It may help you to know that I once sat in that position myself and my experience, as a result of personal research and talking to many other people with similar difficulties, tells me there are millions of us in the world who share or have previously shared this situation. Despite the isolating affects that anxiety disorders such as obsessions impose on us it is important to know you are not alone.
An obsession is a curable condition. I know this because I have healed myself of at least 27 of them and they have not returned. I will go so far as to say that all anxiety disorders are curable conditions, if you are willing to do the necessary work to heal them.
About six years ago I was diagnosed by a psychiatrist with a complex form of OCD – in addition to my obsessions I was plagued by phobias; panic attacks; depression and disgust attacks. I had held on to my condition for almost 30 years, mostly due to having responsibilities towards other people – there is an ‘opportunity cost’ to healing in that it takes a lot of time and energy.
I had managed to live an externally ‘normal’ life all that time. There came a point I decided I finally needed to care of me. I had had enough. I needed to be more selfish.
I went to see my doctor, who sent me to see a psychiatrist, who also sent me to sign up for counselling. I told them I had a plan based on Exposure Therapy, which I had already started to carry out, and I needed their support in seeing it through as it was causing me to feel a whole range of extreme emotional symptoms.
I had started to ‘go within’ and my own emotional responses and hidden beliefs were starting to appear; the general message being thrown at me was ‘if you do this you are going to die’. I made a decision I was either going to live the inner life I wanted to live or I was going to die trying. Bring it on.
I faced my inner world day after day and every day it hurt like hell – but I started to see changes and results. I called the process ‘going-into-the-out-of’. Before you can come out of an anxiety disorder you must first be willing to repeatedly go into it and experience all its glory at its full intensity.
It took me three months of daily work to get rid of the panic attacks that acted as a barrier towards my being able to work directly on my obsessions.
I started to see that various aspects of this emotional mass had structure to it; I would explore, experiment and test on myself once I felt I had a reliable picture of how this or that particular emotional response worked. I realised the same approach worked over and over again with different emotions.
I discovered these responses and their attached images and memories were chronologically layered – only one obsessive response would appear at a time but as I cleared one another, older version of a previous obsession would appear. ‘Oh, I remember this one’. There were times when I wondered when I would get to the bottom of them – but now I knew how to get rid of them my sense of desperate frustration changed to simply acceptance of ‘the next job to do’.
‘There must be a part that…’ was a common question that came up in my mind. I would notice a particular aspect of a pattern and then start researching it and find ‘the part’ in question. Why does this happen? Why does that happen? Pretty soon I was telling my professional supporters what I was seeing – and they were agreeing with me.
Within a year I had got rid of almost all my obsessions; stopped my panic attacks and got rid of my phobias. My psychiatrist told me he was astonished at my progress.
It took another two years, using the same approach, to get rid of my more deeply embedded obsessions and then to start work on the underlying emotional pain that had causes the obsessions and phobias to form in the first place.
I now see my counsellor once a month for ‘maintenance’ and as each year passes I become more and more unconditionally happy as I make decisions that continue to lead me away from the hell I once endured.
The journey is a difficult one, and it has 4 main stages:
1 Learning to Understanding
Like an evil scientist you have to put yourself through increasingly painful episodes and watch, with a part of your mind I call ‘the Silent Observer’, what happens. What you eventually come to understand is your current mental model does not match what really happens with emotional responses. Emotional responses do not just come and stay – if you stay with them long enough they turn from a foggy mood into something you can actually see, as if you were a mechanic fixing a car, and then when you keep willingly going into the experiencing of them they evaporate into nothingness.
There comes a point when you wonder where it went – and you cannot get it back no matter what you do – and the reality of the process dawns.
2 Understanding to Doing
Being able to see their structure of an obsession does not mean you do not have to do the work – but it can get much faster just like in any area of life – once you know how it works, and that it does work, you just get on with it. The negative ‘it could kill you’ messages still come up but you just laugh at them. They are like old friends by now. The work still hurts but you do not care.
You have now learned you get two choices: feel a low level of pain indefinitely or feel an intense pain for a relatively short period of time and remove the problem. Which are you going to choose?
It took me several months to figure out how to remove my first obsession. By my 27th I could do it in 30 minutes of concentrated work. What takes the time is the time in between healing as your thinking mind always puts up a bit of a fight before you are able to get into ‘the zone’ for concentrated work.
3 Doing to Obtaining
What you aim to obtain is happiness. Happiness is not about getting something – happiness is about getting rid of emotional baggage and emotional baggage does not come much bigger than an obsession.
You obtain mental freedom – the more obsessions I got rid of the more I felt free. I could see the freedom percentages increasing with each obsession cleared. You become more aware of what it is you are obtaining and you want more of it. At the start of the process I had just a vague idea of what happiness was, the more happiness I got the better the picture become.
This desire drives you not just to remove your obsessions but to remove the underlying emotional baggage that created the conditions in the first place. What you discover is you like yourself just being at peace – peace is something you cannot obtain when you have obsessions but these peaceful times increase in number and you get a clearer and clearer picture of what you want to obtain and greater confidence you can actually get it – as long as you are willing to keep ‘going-into-the-out-of’.
4 Obtaining to Maintaining
Maintaining is really easy. You have had so much training by now that as soon as a negative emotional experience occurs you are in there getting rid of it. I am not talking about obsessions here – I am talking about basic primary emotions. You are never going to allow yourself to become ill like that ever again.
The mantra that you can never be cured of this condition is false – you know this as a fact when you get to this point. When people tell you it cannot be cured they are talking from a very limited experience. You now come to accept you know things about the way people work a lot of people will never do the work to know.
There is a fifth stage; this stage is the icing on the cake for me.
5 Maintaining to Sharing (?)
My heading here was initially going to be ‘Maintaining to Teaching’ but I have learned this is an area of life that cannot really be taught. It can only be shared – because the responsibility to heal lies within each individual and our individual journeys will be different even if the mechanics are the same. There are no examinations or pass marks for this kind of stuff.
No-one really knows what you know – even we ourselves have enough trouble figuring our inner worlds out.
During my healing journey, which still continues to the day I pop my clogs, I have met a lot of other anxiety disorder sufferers. One of the ways I justify the investment of time it takes to keep me on the right track is that once I discover something new I will share.
So here I am sharing – how am I doing?
If what I write is of interest to you please come and have a chat on my blog at http://managemesystems.com – unlike some folks I am delighted to discuss anxiety disorders!
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