Brain Lock: Free Yourself From Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior (20 page)

Although Jill is largely free of her washing and cleaning compulsions (she no longer “alcohols” her house), she is vigilant about coming to our OCD therapy group at UCLA. For one thing, she says, the group is helping her to Revalue her life, to realize that she is “a lot better off than a lot of people.” It also reinforces her determination, since she sees how frequently people can “use OCD as a crutch, an excuse not to do anything with their lives, not to try to better themselves. There are a lot of productive, really talented people who are just wasting their lives because of this disease.” She wants to encourage others with OCD to use the tools, the Four Steps, “baby step by baby step,” just as she did, on the road to recovery.

In treatment, Jill learned to Revalue her OCD-driven fears about death and contamination. In her mid-40s she realized, “I couldn’t keep falling apart every time someone close to me died.” Her first little step was self-enforced exposure therapy. She set a mousetrap, but when she found a little mouse glued to that trap, she felt so terrible that she began bringing him water. “I knew he was going to die. In a way, I did it so I could face death.” Her beloved cat, which had been part of the family for eleven years, was sick, and Jill was using the mouse to prepare herself for the cat’s death. She was consumed with a terrible fear that “the cat would stop breathing in my face, and then what would I do? Would the whole town then be contaminated?” By the time the cat died, Jill was in therapy and was able to
deal with it. She kissed the cat good-bye, showered, and that was that. She remembers, “We even stopped on the way to the vet to drop off a video, so I wouldn’t be charged for another day’s rental. To maintain my composure like that was just unbelievable to me.”

Jill’s biggest test was to come later, with the death of her mother. She knew the end was near, and on the day her mother died, she had a big debate with herself over what to wear to work. Surely, if she got the dreaded call from the hospital that day, whatever she was wearing would become instantly “contaminated.” Ultimately, though, she forced herself to wear her best white linen suit. When she got the phone call, she did not feel compelled to throw away the suit.

Another hurdle for Jill was her mother’s funeral. Because Jill traced the onset of her OCD, with its terrible contamination fears, to the funeral of a friend when she was only a teenager, she had never been able to attend another funeral. Feeling great guilt about not wanting to be at her mother’s funeral services, she consulted a priest, who wisely assured her that her mother would not have wanted her to make herself sick over this. Jill engineered a compromise: She and her daughter took flowers to the beach and had a private, meaningful ceremony in honor of her mother.

OPPORTUNITIES LOST

In therapy, Josh, who obsessed that he might flip paper clips into colleagues’ coffee cups (causing them to choke) and loosen hood ornaments on cars (causing them to fly through the windshield on the freeway), came to understand clearly how his guilt, his decreased ability to function, and his deteriorating relationships with family and friends—all fallout from his OCD—were harming both him and others. “To put it into really sophisticated economic terms, there are profound opportunity costs for doing the compulsions.” In economic terms, this means that time spent on OCD results in lost opportunities in business and elsewhere in life. Part of Josh’s guilt was over what he perceived as his inadequate commitment to financial support of a shelter for the homeless. So he’d tell himself, “If I can avoid this obsession, I can get out there and make more money
and give more of it away.” Sometimes that reasoning helped. Josh was truly Revaluing.

Josh’s concept of opportunity cost is valid. It really is the answer to why there’s no value in doing a compulsion. Even if you’re not able to realize that your time is valuable in an economic sense, doing a compulsion to avert some imagined and illogical catastrophe is still not a good trade-off. Why? Because the effort that you expend doing the compulsion is robbing you of time and distancing you from other people and from doing some wholesome and productive behavior. I’m not necessarily talking about saving mankind. It could be something as basic and simple as having time to sit and talk with your family.

A common and serious error that people with OCD make is to say, “Well, I’ll just do the compulsion because otherwise I’m going to worry about it and it’ll distract me from my work.” First, doing the compulsion is only going to make the compulsive feeling get worse, as you have learned. But there’s another issue: One compulsion leads to another. The amount of time you spend doing all those compulsions can be spent doing something that is genuinely useful. Therefore, you’ve not only wasted time doing the silly compulsions, but you’ve also lost the opportunity to do something useful with that time. So keep in mind: If you do something useful instead of OCD, that’s also Refocusing, which is the primary way of making your brain change and getting better. And that’s creating new opportunities and better value by anyone’s definition.

Brian, who struggles to control an urge to scrub down public streets at night to rid them of battery acid, says, “Time that people with OCD spend doing just totally irrational things is the biggest waste. It’s time you’ll never get back. It’s time I should have spent with my kids instead of out on the streets, scrubbing. All that time—just a waste. OCD consumes every ounce of energy, takes over so much of your life. I’d be out there at 1:30 in the morning, washing down the street, then go home with my butt dragging and wake up just deadbeat tired.” He was physically exhausted from lack of sleep and mentally exhausted from constantly dwelling on his obsession. Had he not been a part-owner of the car dealership where he worked, Brian says, “They’d have said, ‘Go to hell.’”

At his lowest point—before Brian began behavior therapy in our UCLA group—he was so desperate that he swore that if he died and was somehow offered a second chance to live, he would turn it down if it meant coming back to earth as a person with OCD. Each day was sheer agony. “I can honestly say I hated the damned sunrise. Another damned day of OCD, another damned day of being afraid. I prayed that I’d get a terminal illness. I just prayed, ‘Lord, take me. I just can’t take this anymore.’”

Brian went through a rocky period in his marriage and troubling times with his children, as do many people with OCD. But today, he’s able to look at his progress and speak with pride about the “gallant gains” he has made in fighting his disease. His battle with OCD, however, remains an ongoing struggle.

“A LITTLE LIGHT IN MY SOUL”

Those who have Revalued their OCD symptoms and gone on to Revalue their lives offer us some deep philosophical insights, as the following examples illustrate.

Joanne, who for years had been plagued by dark, brooding thoughts, found that after she began practicing the Four Steps dutifully, “My fear started to go away and my life started to make sense. I could finally see a little bit of light in my soul. For the first time, I was able to experience the feeling of having my mind ‘move on,’ not stuck in the moment, but moving forward. It was incredible! I know what is happening to me, and I can help myself. Some say about life that all bad things that happen to us have a reason or a lesson. I’m not sure that I go along with this. All I can say is that, in the end, I have learned about compassion and I feel so lucky because it has helped me to become a better human being.” Her account is also an elegant description of someone with improved brain function: moving forward, Brain Lock relieved, no longer “stuck in gear.”

Lara, who has built a productive professional life despite having OCD and Tourette’s syndrome, says, “‘Never give up’ is my motto. No one with OCD should ever give up. I managed to get both bachelor’s and master’s degrees and to become a counselor. Now I help others work through the everyday struggle against OCD. Having
OCD and Tourette’s has helped me to be more in tune with my clients. I probably will always struggle with my disorder, and that is okay. Maybe I can help others with OCD or Tourette’s. I often think how wonderful life would be without Tourette’s or OCD and what I would be like. Unfortunately, I’ll probably never find out. But that’s okay, too.”

Karen, the compulsive hoarder who had allowed junk to take over her house and her life, set both pragmatic and spiritual goals for herself once she recognized that she was dealing with a medical disease called OCD. She wanted a home filled with fresh air and sunlight—for too long she’d kept the windows barricaded to hide her terrible secret. She also wanted to savor every hour of the new leisure time she would have, once she had freed herself from her time-consuming compulsion. She says, “You have no idea how much time I spent each day rearranging things so I could fit in more. I spent hours of frustration looking for things that were hopelessly lost in the clutter and chaos. The hours it took to acquire all that stuff—and the hours, years actually, it took to clear it out—added up to at least a decade out of my life. Years of hassle and stress and frustration, feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, and grief.”

What she truly wanted most, Karen said, was serenity. “I guess that would be the number one goal of anyone with obsessive-compulsive disorder. OCD is hard work. It leads to internal (and seemingly eternal) unrest; frenzied activity; and physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion.”

While doing behavioral therapy at UCLA, Karen came to see, “I am not a bad person because I feel a need to scavenge things out of trash cans.” She learned that although she could not keep her compulsive urges from coming on, she
could
control what she did about those urges. She says, “You’re never going to hear me say, ‘Oh, I’m so glad I have OCD because it is such a challenge and it changed the whole direction of my life.’ It is, and it did, and I know I’m a stronger person today because of it. However, I lost a decade of my life to OCD, and that can never be replaced. Why couldn’t I see earlier that material things can be replaced, but time lost is gone forever and can never be retrieved?”

Karen is now in her 50s, a time when people typically reassess
their lives. And she has done just that. She is philosophical: “I’m not going to beat myself up over those lost years. I did the best I could at the time.” Her biggest mistake, she now knows, was to let her false pride keep her from seeking help before useless rubbish took over her life. She knows, “You really must have human help to get yourself on the road to health. Trusting another to lead you will be the most difficult thing you ever do, but you must do it. Get a loving buddy, a friend, or a family member to help you and encourage you. Don’t be a victim to this disease. Be a victor over it. Take the risk. Do it now. Get your life back. Your future is in your own hands.”

Time—the extra hours in the day that OCD patients find they have when they’re no longer spending them doing compulsions—also became a big factor for Jack, the compulsive hand washer. But he found it a mixed blessing. “You can fill up vast amounts of time with OCD, and then you’ve got a problem. After behavior therapy, you can get stuff done faster, especially around the house—watering, feeding the cats, doing laundry.” At home, he now felt in control, and he liked doing things in a time-efficient manner. Unfortunately, this feeling only led to greater frustration at work. Because he was in a temporary job that basically bored him, he became more frustrated. Jack had a patchy work record, with problems of concentration and an inability to deal with people. “I’d just get mad and think, ‘Here I am, wasting my time. I could at least be out looking for a worthwhile job or at home doing those chores.’ My wife would say, ‘Nobody’s going to care if you do the laundry. Why don’t you look for better work?’ But it’s funny. With OCD, there’s a lot of resistance to change.”

Jack developed good habits in Revaluing OCD urges as he worked on his hand-washing compulsions with the Four Steps. As he described it, “Of course, I was anxious at first when I [resisted the compulsive urges to] wash, but then I discovered that the more time that you don’t give in and find out that nothing happens, the easier it gets the next time. You begin to have a history of incidents in which nothing really happens when you ignore the obsession.” Now he’s learning to apply the Revalue principle in a more general way to improve his self-confidence and begin to overcome the resistance to change. “I try to work on my OCD every day—to work on
some of the more subtle symptoms and thought patterns. I try not to pay attention to intrusive thoughts. I try not to be too hard on myself. It’s hard to get rid of this problem completely, but you have to give yourself credit for any improvements you make.” By learning to take note of his achievements and to make mental notes of a self-supporting nature, Jack has improved his confidence level. He is now more comfortable at job interviews, and his overall function continues to steadily improve.

SELF-SUPPORTIVE STATEMENTS

It’s impossible to overstress the importance of learning to make self-supportive statements as a regular part of doing the Four Steps. In brief, you are working to learn how to Revalue your OCD
down
and Revalue your behavior therapy achievements
up
. For instance, never demean or underestimate the importance of even a small time delay before doing a compulsion. You may say, “I want to do even better,” but never demean the achievements that you actually make. Of course, keeping a journal record of your achievements in behavior therapy will help you accomplish this goal.

Benjamin, whose PET brain scan is on the book jacket, is now in his early 40s and has been battling OCD compulsions, including checking and cleaning, off and on since he was about 6. Washing his car could take six hours; it had to be done just right. The garage, the closets, and his files had to be in precise order. Disarray and disorder were not to be tolerated. Having a repairman come into his house was a trauma because this stranger would be intruding on Benjamin’s tidy environment and might make something dirty or get it out of order. Benjamin’s compulsions and anxieties began to take up so much time that he could not take a full course load in graduate school. Finally, he “hit rock bottom” in productivity.