International OCD Foundation Giving Up The Internal Battle (Fear of Fear in OCD)   Outro Song: "Yellow Datsun" by Neva Dinova

Hello everybody. This episode is going to be a little different. It's just going to be me talking about a recent revelation I've had in my life with regards to mental health struggles I've gone through. And the goal of sharing this is in its own right. It's sort of therapeutic to talk about. Moreover, I think it helps other people feel less alone who might be struggling with something similar. It's a very common mental health disorder that many people struggle with or know people. who struggle with. It's broadly misunderstood in mainstream culture and sort of simplified in these really absurd and silly ways that sort of mystify the real struggles and sufferings that this disorder can inflict on people. And I just wanted to put out my story in hopes that it could resonate with somebody else. And the fact that it took me 35 years to find out that I had this disorder, even though I now realize I've had it since I was a child, I think speaks to the fact that there could be people out there listening that might have it as well and don't know. And when you're suffering from something and you don't know the name of it, you can't put your finger on it.

It can feel incredibly isolating, incredibly confusing. And you can think wrongly, but scarily, that you're the only person that goes through what you're going through. And the disorder that I have and that I've had my entire life and that I'm going to talk about today is an obsessive, compulsive disorder um it's it's it's broadly misunderstood in in mainstream culture you know it's it's really simplified people will say things like oh i'm so oCD you know i need the picture frame to be perfectly straighter it's going to bother me or i'm oCD i need my my markers color coded and lined up perfectly you know or i'm oCD i just i don't like germs um but oCD is something much deeper than just preferences it's much deeper than merely prefering aesthetic

symmetry. It's much deeper than merely noticing you have germs on your hand and going and washing it. Obsessive compulsive disorder is a genetic neurological disorder that can really fuck with people's quality of life. I'm by no mean an expert on it, although I've been reading many, many books and learning about it incredibly deeply since I've come to this realization that I've struggled with it my entire life. But I'm just going to tell my story. This is not medical advice. This is not expert advice. I encourage people to speak to their medical doctor if they have access to that, if they think that they might have this disorder or do research on your own to learn more about it. I'll provide as many resources as I can in the show notes, but the point of today is just to kind of share my story in hopes that it resonates with other people, makes people feel less alone, and also maybe for a couple people out there who are struggling with it could clarify what exactly they've been wrestling with.

So my obsessive compulsive disorder started, as it does for many people in my childhood. There's some science out there that suggests that stressful life events or even traumatic events in childhood can often trigger the onset. So somebody may have a genetic predisposition to obsessive compulsive disorder. It's somewhere in your family tree. But that genetic predisposition is then realized and made manifest through a stressful life event. and for me as a young child i wasn't particularly traumatized as a child i know people have had much harder childhoods than i have but um in around eight nine 10 years old i had you know my parents had gone through a divorce um my dad had had custody of me um had various stepmoms

that have come and gone throughout my life my mom won custody of me so there's this real instability this back and forth between my dad and my mom and living with them at different periods of time. And I remember as a nine-year-old, I was living with my mom. My mom had finally gained custody after many years of fighting for it. And my dad, for various reasons and his own mental health struggles, had a suicide attempt. And I remember at nine years old, my dad calling me at my mom's house. I, you know, picked up the phone. And my dad just told me, son, I'm going to die. I'm not going to be here anymore. I'm sorry about that. But you're the man of the house now. you to take care of your sister. I need you to take care of your mom and I need you to be strong

when this whole thing goes down. And I don't remember the exact conversation after that, but it was my dad just told me, I'm going to die and I'm not going to be here anymore and I'm going to kill myself and I need you to take over. And you can imagine what that does to a nine-year-old boy. My dad was in a bad place. I don't blame him for this. In retrospect, it's too much to put on the plate of any child but that began a spiral into obsessive compulsive disorder that in hindsight I might say was about trying to save myself from uncertainty or to exert control over situation and a life that I very obviously did not have control over and my dad attempted was unsuccessful was stopped by his brothers who went and found his location

and somehow talked him back from the ledge, and it didn't happen. He was hospitalized, put on new sets of medications for his depression, anxiety, his various other issues. He's also obviously a heavy drinker. That's what ultimately took his life a couple years ago, was from a life of alcohol abuse. And I remember that as being a real traumatic point in my life, and right afterwards, I remember OCD starting to kick in. and the way it took it took off at first and you have to realize up until I'm 35 now I just learned that I have obsessive compulsive disorder in the last few months I thought I thought it was just something I had as a kid I knew I had it as a child and then I thought I had let go of it and then all my other mental health struggles after that were just you know generalized anxiety or you know existential crises or just depressive episodes right anything and everything but the thing it actually was and so and child the first way it manifested was a deep fear of germs. It was the obsessive, compulsive sort of

mainstream view of somebody who can't stand germs. And how it manifested for me was, of course, in hand washing. I remember periods of time when I was in middle school where a teacher pulled me aside and she saw that my hands and my knuckles were all cracked and bleeding. And she was just like, honey, what's going on? Why are your hands brutally dry? And, And, you know, I just said, oh, I wash my hands a lot. And, you know, she would inform me, like, you know, it's not really, you're doing it too much. You're using hand sanitizer all the time. You're washing your hands all the time.

You know, I can't remember exactly how the rest of that conversation went. But I remember, you know, strangers in some sense reaching out and noticing that something was wrong. I would become obsessed about germs. I wouldn't be able to touch grocery carts in the store or I would literally feel like my hands were being bogged down with germs. I was unable to, you know, touch anything in public. When I went to the restroom, even in my own home, I would layer the seats with, you know, several layers of toilet paper to the point where I would often clog the toilet in my family home. But, of course, anywhere else outside my home, it was even more intense. I would not let anybody into my room with clothes that they wore outside of my room.

So if you're coming home, including myself, so when I would come home from school, I would step up. into my doorway and my house, immediately take off all of my clothes down to my boxers, and then I'd go in and I would have at-home clothes that were completely safeguarded from the germs of the outside world that I would put on. And those would be my at-home clothes, and then, you know, I would put on my outward clothes when I went out in public. And I would also not allow anybody else, my family, my sister, my parents, to come into my room with any clothes that they had when they were at work, when they were out at the bar, you know, their shoes, anything like that whatsoever. You know, you could not enter my room unless you changed your

entire wardrobe because my room was my little sanctity of being away from germs. And you can see in hindsight how this is an attempt to control. This is a little boy who has been a sensitive little boy who's been destabilized by family events trying urgently to have some control in his life but not knowing why he was doing these things, not knowing that this was a mental disorder of any sort my family was not educated on these things it was just kind of amusing if sometimes annoying that you know little brett would be obsessed about cleanliness and it was sort of you know not mean-spirited but you know light-hearted jokes you know Brett's just a germaphobe you know my sister would fuck with me she would come in with her clothes on and with her shoes on and

jump on my bed and then watch me absolutely fucking melt down when she would do that have to wash all my I hated my sister at this period of time because she was the exact opposite of me. She was incredibly messy, incredibly dirty, walked into her room. It was just shit everywhere, you know, clothes everywhere. She would go many, many days without bathing. I would need to be bathed and cleaned all the time. My room was really particular. Everything put in order.

It would cause me enormous distress if I felt that germs had gotten into my room, if I felt that I was exposed to germs and the compulsive handwashing. was one part of that germophobia. Other things that I would have as a little child is a symmetry OCD where, for example, I'm walking home from school every day. I can't step on cracks, so I would go out of my way to step over the cracks in the sidewalk. And I would also have this thing where I would spit, if you're just walking home, you know, you spit on one side of your body just because that's what you do, I guess.

So I would just spit, you know, like onto the right side of my body. and then immediately I would need to spit on the left side of my body and I would need to spit straight on such that I could walk and the spit would go between my two legs. And if I didn't do all three of those things, I would feel like something was off. I would feel distress and I would have to do it until it all happened perfectly and then I could go on with the rest of my day. Another way it manifested in childhood was I had to have this just right feeling when I turned off my TV before I went to bed or I felt something bad would happen. So the last image that I saw on the television had to be a positive image. It had to be at the very least neutral, but ideally it would have to be something positive. And for me, those were things like a neutral thing might be turning it onto a baseball game and then turning my TV off.

And then I would turn it off and that was a neutral image and so I was okay to go to sleep. Maybe a positive image would be an attractive woman on the TV. If I turned it off when there was an attractive woman on the TV, that was fine, that was a positive image, I could go to sleep. But if I would turn the TV off when there was an act of violence or a bad person or something negative in any way happening, I would not be able to, I'd have to turn the TV back on and I'd have to find the right image that would make me feel okay about turning my television off. And, you know, never got therapy, never got diagnosed with anything. nobody knew what was going on a lot of these things would happen outside of the view of people so like my spitting symmetry thing

people didn't pick up on because it was just something I did on the way home from school not stepping on cracks nobody really noticed that what image would have to be on the television before I went to sleep nobody would notice that what everybody noticed in my life was the germ was the germophobia and the compulsive handwashing but again they just thought it was a personality quirk

it was never seen as anything that was a disorder or might need a treatment, even though it did cause me great distress, it would become the point where, yeah, I can't touch grocery carts in the store. I can't touch anything in a public store because all of these things have germs. And so I would just walk by the cart and make sure my hands didn't touch absolutely anything. So, you know, it wasn't so disruptive that it felt like, you know, we need to get him to the ER or anything. But it was certainly a distressing thing in my life. But I didn't have the ability to understand what exactly was happening. Now I know that the on that this is a chronic lifelong disorder it's treatable and i want to make that clear up front

ocd is a highly treatable and manageable disease but it's a chronic condition it's a it's a genetic neurological disorder um and so you have to manage it through things like cbt and erp cognitive behavioral therapy you know forms of of um erp which is exposure and response prevention in which you expose yourself to the fear but you prevent the compulsive behavior afterwards because an important thing to know about OCD, engaging in the compulsions, whatever they may be, brings short-term anxiety relief, but it strengthens the cycle of OCD. When you engage in your compulsive behaviors to alleviate the distress you feel with your obsessions, you are strengthening the beast. And exposure and response prevention is all about

refusing to engage in those short-term anxiety-relieving compulsions and instead sit hitting with the anxiety, showing your body and your mind that you can be there with the distress without engaging in the compulsion. And this is the gold standard for treating OCD in all of its forms. And the thing about OCD, it can latch on to anything. And so people with OCD throughout their life almost always have different forms that it takes, and often in different periods of their life. So because I had the contamination accessions and compulsions as a child, I left that behind when I hit puberty into my teens. I was into remission with my OCD. Don't really remember OCD being a problem throughout the rest of my teenage years, probably from like 14 or 15 onward.

I didn't have anything and that gave me the illusion that I left that in the past. That was just a weird childhood thing and that I didn't know I had OCD. I knew those were obsessive, compulsive behaviors, but I didn't know it was a lifelong chronic disorder that I would have to continue to manage and that could also latch on to other things. I sort of had this idea that OCD was just germophobia. But as I aged into my 20s, my OCD popped up in different ways. And because it was always morphing, I never knew what it was. I just thought I'm fucked up.

I thought, you know, I just have a weird brain thing that nobody else can understand. And this is a very common experience with people who have OCD feeling like this before they realize what they have, feeling like they're the only person that has it, feeling like other people won't understand, feeling like, you know, you are going crazy. And so I'll talk about some of the other OCD events that the things that OCD latched onto throughout my life. One of those, and this got me called, you know, a hypochondriac from my family and friends again, lightheartedly, not being mean or cruel or anything. Nobody knew I was really struggling in the ways that I was, but all through my 20s, I had what you would call health anxiety.

I would have this obsessive rumination on any possible bodily sensation being this horrible disease. So if I had a particularly bad headache, my brain would obsess about the idea that I have a brain cancer. I would start Googling, looking up symptoms of brain tumors, asking other people how much they get headaches, right? Seeking reassurance, which is a compulsion. Googling your symptoms, which is a compulsion. I have convinced myself that I've had AIDS in the past. I've convinced myself I have cancer in the past. For a little period in my early 20s, I had this like sort of numb, tingly feeling in my limbs.

And these are very vague feelings. And anybody with anxiety, even outside of OCD, will often have these feelings. I have tightness in my chest. God, maybe that's like maybe I'm having a heart attack and they're just having an anxiety attack. Very, very common, right? so that was that was what form it took for me in large part throughout my my 20s and still to this day there will be that impulse now that I know that I have OCD I can stop engaging in the compulsions of researching and seeking reassurance and you know if I had health insurance I would visit the doctor all the fucking time to check up on unfortunately for me I've never really had access to health care in that way and so I've never really been able to engage in compulsions where I'm going to the doctor over and over and over again but that that happens with people very often um and so you know that that's like the spiral and

these these compulsions these intrusive thoughts right you have this disorder or you're unclean or you need to make sure that image is right on the tv screen and when you click it off or else something bad's going to happen that has sort of been the the shared similar trait amongst all the things that OCD has latched onto. Now, in my mid-20s, I got what is referred to, there's a million subtypes, right? They'd say OCD is as broad as the human imagination, because what OCD is is a fear of fear. It's a fear of uncertainty. Anything that you are scared of, the OCD, warms its way into that and exacerbates that into obsessions. So in my mid-20s, I had what I've referred to on the show in other places as an existential or spiritual crisis about death. Um,

Where I've talked about it, even on this show, I've talked about this, where I would describe it before I knew I had, it was OCD, I would describe it as every single day when I woke up until the moment I went to sleep, I was haunted and terrorized by thoughts of death, death of myself, death of everybody around me, death of the trees that lined my streets, this intrusive thought that everybody and everything is going to die. and at that time I was I had a young daughter and I was my my fiancee was pregnant with my girlfriend at the time eventually my fiancee now my wife was pregnant with our first son and you know these are stressful life events and OCD is triggered an OCD episode of flare up of this chronic condition is often triggered by stressful life events and I now see very clearly almost every major OCD episode in my life no matter what the content was was a reaction. action to stressful life events. And so probably one of my worst ones ever was in my mid-20s about death. And there's a subtype of OCD called existential OCD in which the OCD sufferer begins getting intrusive thoughts about the nature of reality, the nature of life and death, etc. This can take the form of unreality OCD where you feel like solipsistic OCD, like I'm the only person that actually exists.

Everybody else is like a philosophical zombie. or a robot, like they actually have no consciousness. Only I do, right? It can manifest in many different forms if you're religious. People have a religious OCD where they think that they've offended God or they obsess about the nature of heaven. For me, it was, I was, I turned into an atheist in my late teens and early 20s, and that was a rough transition for me where I started realizing like, or at least I thought, you know, I'm not even, I wouldn't consider myself necessarily an atheist today, more of a Buddhist agnostic with atheist undertones or atheist characteristics for sure, but that period of time in my early 20s where I was really

coming to terms with it and really picking it up as my torch that I was carrying, right? This atheism, this philosophical position. And so that stripped away any comforts I might have had about death. And so for about a six-month period, every single day I had intrusive thoughts about death. And I would engage in the compulsions of reassurance seeking, of Googling, of trying to find a way out. and they call OCD the doubting disease because it's all about uncertainty and a total lack of control and when you when you try to seek reassurance what you're trying to do is seek certainty you want an answer but with a question like death there is no answer there's just a

million opinions what happens when you die right and so OCD sees that vulnerability oh there is no answer here this is a fundamentally philosophically uncertain question let's a fucking about it for the next six months. And this led to deep anxiety. This led to a deep depressive episode. I was really fucked up. And I remember not knowing that I had OCD, thinking that this was purely a spiritual and existential crisis, knowing that there is no pill or doctors that could help me because the question I'm dealing with, in my head, I'm not dealing with OCD. I'm dealing with just with human struggle with their own mortality. And I'm like, what can a therapist tell me? What can a pill do for me. My brain is just broken. My brain is not letting me let go of this thought about death.

Like we all think about death. We're all spooked by it on some level. People put it out of their minds. Like if a normal non-OCD person would have an intrusive thought, which we all have, about death and the scariness of it, they would be able to maybe be spooked by that for a second, but they would be able to set that aside and continue moving on. You know, it wouldn't be, it wouldn't be comfortable, but they would move on and they wouldn't be thinking about it for the next days, weeks, and month, every day, all day long. I had been familiar with broadly speaking exposure therapy, so I was thinking like if I just look into a mirror and expose myself to the reality of death, that that might help.

So I would say stuff like, you know, I look in a mirror into my eyes and I would say, you're going to die, everybody you know is going to die, everybody you love is going to die, and you have to accept that, right? But this just aggravates the entire thing. anytime I sought reassurance it aggravated it anytime I was Googling trying to find like do other people suffer with this existential crisis these are all forms of compulsions I was engaging in to try to find certainty where they don't exist and the weird thing about OCD is often it will lock on for a while it will become obsessed with something you will not be able to get out of the loop and then one day for whatever reason it releases its grip and I could I could after six months of this shit what really fucked my life up and became debilitating and people around me just thought I was going through depression or something but after about six months I felt the release

I remember exactly where I was I was driving my car here in the Omaha metro area and I remembered like again thinking thinking thinking that's this intrusive thought that never goes away it's always in the background you can you maybe distract yourself for a little bit when you're engaged in another activity the moment you stop it's right back in there right back in there reminding you reminding you reminding you.

And it's scary as fuck. And I remember driving down the road and all of a sudden it released. And it's almost like a physical release. I started sobbing. I had this interestingly, there was the spiritual and existential dimension to it because it is a human condition, death and mortality. Humans all throughout history have wrestled with it. I felt when it released, I felt deeply connected to the human condition.

and I was weeping in love and compassion for every other human being that was aware of their own mortality, that lost loved ones, that have to wrestle with their own fears of death. So the other side of this crisis period for me was this deepening of my love and connection and compassion for all human beings and this feeling that I'm sharing in the human condition, which was reifying and edifying in some way. and so after this prolonged period of suffering it burst open in actually this kind of interestingly spiritual experience where the self dropped away the because the obsession of death was often revolving around the self right on this little thing that's going to die and that was what I was kept obsessing on and I would try to you know interestingly meditate my way out of it and I think that probably helped but it broke open in like a selfless love and feeling of unity with all human beings and a deep, weeping compassion for all sentient life that is aware of their own mortality. And so that was interesting. And then after that, my relationship to death had changed for the better. And I had no longer intrusive thoughts about death.

And, okay, then I just racked that up to like, okay, that was an interesting spiritual experience. I meditated my way out of it. I felt selfless love and compassion for all beings. And, okay, that was a spiritual crisis. And that was a resolution via Buddhist meditation. That's awesome. And in large part, those things are true. But I now realize that that was OCD.

That the intrusive, obsessive thoughts and the compulsions I would engage in to relieve my distress, that's OCD. And that's what was driving that crisis. There are other dimensions to it, existential and spiritual dimensions to it. But the underlying force was my OCD. This happened again with my second son, as he was, as my fiance. at that time was pregnant with our second son. I also had another spiral of obsessive thinking. This time it was around climate change. So another fear of mine, right? I'm interested in climate change. I've done many shows on climate change. Several years ago, I was reading books

like the uninhabitable earth. I was looking at worst case scenarios, just out of intellectual curiosity. And OCD found that as the thing to latch on to. Oh, you're scared of this? Because you're having kids. And then I'm thinking about the future they're going to live in. And so that's a real fear. and then OCD sees that vulnerability and attacks. And it wasn't as long as the death OCD was, but it lasted for several, several weeks to a few months. And it was again, from the moment I woke up, I can't stress this enough,

the first thought of your day is your OCD obsession. And the last thought when you go to sleep at night is your OCD obsession. And all throughout the day, it's this ebb and flow of, I can be distracted for a second, oh, I'm back in it. Any time I'm not fully and wholeheartedly distracted by something, the thought is entering my mind.

And I'm having images of a planet on fire. I'm having images of, you know, my children having to navigate a desertified planet and fight over water and not having to be able to have a life at all. A sort of Mad Max's worst case scenario situation that my OCD would just pound my fucking head with these images and just convince me that this is going to happen. and there's nothing you can fucking do about it and your kids are going to live in this post-apocalyptic Mad Max hell world and you'll probably be dead and you won't even be able to fucking help them

just all day long being punched in the fucking brain by this intrusive fucking thought and again I just hyped it up to I'm a politically aware person that's having children and I'm scared about climate change and there's even an episode I did on RevLeft

where in the depths of that OCD attack I made this weird episode about aliens, coming down about this situation that happened in Zimbabwe in the 1990s where these schoolyard kids say that they collectively experience this engagement with these extraterrestrials and I was just talking about aliens and death and climate change and it was you can tell in my voice in that episode if you go look it up that I was going through it even the way that I was speaking was just I was beleaguered I was beaten down and I was trying to use

that episode as a way of sort of wrestling with these fears and problems that I was having and it did kind of help to have expression on that level of your underlying torment. It was helpful. And I remember people saying, this is a weird-ass episode, dude, but I get it. It's interesting. I can roll with it. But people are noticing that's, this is out of the realm of normal Rev-left episodes, and it certainly was. But that was an insight into me having an OCD attack, which I realize now. now what had happened throughout my 20s but really started kicking in in my 30s was another form of OCD which I'm currently struggling with right now and this is the latest iteration that opened up the revelation to me

and this is called sensory motor or somatic OCD and this in the past it was called neutral obsession because what it is is an obsession with normal bodily processes where you get intrusive sensations and thoughts about normal bodily processes that normal people's brains completely filter out of the picture. So the three big ones of sensory motor OCD is blinking, breathing, and swallowing, right? These natural bodily processes that occur all the time that most people's brains are able to shut out. Now, we've all had the experience of focusing too much on our breath and having that feeling like we're manually having to breathe in and breathe out.

and that can be kind of annoying and distressing and feeling clumsy but you know quickly if you don't have OCD that drops away you move on your your mind is like this is interesting but irrelevant no need for fear and you quickly forget that you know you're breathing and it goes back to normal you live your life imagine though if you will and if you I hope this doesn't trigger anybody with OCD to have this sort of thing but you know it's kind of ambiguous as to whether that's how it works because I can be exposed to a million different OCD stories that I don't have and not necessarily become obsessed with them, right? People have OCD all across the spectrum,

and I don't have a lot of those. And so I can see somebody else struggling with the form of OCD that I don't have and not necessarily have that become my thing. But there is always a little worry that I'll trigger something in people. But it's just like noticing those bodily processes, but it can be anything.

People notice against their will, a hyper awareness of their thumb, of their leg, of the way their body moves in space, literally anything, anything in your body. body your mind can cling on to and this goes hand in hand with health anxiety hypochondria which is a which can often be a form of OCD that I've always had where you notice a bodily sensation and then you exaggerate that into the worst case scenario and become obsessed with like you have this fucking disease and so there's there's a really interesting combination there but I've had breathing

OCD where for weeks at a time I become against my own will or wishes hyper aware of my breathing. And I just feel like I'm not breathing right, that I'm not getting a full breath in. It gives me a lot of anxiety. It is my lungs collapsing. Do I have a lung disorder? Do I have COPD? Right? You start Googling, start finding all these things. And after a while, it relents. But the one that I have now, and I've had for the last month or so, and I've talked about this on shoeless in South Dakota at great length, is swallowing somatic OCD. For the last month of my life, my brain has hyper fixated on every single time that I swallow. And every single time that I swallow without food in my mouth, there's a little click in my ear. And it's your Eustachian tube opening

and closing to equalize pressure, right? Some people can do this on a plane. Like, for example, some people out there will have exactly what I'm, not the OCD, but this, the bodily experience. You're on a plane. Can you, can you pop your own ears? Or do you need gum or some external thing to pop your ears? I've always been able to pop my ears. like you know if i'm up on a plane it starts getting stuffy i just i do a little thing in my head maybe i plug my nose and i can easily pop open my ears and and de-congest them as it were um and there's a little click sound that goes along with it so silly it almost sounds absurd and like um how is this even a fucking problem man like what what is the problem here exactly but it's just a very normal

thing some people when they swallow especially with no food in their mouth they hear a little click in their ears and that's just that and same with with you when you yawn right and some people can do it on command they can make their ears pop and click um and i've always been able to do that since i was a kid never my oCD never latched onto it but over the last few months for whatever reason i started becoming more aware of it and then i started thinking is this normal and then i started googling you know is this normal is this is this normal you read some things like dude this is totally normal this e and t doctor says that this is just your eust i can't pronounce the word e eust station tube in your in your in your middle

ear opening and closing to equalize pressure and you keep Googling and you find oh this is a eustachian tube dysfunction uh you know here's a thing and then here's another thing that could be happening you might need tubes in your ears you just follow this rabbit hole down and you're seeking certainty but you can never find it and your oCD will never accept it and that's kind of the thing that drives the thing you're seeking certainty right you're unable to find it and you you continue you seeking. And so let's say you have this issue and you go to an E&T and ear, nose and throat doctor, and they look at your shit. They're experts. They say, you have absolutely no ear infection. You absolutely have no problem whatsoever. This is totally normal. For a normal person,

excuse my crude language, that would be the end of it. Okay, fine. And then you would just go on your life. You wouldn't notice that anymore. For an OCD suffer, no amount of reassurance is enough. there is nothing a doctor could say that would fully convince you because even though it might work temporarily your OCD compulsive thinking will jump in right away and say stuff like well he just doesn't really know

like he didn't look deep enough maybe he thinks that but doctors aren't infallible doctors make mistakes all the time I'm going to go start looking up about how doctors can be wrong oh I'm on a Reddit thread now where people said that they've been misdiagnosed for fucking 10 years by multiple different doctors Well, this doctor is probably misdiagnosing me.

You can look up on Google and says, hey, this ear thing is totally normal. For many, many people, when you swallow, you have a little click in your ears. Nothing wrong at all, totally normal. You would think that would be like, okay, nice. It's from a reputable site. It's totally exactly what I have. The OCD is like, they don't know. That's just a generalized internet idea.

You don't fucking know. Keep looking. Go on Reddit. Go on Quora. Other people might have this, you know? And so no amount of seeking certain. and reassurance ever actually helps but the idea is that you could be able to find you are somehow it's a possibility that you'll be able to find the right thing the perfect article the right set

of words that somebody else will say that will completely calm down your anxiety and get you that certainty that you are so desperately searching for and it never ever comes another example of somatic oCD is around tinnitus right many people for various reasons can have permanent or temporary tinnitus, which is a ringing in your ear. And many doctors and neurologists believe it's a weird sound your brain makes. It's a function of maybe having, you know, damaged ears and hearing over the years. A lot of musicians who play without headphones or a lot of people who are like diesel mechanics or people in the military that hear big bombs and explosions going off, right, can damage their ears.

And then they have a tinnitus and a ringing viruses can sometimes. cause it anxiety can sometimes cause it right temporary forms of it for some people it's permanent for some people it's it's temporary uh i became obsessed a year or two back um this is specifically after i lost my dad and me and my wife had a miscarriage so a stressful life event if there is such a thing my god um and i remember just obsessing about the possibility of having tinnitus and i also i had you know i've been a long time weed smoker and i stopped cold turkey after the death of my dad and the loss of our baby because, I mean, a week after my dad died, our second son was born.

So earlier that year, a year before that, we had a miscarriage, immediately wanted to try again. We tried again, got pregnant. My wife is going through the pregnancy during COVID, no less, which is another fucking stressor. So we had a miscarriage. Now we're pregnant again. Now we're going through this again, trying to prevent. the problem that caused the miscarriage in the first place.

Then I realized my dad is dying from alcoholism. And in that November of, I think, 2021, 2022, I fucking forget the, 2022. I believe, no, 2021. It doesn't matter. But, yeah, 2021. My dad dies a week later, my son is born. I'm coming out of this year of suffering and insanity and fucking fear and law.

and grief and I say you know what when I get back from the hospital after our son was born I say I'm not smoking weed anymore I'm not drinking whatever grief process has to happen has to happen I'm not going to cover it up I'm not reaching for my my little safety blankie right which was marijuana for me you know to help you get through rough times or to lift your mood when you're going through some shit people have their little coping mechanisms unhealthy and healthy and but for me I just became convinced that you know I guess got to quit and I got a quick cold fucking turkey and if you smoke weed every day for years and years and years and years and you quit cold turkey, there are withdrawal symptoms for many people. And I certainly had withdrawal symptoms, which funnily enough

include anxiety and depression and irritability and insomnia, all things that in retrospect, I probably shouldn't have quit at that time. It was just another layer of physical, intense stress that my body really did not need. And certainly a less than healthy coping mechanism was better than what I put myself through in those intervening months. But because of my anxiety, because of the withdrawals, because of my body trying to fucking go through this process, I started getting my worst fear, tinnitus. And it was a low-level tinnitus that was anxiety-induced. Now in hindsight, I realized that it was temporary. I became obsessed with it. It's the only thing I could think about, all I could hear every single night, stayed up until two in the morning,

Googling tinnitus looking at the worst horror stories imaginable people on these forums saying I'm killing myself tonight the tinnitus is so bad all I can hear is screaming in my ear 24-7 I'm just getting anxiety my heart is pounding I'm fucking sweating I'm like oh my god my tinnitus is going to get like that right you can see here how health anxiety hypochondria and the oCD come together and they're a fucking match made in heaven here's a sensation in your body you're going to get really anxious about it and now it's an intrusive obsessive thought that you can't get rid of, then you have to engage in these compulsions to try to find relief from your incredible distress.

Constantly seeking reassurance, asking my family, do you guys have ringing in your ears? When it gets really quiet at night, do you hear this ringing? Just hoping somebody will say, yeah, but it's totally fine. Don't worry about it. It goes away. Just seeking reassurance. But no matter what I heard, it was never reassuring enough. And Googling is this compulsion that you have, especially with health anxiety, where you're just

Googling these disorders and you're fucking finding the worst shit, a matter. imaginable, and then your brain is convincing you that you have that, right? And so this is the form, and this is technically somatic or sensory motor OCD. Tinnitus is another form that this can take, because it's a bodily sensation, an automatic bodily process that your OCD latches onto and becomes obsessed with. Now, all of these iterations that I've gone through, and there were more, there was in my childhood, this really sad, this really sad form. that it took that I only realized recently was probably a product of it, but for some people they have harm OCD where they become obsessed about the possibility of harming their loved

ones or their loved ones harming them. And I don't know what caused it, but when I was a little kid and it was around my dad's suicide, I began thinking that my family was possibly trying to kill me. And so I, of course, this is not something you tell anybody. I didn't, didn't tell my friends. I didn't tell a single family member. I was a little kid and I didn't fucking know what was happening. But I became incredibly paranoid that people in my life that have never done wrong by me were actually secretly trying to hurt me. So after my dad had his failed suicide attempt and my OCD started kicking in, he was in hospital for a while. And he got out and he wanted to see his son, right? He wanted to come pick me up from my mom's. And he's going to take me to

his psychiatrist appointment just as like the first thing that we can do together since he's since his this whole incident took place and so he came and picked me up and i remember being so fucking scared because my dad said he was going to kill himself his plan i think was to drive off a bridge and so he comes and picks me up and we're going to his therapist's um office across town the entire ride i am fearful that my dad is going to kill us that my dad is going to take the car and drive us off the bridge like he was going to do, but he's going to take me with him. No indication that he would do that. He's never hurt me, never had any intention on hurting me whatsoever. I became obsessed with that idea. But then after we went to the thing and then

I came back, I was giving back to my mom. I was completely fine. My dad moved out of state shortly thereafter. And so I wasn't riding in the car with my dad a lot. And so it shifted. And it turned into the best person in my fucking life, my grandma, my mom's mom, somebody I love more than this fucking world that I would do anything for. She has done nothing in my entire life except love and care for me selflessly, a fucking saint if there ever was one, the most selfless person I've ever met. And she's been through tragedies. She got in a car accident when she was a young mom her and my grandpa and their five-year-old daughter died. Imagine the trauma.

In the 70s, there's no mental health. There's no therapist. I mean, that she had access to. She's living in like fucking Iowa and Nebraska. This is not a common thing where people go to therapy and get help for shit. Suffered for many, many years from brutal, existential, clinical depression, but didn't even know what it was. Right. So, I mean, she's just been through true tragedies.

Right now, she's in remission for lung cancer. she just went through the last two years of chemo and all this shit of fucking saint um as one of the best people in my life i became convinced for a period of several months that she was poisoning my bath so when she would give me a bath um you know she'd pour this these bubble these bubbles and this like um absent salt into the into the bathtub right and i got this insanely intrusive and obsessive thought that the person that has done nothing but take care of me my whole life is trying is trying to kill me and i don't know if it was sparked by watching an unsolved mysteries um episode about like um you know these black widows like these

these wives that poison their husbands or something i think i remember watching something like that so there was like a fear there like a weird fear and that the oCD latched on to and what it does is it takes it takes your worst fears and it digs its claws into those so like imagine the person that loves you more than anything that has never done anything but wholly and completely dedicate her life to taking care of you loving you making sure you have everything you need that she was the one that was hurting you right the terror of that the oCD season opening okay boom so now for many months when i was whatever that age nine 10 years old um she would prepare baths for me and i would go get in the bath and then i would just be like i i would just come up with these

sensations on my body that maybe she's trying to poison me. And it almost makes me want to cry right now because I fucking, of course she wasn't. And I didn't know that I had a problem. And that's the thing. Again, with OCD, a lot of people don't know. It took me 35 motherfucking years to finally put my finger on what the fuck has been haunting and terrorizing me my entire life. Off and on, right?

It's episodic. There are periods of my life when it is relatively stress free, I do not have OCD symptoms. And when there is a stressor in my life, be that COVID, the death of a loved one, some big transition, having a baby, starting a new job, whatever it may be, a point of vulnerability, that's when, at least for me, it's clamped on. And it lasts for, on average, several weeks to several months. And then for some reason, the obsession drops. And if I didn't, I didn't know I had OCD, so I didn't know how to engage in CBT and ERP. and I'm just now learning those skills

and I'm starting to apply them to my current somatic OCD flare-up and they're absolutely fucking working and oh my God, just knowing what you have and being able to see experts on YouTube and the internet, all the books,

like we live in a beautiful time where you can fucking figure out what's wrong with you. I often think, think of all the people throughout history, right, before the rise of science, before fucking fro.

before anything where you had something like obsessive compulsive disorder or you had an anxiety disorder right you had these things that didn't even have names so i think of my suffering for 35 years off and on without knowing that i have this thing and just trying to deal with it thinking it's a new thing every time to realizing oh shit this is one single thing now i know what it is here's a neuroscientific explanation of it here's a Freudian explanation of it here's a cbt explanation of it. Here's your toolbox of things you can do to manage the disorder. Here's a whole world on YouTube of people who have overcome the exact same types of OCD that you've had, contamination OCD, symmetry OCD, existential OCD, and now somatic OCD.

They told you exactly how they got over it. They give you hope. They make you feel less alone. Holy fucking shit. Thank you. And to think of all the people that have gone through history with these disorders and not even having a name no help in the world no therapist therapy wasn't even existent then didn't even have the scientific method

so the idea that you could get on medication for this shit is just absolutely insane what did people think you're possessed you're possessed by the demon I guarantee you there was some fucking lady that had a severe OCD

and was burned at the stake for being witch, right? Oh, look at that lady. She's over there engaging in these weird rituals where she's lifting and putting down this thing or she's whispering to herself these terms over and over and over again to try to what we now understand to be engaging in compulsions to deal with an obsession. But from the outside, from people's brains rotted out by puritanical Christianity, that person's obsessed by the devil or that person is a fucking witch. Let's get her. You know that happened um and so i just can't fathom the suffering that occurred all along i mean think about schizoaffective disorder borderline personality disorder schizophrenia depression anxiety these things

didn't even have words and for thousands and thousands of years human beings had to suffer through that shit with no hope of a recourse and what that does to me is it filled me with an incredible amount of gratitude that I exist at a time where I can at least fucking get help and I'm a real go-getter I'm a self-starter so like you don't need to like hold my hand and walk me through the shit the moment I found out about this the moment I see things like CBT helps um ERP helps okay I'm reading full fucking books I'm downloading audio books I'm listening to hours and hours and hours of licensed therapists on YouTube walking me through this disorder I'm looking at

interviews on like soft white underbelly i've highly recommend this interview um called the oCD clown on soft white underbelly on youtube it is this long you have to go to the first one and then there's a follow up um from about a month ago but a year ago it's this guy who's this professional clown but he was born in like the 50s 60s suffered with severe oCD his entire life didn't know what it was until he was like 40 um and and it's just a fascinating dive into the mind of somebody with OCD and the fact that OCD can manifest in so many different ways, he had stuff like counting OCD and just write OCD where you needed to pick things up a certain amount of times or symmetry OCD where a bad thought had to be facilitated by a good thought, you know, and I think

it just gives you, he's a fascinating person to listen to and he talks nonstop for an hour and a half, but it's a fascinating look into the mind of somebody with OCD and how intense it can fucking be how distorted it makes everything how debilitating it can be and i'm not i'm not so sure that i have a severe form probably a moderate form um but it's not really that it matters it's just just i i would tears would come to my eyes when i a few months ago when i finally stumbled across it because what was i doing i was engaging in a compulsion about my ear clicking and my swallowing a month ago searching searching blah blah blah blah blah and eventually i just bump into a thread that is about OCD. I follow the rabbit hole for like two hours and I end up on this thread about

somatic OCD. And these people are talking about being obsessed with their breathing, being obsessed with tinnitus, being obsessed with their swallowing, even people with the exact thing I have about the click in the ear when you swallow. A couple people, very small little corner of Reddit, had like three people talking about like, yeah, this fucking sucks, right? And I'm holy fucking shit. It was just like this 35 year old man. Boom. everything makes sense I look back over my whole life everything falls perfectly in place

when I read the lines OCD starts in childhood and is a lifelong chronic condition I immediately knew that the entire belief that I had for my entire adult life that OCD was just something I had as a kid and I got over was complete bullshit

this is a neurological disorder manageable for sure treatable even there's no silver bullet there never is but you know like most mental health disorders certainly treatable but to find out that that's what that was and when I read those lines it's not it starts in childhood and goes through your whole life and it morphs I was like a bell went off in my head oh everything throughout my life like you know your life flashes before your eyes all my mental health crises flashed before my eyes

and they all fit perfectly into this box of OCD that's exactly what I have and it's startling it's scary Because you realize you have this disorder, this genetic brain fucking thing, and that's scary, but it's massively liberating because I now know what I have. And then the first thing I fucking do, shift over to learning about it. Reading books, hearing people talk about it, they immediately start saying, stop engaging in your compulsions. I'm listening to these podcasts. Here's a way to deal with sensory motor in particular. You can keep the sensation in your awareness without feeding it with your attention. Stuff like that, right?

CBT stuff. I just finished this entire book. Let me get the exact title. I'm going to put a resources page in the show notes for anybody that might think they have this to look through these resources to find what helped me and it'll certainly help you.

But I just finished this book called The Mindfulness Workbook for OCD, second edition by John Hirschfield, Tom Corboy, etc. It's, I have it on Audible. It's a great thing to listen to. So fucking helpful. What does it say?

say it combines CBT therapy of exposure and response prevention ACT I think it's acceptance commitment therapy these are forms of CBT cognitive behavioral therapy the gold standard for treating this stuff and they mix it with mindfulness and then all of a sudden that clicks holy fuck I've been deeply since my first real mental breakdown in my late teens where I got put into hospitalization for a clinical depression and was in-house treatment. treated for a week. From that point, and a nurse handed me a book on Taoism when I was 17 and I was in the hospital for a clinical depression, from that moment I became fascinated with meditation.

And what is OCD? Intrusive thoughts, fear, uncertainty, the need for control. And what is meditation? The dismantling of all of that. It is the disidentification from your thoughts. What does mindfulness teach you? thoughts are what the brain's what the brain produces you don't have to identify with the thoughts instead you can identify with the observer of the thoughts and objectify your thoughts as if they

were clouds in the sky i am not my thought i'm no longer imprisoned by my thoughts i can observe my thoughts and i can observe my thoughts and i identify with them then i'm actually at the deepest level, the observer, not the thinker, right? And that's something for years. Before I knew I had OCD, I am just naturally, deeply pulled towards Buddhist meditation. Practice it on and off. Every single time since I learned about Buddhism in my teenage years that I've had, what I now know were OCD attacks, I immediately turned to meditation to try to get out of it. I did not know that I had OCD. I did not know that meditation and mindfulness could be combined with CBT to be incredibly helpful for this exact disorder but I just stumbled across it my suffering brought me to the foot of the Buddha you know

people find their spiritual paths in different ways but for lots of us suffering brings us there and it was exactly my suffering that brought me there and it's almost like this cosmic alignment where I had OCD without knowing it and I stumbled into one of the best ways to to manage and take care of it. And I turned to that in the depths of my despair every OCD attack I've had since I figured it out to great assistance. And so immediately I start engaging in mindfulness and CBT. I pick back up my practice.

And I also realize my whole life I've told myself, you know, because there's been periods of time where I keep up a daily meditation practice 10 to 30 minutes every morning. And there are periods of time a year or two at a time where I'm feeling good and I don't practice meditation and then I enter a period of suffering and then I start engaging in meditation again because the suffering brings brings me back to the necessity of meditating when you're feeling good and full of energy and no mental health issues I'm sorry sitting down for 30 minutes is not as alluring I got shit to do when you're suffering fucking deeply you're trying to find any way out all of a sudden you're brought back to your spiritual practice and I can now see that that is

exactly what happened for me and thank God the Buddha existed thank God for this amazing beautiful tradition that we call Buddhism that is literally a fucking lifesaver the single most important thing I've ever learned in my life and I'm not an expert I'm not enlightened I'm still an amateur on the path I have a long way to go but I've always told myself getting back to what I was just saying before I knew any of this I would say when I'm keeping up a daily practice I'm less neurotic I'm trying to find like you know what's the difference when you're meditating versus when you're not meditating and it's not always like I'm not meditating and therefore I have a mental health

crisis it's like no I'm just this low level neuroticism right and now I understand that a lot of that neuroticism is obsessive compulsive thinking obsessive thoughts intrusive thoughts that make me feel neurotic that the OCD even in its very mild forms maybe doesn't lock on for months at an end maybe it's a couple days at a time right it could be about anything but I realize on some level that I'm I called it being less neurotic when I'm keeping up even just a 10 minute every morning practice, I'm less neurotic. And what that means is I'm less identified with my fucking thoughts. I have this deeper part within my awareness that I can fall back into when my thoughts get rough. I'm learning how to sit with the sensations of anxiety and

depression and be with them without clinging to them or pushing them away or even identifying with them, starting to see my thoughts and my feelings and my moods and my emotions as like weather patterns that come and go that are not me, that don't need to implicate me. And of course that helps. Of course that helps you feel less neurotic. And so it's just this huge revelation that I've had. And I found that workbook to be incredibly helpful. Immediately I restart my meditation practice.

Immediately it starts becoming helpful. And I use the tools of mindfulness and CBT now that I've learned over the last couple of weeks. You know, me, I'm diving into this shit. So it's not like I'm just like casually skimming some shit. I'm like, sometimes I wonder like how I get so obsessed with things. like is this a positive element of oCD that you can just because i you know whether it's nutrition or working out or politics or philosophy or history all through my life i'll i'll just fixate

on something and just fucking learn everything i can about it but there's no distress there's no compulsions right you're just like super interested so i'm like i don't i want to call that oCD by any means um but there is that element that i have and so i find out i have oCD i fucking immediately start researching, availing myself of every possible resource, following all these channels on YouTube, downloading all these podcasts centered around OCD, watching documentaries, reading books, reading audiobooks, and figuring out, putting together my toolbox of things to deal with. Because the scary thing, this is a lifelong condition.

It's a chronic condition. The positive thing, it is manageable and overcomable. You can do it. First step is knowing what the fuck you have. And the second step is engaging in these therapeutic and these toolboxes of mindfulness and CBT and ERP. I don't have access to a therapist. I don't have health insurance. I have three fucking kids.

I just can't afford it. We struggle paycheck to paycheck like most other people. I wish I lived in a fucking country that had universal health care because I would have figured this out much, much earlier. Every period of mental suffering I went through, I did not have the recourse to assistance except for that time that my mom took me into the emergency room when I was 17 because of my depression and she paid for that but you know my entire adult life I've never had recourse to go see a doctor and so I've always had to figure shit out on my own and that's no different now but if you have access that's a great thing to do and again why am I saying all this

in part because it's therapeutic to talk about in part because I want other people to feel less alone. But in large part, if it took me 35 fucking years to figure this out with an interest in psychology, with an interest in this shit, an interest in existential problems, an interest in the mind, Buddhism, all this shit, a guy that is, if anybody's going to bump into this shit, it would be me, right? It took me 35 years to realize what it was. So I'm willing to bet that out of the thousands and thousands of people who would listen to this episode, there could be a handful of people who this is their clicking moment, even if it's just one person, even if just one person out there listens to this episode and it fucking does for me what just happened to me

a month ago, the full revelation, the holy shit moment, the ding, ding, ding. It's worth this episode. For a lot of people, this is going to be off the radar of what they're interested in. They don't come to Rev. Left for this shit. I get it. No harm, no foul. I'll be back with You know, political stuff very soon. But this has been such a major moment in my life that I wanted to share that. I wanted people to know who are struggling with this that they're not alone. I want people to know that OCD can take many, many forms. So if you don't relate to the contamination stuff, if you don't relate to the somatic

and sensory motor OCD stuff, doesn't mean you might not have it. And again, I'm not a medical doctor. I'm not telling you you do. I don't want anybody to convince themselves. They have something they don't. horrific. That would be against the spirit and goals of this episode completely. This would just be an opening to begin researching, to begin investigating. And I was telling you earlier about that soft white underbelly episode with the OCD clown. Again, highly recommend. I go into

the comment section. Comment after comment after comment. I am in tears. This is me. I've had this my entire fucking life and didn't know about it. The guy himself talks about not knowing for 40 fucking years what he had. Guess how he found out. He was watching a Phil Donahue, this fucking guy back in the 90s or whatever, this talk show host. And they had a guy on who had OCD and his obsession would be like flicking lights on and off, right? There's like checking OCD where you have to go back and check the door a hundred times to make sure it's locked when you're on your way to work. You have to go back and check the stove to make sure it's turned off. They're counting OCD where you have to do something a certain number of times for it to feel right to move on. And so this

guy happened to have a light switch thing where you had to go. turn the light switch on and off 10 times and the guy being interviewed on soft white underbelly he just said holy fucking shit i stood up my jaw dropped for the first time of my life i realized i wasn't alone i realized this is what the fuck i had and that was his first step to getting into therapy to researching the disorder to reading the books to understanding his fucking mind at a deeper and deeper level and that was an amazing moment and then i looked through the comments and he's doing that for a bunch of people in the comment section a bunch of people in the comment section holy fucking shit i'm in tears i can't believe this i've never heard anybody

explain exactly what i've gone through now we do live in a time where there are people who self-diagnose on the internet and you know will present like they have all these different disorders and that can be annoying and shit like that but for most people they're not they don't want to self-diagnose or you know be have a munchausen's case where they're giving themselves disorders they don't have they just want relief they want to feel not alone. They want to stop feeling isolated. And if that guy could watch a Phil Donahue episode and realize it, and people could watch that guy's interview and realize it, there has to be somebody out there right now that is listening to this, that the alarm bell, the little light bulb in their

head just went off. And that could then lead them to taking the steps necessary, to learning about this disorder and getting the help you need because this is, I repeat, a treatable and manageable condition. It's not, there is no silver bullet. There's no way to never have an intrusive thought again or to never engage in a compulsion again, but there is a way to manage it and live a happy, healthy, normal fucking life. You can achieve your goals. You can live a full life. It's manageable. And that is so helpful to hear. you're in the midst of it and you think you're fucking crazy and you think you're the only motherfucker on earth that goes through this and nobody understands there is a way out we live in the

21st century thank god that we have these resources at our disposal and i will put the ones that helped me in the show notes to this episode for the one or two people that might the light ball might have went off but that you know to pursue further resources but there's a broader source of people that know they have OCD it's nice to hear this stuff you feel less alone there might be somebody out there you know i often get emails from younger people people that are teenagers and whatnot who explicitly say stuff i look up to you you're you're a role model for the sort of adult that i want to be incredibly humbling incredibly grateful it's also worth noting that i struggle with shit you know for those people that that might put you know somebody like me on a pedestal or

something or look up it's important to know that it's not all rainbows and lollipops that i have my own struggles too. And that's very fucking scary and difficult, but I still live my life. And that's one thing I told myself when I was young or when I was in my teens and I had anxiety and depression, all these things. And now that I have OCD, I refuse to let it stop me living my life. When you let it take you over, when you start isolating, when you stop doing stuff, whether you have anxiety, depression, OCD, whatever, when you start isolating, you start stopping doing what you want to do in life. It doesn't help. It gets stronger. It makes the fucking sickness stronger. I have OCD. For the last month, I've had a specific form of somatic OCD. It is distressing. It fucking

sucks to notice every fucking time you swallow and to have a spike of anxiety thinking, what if this never goes away? What if I never stop noticing this? But I refuse to let it stop me living my life. I'm a parent. I have goals. I am not going to let this shit stop me. And so what I'll sometimes do. I think now, you know what, I'm going through an OCD episode. I get invited out by friends or it's time to go work out or I got to go to my kids sports event or whatever it may be. I'm taking OCD with me. It's a friend in the passenger seat. I'm going to be noticing my swallowing the whole time I'm playing this volleyball game, the whole time I'm playing the softball game, whatever. I'm not fucking letting it stop me from living my life, from doing my goals and from

upholding my responsibilities to my family and just having that mindset is is incredibly helpful it's not easy the impulse is to turn inward the impulse is to retreat to isolate thinking that that's going to help you feel more comfortable and not trigger you but i promise you it's a shallowing and a belittling of your life the sphere keeps getting smaller and smaller and smaller a great depiction of this in cinema is Leonardo DiCaprio's character in The Aviator. I haven't even watched the full movie. I've just watched the scenes of OCD, but it was this famous guy in the 1900s innovator pilot guy. I'm not exactly sure. I forget this fucking name even, Humphrey Hughes or something like that. He was this famous guy, but he had contamination OCD, and he would engage in his compulsions.

And at the end of his life, he died alone in an apartment, peeing and jar. cars because he let the obsession and compulsion completely take him over. So somebody with a lot of ambition, a lot of fame, a lot of talent, by not getting help, and maybe he couldn't, I didn't watch the movie and it was a different time. They probably didn't even have help because we didn't really even understand OCD until like the fucking 80s. So, you know, by no fault of his own, you don't know what to do. You engage in the compulsions. You start isolating. You get smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. I know somebody in my life with schizophrenia.

Part of their delusions, they refuse to go to the doctor because they think the doctors are against them. They refuse to take medicine because they think the medicine is poison. And their life now is relegated. They can't drive. They lost their job. They basically live in a house taken care of by others and will be in the bathroom talking to themselves for hours in a day sometimes. that's what happens when these mental health conditions go untreated when you let them take you over and so i just want to encourage people not to let it take you over don't let it stop you from living

your life and there's another group of people who might benefit here people who have family and friends who have oCD understanding the condition can be very helpful to being a person in that in that oCD sufferers life that can help them because a lot of oCD sufferers are met with this response. Just stop thinking about it. That's so irrational. You're not going to hurt anybody. You're not going to die. If you don't engage in that compulsion, the house isn't going to burn down. And what's important to note, when you suffer from OCD, you know it's fucking irrational. It doesn't stop the intrusive thoughts. You know fucking on some level that your obsessions are fundamentally irrational. It doesn't stop them. And so, you know, a lot of

lot of people with mental health disorders have family and friends who are well-intentioned but will say the most cliche and hurtful things thinking they're helping but they're really minimizing the suffering of the person that's suffering and nothing makes you feel more lonely than your loved ones minimizing downplaying your suffering and so you know for family and friends of people with oCD there are resources you can search out how to be a good partner with somebody who has OCD. Things I can do to help my part. And there are things you can do that are actually helpful. It's like with an addict or with somebody suffering from anxiety attack, there are things you can do that help them and there are things you can do that hurt them. And learning what those things are

and choosing the things that are helpful is really important if you want to be a loving presence in somebody's life. And there are estimates that from one to three percent of the population has OCD. So this is, you know, at the highest range, because of OCD is so underreported, people can kind of hide it within themselves and not seek help. It could be as high as 4% of the population, 5%. That could be as high as 1 in 25 people, 1 in 30, 1 in 50, 1 in every 100 people have at some point or have OCD. That's a pretty common disorder. And that means that there are people in your life that almost certainly have it.

There are people listening right now that have it, that know somebody that has it. And so, you know, I'm not one of those guys that's like, we need to bring awareness and we need to destigmatize mental health. I think we've done that. There's been a great cultural movement in the last couple of decades where mental illness, mental health has really been destigmatized. There are people in older generations that still hold on to the stigma. But for younger people, we know that these things are real. We know that we suffer from them. We know that they don't make us less.

There's no more awareness that needs to be brought to these things, right, in the sense of like, we just need to let people know that mental health. exists we all know many of us suffer from it um it's not as stigmatized i don't want to act like it's not stigmatized anywhere but in our culture at this moment amongst younger people it isn't as stigmatized as it's been in the past which is great so i'm not trying to be like let's let's destigmatize and let's bring awareness those things are great but i think we get it it's mostly about offering a voice making people feel less alone having that light bulb go off for a few of you letting those of you that have somebody like this in your life find ways to be more conducive to their healing and

management instead of exacerbating it or downplaying it and just trying to use my voice in my platform to tell my story, which is, as I said, in and of itself, therapeutic. So, you know, I really hope this helps somebody. You are not alone. Again, I'll link to resources in the show notes for anybody who's struggling with this stuff. There's some wonderful websites, some wonderful organizations out there that really help people some amazing books and importantly people that have gone through it have managed it have come out the other side and those people are the most helpful because it's one thing to go to a therapist who doesn't have OCD who just reads about it and can give you some tools they're certainly worthwhile it's another thing to

listen to somebody who has been in the depths of hell with OCD has applied the toolbox of CBT, ERP, ACT, mindfulness, whatever it may be, unconditional life acceptance, and have gotten to a point where they manage it, and then they turn around and help others. That's the most beautiful thing you can do with your suffering. Whatever type of suffering you have. We all suffer. To live is to suffer. The Buddha reminds us, the first noble truth.

We all suffer in our own ways. If you can take your suffering and you can use it to help others, that is the most noble thing you can do. somebody who struggles with addiction turns around and helps other people that's struggling with addiction somebody who has OCD and struggles with OCD can turn around and help somebody else with OCD what else are you going to do like what a beautiful thing to do with your suffering is to turn it into love and compassion for others and there are amazing people out there in the world that have suffered with OCD and are doing exactly that and I salute them and I hope this is me throwing my penny into the well my raindrop into the ocean of letting people know that this shit exists,

that people have it, that you can still live a meaningful life, you can still have your responsibility, you can still meet your goals, you can manage this, you can overcome this, and you can use it to turn around and help others. And I hope that resonates with some of you. Love and solidarity.

Well, the sickness hasn't left. Has it left me? Don't know. Why? If my health does not come back, I'm going to die. Here comes my ride. It's not that fast, and I know why. Because my friends don't drive the bins. They drive them yellow dartsens. Lady, please don't make me the fool I'm wearing sleeves on my heart for you

I ain't gonna live And I think that dark knows why I got morphine in my sleeves I got some stars in my eyes I got morphine in my sleeves got some stars

in my eyes Hey lady please don't make me the fool because Jerry's kid's been betting on this information they got from you

No, I ain't gonna live, but I'll race you to the sun. I can't lose, I'm gonna win, I'm in my yellow dotting. I can't lose, I'm gonna win, I'm in my yellow dotting. Thank you.