Rewind, Replay, Repeat

I am sitting at my den desk, agonizing over the precise words that should occupy the last fifteen square inches of lined white space in front of me. The right words to button up this big experiment of mine.

I take a minute to look around my den at my many treasured mementos of the past twelve months. On my wall: a framed color photo of Unity Village that Cathleen had enlarged for me. On my shelves: at least two dozen thoroughly highlighted new books covering everything from traditional psychology to practical spirituality, along with my dog-eared Emmet Fox treasure from the floor of the Kansas City airport. And on my desk: a well-weathered cardboard pyramid and thousands of neatly stacked and categorized index cards just waiting for one more to forever join their ranks.

I begin pulling out, looking over, and trying to make sense of my three-by-five cards. There are so many of them now, each like a thumbnail snapshot at a multimedia Web site—“Click here to watch a streaming video of this image.” I do this because that’s how my head works, and because that’s the only way I know how to process the events of my life. But my playbacks tonight are my own. It is I, and not Doubt, in charge of what images I see and how many times I choose to review them. Easily and without even a hint of anxiety, I shuffle from one scene to another—from my dip in the pool in Missouri to Nicole’s father-daughter dance, from the moonlit creek in Joy’s backyard to the recent company picnic. Sequence after sequence, I play back my tapes from the past 365 days, and then from the five years before them. The Boat. The bouncing body. The call to the coroner. Dr. X. Dr. Y. Dr. Z. Dr. Smith. Dr. Schwartz. Jackie. The pills. The exposures. My virtual asylum. My bargain with the stars …

My Bargain with the Stars—not much chance of glossing over that one on this night.

Oct. 20, 1998. And so ends one journey as another begins.

Now I have eight words on my index card, and it strikes me right away that they are not at all the ones I would have expected to wind up there. Day 365 was supposed to be about closure, not transitions; about walking out of a building into a field, not stepping through a narrow doorway separating one room from another. I know there’s another big project awaiting my attention, and I know it involves the very same cards now spread across my desk. I understand that what lies ahead is nothing short of a journey in and of itself, and I can now admit that I’m excited about that. But I guess it’s the “baggage” I’m taking with me that has me questioning everything. Wasn’t I supposed to be leaving all my obsessions and compulsions at the door marked Exit?

Sitting here tonight, I know this will not be the case, and for proof I need only look over the handful of items on my most recent episodes cards. I also know better than to be surprised. I understand, if only intellectually, that I can no more be cured of my brain disorder than a former drunk can be cured of his alcoholism. Much as he’ll always be one drink away from a night in the gutter, I suppose I will forever be one OCD episode away from my own personal hell. That illusory asylum of mine will always be waiting for me at the end of my virtual tapes.

I’ve been waiting for Doubt to check in one last time during my project—waiting and challenging myself to hold my own on this all-important night. I know what’s coming.

I have the answer and I silently shout it: Maybe it was about learning to live with the “discomfort of uncertainty”—as Jackie had put it this morning at the end of what we triumphantly agreed would be our final phone session.

Maybe it was about coming to trust that there’s a “greater good” certainty and unlimited resources to help us find it.

Maybe it was about claiming my natural birthright of free will and using it to decide for myself who and what will direct my life.

Maybe it was about accepting that, while I cannot chase you away, Doubt, I can choose not to take my directions from you.

What was it I wrote one year ago tonight?
Something like “my outcome is certain
or my premise eternally flawed.” With
the same certainty I claimed back then, I
can now report that my premise—that we
have within us the “tools” to transform our
lives—is far from flawed. It is the greatest
truth I will ever know.

So here’s where I’m going to need to mess with time, to somehow morph the guy in my final 1998 project tapes with the guy writing these words in 2006. I have to do this because after hours of trying to separate what I knew then from what I know now, I’ve decided I can’t. Not even with the help of virtual tapes and index cards. Still, I want to share with you this “greatest truth I will ever know.” The painfully obvious one about the “tools” we have to transform our lives. The one I came to understand that night. The one I have lived by ever since.

So simple, really: those tools, they are nothing more than our choices—the ones we make a thousand times a day, and the ones that, strung together, define our lives.

I know this because of all that happened during the 365 days of my crash course in believing. Nothing magic, in retrospect. Nothing even very profound. Just an application, really, of so many seemingly divergent approaches to dealing with uncertainty through the power of our choices. Jackie’s coaching. Cognitive behavioral therapy. Jerry Jampolsky’s dueling directors. Dr. Schwartz’s impartial spectators and refocusing techniques. My little cardboard pyramid. So many ways of applying the same fundamental principles of free will and belief. So many life lessons learned along the way.

The triumphs, the setbacks, the breakthroughs, the steps forward and backward on my road to recovery: all of them, I know now, were the results of my own willful application—or lack thereof—of the myriad teachings and resources made available to me. I also know now that out of the alchemy of my one-year project came a set of very specific tools I could use to cope with the day-to-day challenges of life with OCD, tools that have served me incredibly well for nearly a decade now.

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.

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.”

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.

As 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.

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…

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.

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:

twenty-nine

fast-forward 18 days

Keep Perspective.

Take Initiative.

Release and Have Faith.