Reassurance – an unquenchable thirst

Ultimately, we are not reassurable – so said my brilliant therapist who, alongside the right medication, helped me recover from OCD. Well, I say recover, I still get anxious, but she helped me come to terms with it – and when I say ‘it,’ I mean this concept of not being able to be certain about certain things, for want of a better word. I think our lack of control over certain events takes a lifetime to master – it is progress not perfection.

If you think I’m speaking in riddles, perhaps I am. It is hard to describe the process by which we get some peace from OCD. We have to become un-peaceful in order to gain peace (by this I mean learn to sit with anxiety for anxiety to lessen). As a tutor at my therapy college said to me many years ago – therapy is about comforting the disturbed, and disturbing the comfort.

It is rather like a grief process. If you have real event and false memory OCD (look it up, if you want more info), you have to sit with the small chance that something awful did happen, or is going to happen in the near future. It’s unlikely, but it’s possible. It’s unlikely I will get run over by a bus tomorrow morning, but it is possible, after all. No one can say for certain, we are not reassurable in totality.

We can have a hunch. My therapist used to get me to say ‘my hunch is that xyz didn’t happen, but I cannot be sure.’ We can be 99% sure but the 99% doesn’t really matter because OCD will focus on the 1%, and that is what we have to learn to live with by sitting with the anxiety (I will say it again, we are not reassurable).

Reassurance and seeking reassurance is a sure fire way to stay in the loop of anxiety, something I’ve written about in previous blogs on here. If we don’t gradually come to terms with staying in the 1%, and we constantly seek reassurance, what tends to happen is that the OCD stays one step ahead – morphing into other themes, laying out new propositions. ‘OK,’ it hammers home, ‘we know you didn’t do that, but what about if you did this….’ And so on and so forth, in perpetual OCD hell.

The reptilian part of your brain, or the amygdala, is not firing its neurons correctly, and still thinks we are living in caves, and that there is something in the bushes (we are the antelope, the anxiety is the lion). Of course that is not the case any more. The trouble is, thanks to natural selection, the most anxious of us have survived, leaving us with a whole bunch of anxious people roaming planet earth.

The more extreme of us with anxiety disorders like OCD take this one step further. For some reason our brains conjure up all sorts of lions in bushes scenarios – that could be that you did something many years ago, or that you are going to do something – ie push someone in front of a train. Or, that if you don’t do something, check light switches, wash your hands til they bleed, then something will happen. We are bargaining with the devil and we must step out of Satan’s boxing ring in order to recover.

We do this of course with Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP).

ERP deals with stepping out the ring and dealing with the 1%. We sit with the possibility that xyz was true, or will happen, and gradually the brain learns it doesn’t need to send these anxious messages, and the fight or flight comes down. This works for phobias and other types of anxiety and worry disorders. It has been used for years and it has endured because it is the gold standard in anxiety therapy.  It is really hard but very worth it. We do exposures by going towards triggers that we have avoided – the avoidance is the compulsion. We do something different to break out the loop. 

We go with our hunch but we fake it to make it in accepting that nothing is certain. When we fake it to make it, we end up making it, insofar as the OCD gets bored and fades, even gives up. The faking that we don’t care teaches our brains that we are safe. This is quite basic stuff but we are dealing with that basic, lizard part of our brain, which we can talk to like a child. It feels massive but it’s ultimately a brain firing out possibilities, and each time we engage with it, we are taking one of its ‘what if’s’ as gospel. 

Chad Lejeune talks about the OCD noise, when treatment is successful, as becoming like supermarket music – you can hear it but you don’t really pay attention to it. You certainly wouldn’t be able to tell anyone what was playing in Tescos last time you were there, would you? You were listening but not engaging. Disengaging enables the thoughts to become unstuck, filtering through, like all the other thoughts we have that we don’t even remember because they are so irrelevant. 

We need to go towards triggers and keep exposing ourselves to them without performing compulsions. If our OCD presents as more of a mental process then we spend time with the people or whatever/whoever it is that make us anxious. If we wash our hands compulsively because otherwise xyz will happen, we learn to do it maybe a little less each day, sitting with anxiety, and watching it come down. It is a piecemeal process, this reassurance stuff.

Contact me on jessica@jessicadrake.biz to book an appointment where I will explain more.