After recovering from anxiety, which took me several years, I began learning to sit with and embrace fear more and more. One key aspect of my recovery was flipping the coin around and using the pain and fear I had experienced for years as fuel for the courage to start my own business. It was something I probably wouldn’t have done, but the fear toughened me to dare to expand my comfort zone.
This strategy worked, and I successfully started and ran my own business, becoming my own boss and enjoying a comfortable life with travel around the world, among other things.
However, as life always promises, there are ups and downs. One day at work, I was surprised out of nowhere by being sexually assaulted by a male co-worker. When this happened, my automatic response was to “freeze.” The assault occurred in such a sneaky way that I was overwhelmed with confusion and shame. My next response was to suppress it and bury the moment in my mind as deeply as I could. Something told me to forget about it and never think about it again.
And that’s what I did. I walked around for two years with shame, confusion, and anger, never talking about it with anybody. Until I started noticing anxiety creeping back in, but this time, it was a bit different than the anxiety I was used to.
I began to notice strange and weird symptoms, sensations, urges, thoughts, and feelings. Something told me there was a problem, but I didn’t link it to the assault yet. One day, I also noticed sexually themed thoughts and feelings popping up in my conscious awareness, like a barrier between my unconscious and conscious brain could not suppress it any longer.
This was the day that OCD came into my life. The strange and scary feelings shocked me, and I started to obsess right away. What is it? What does it mean? What is the cause? Does it have to do with the incident? What does this tell me about me? Etc. I went into full blaze attack mode with the acceptance method I had learned before, and that kept the anxiety away. However, it did not keep OCD away because these symptoms were all new and weird, and I didn’t even want to accept them. I fought as hard as I could.
It took a while for me to figure out it was OCD because, in the beginning, it felt like something only I experienced, and nobody else. And I only knew OCD as a fear of contamination disorder. In the meantime, I underwent EMDR therapy, but this didn’t work at all for the OCD symptoms.
Now, around five months later, I’ve started my recovery journey with enough information. During the past five months, I’ve been obsessed with recovery (which is paradoxical for recovering, I know), but I’ve learned a lot from reading different books, watching various podcasts, videos, etc. All of this has given me reassurance to know that I’m not going psycho; it’s “just” OCD, which comes with different themes (religious, harm, sexual, etc).
I came across the ERP (Exposure Response Prevention) method in combination with ACT (Acceptance Commitment Therapy) as the most successful way to recover, which is basically the same as the Claire Weekes Acceptance method.
The only problem for me was that I was so used to the Acceptance method to use it with fear and anxiety and OCD struck me mostly with shame and guilt in combination with the different tricks OCD plays. This felt like a different game to play.
So now, I’m in my second week of ERP, and I am working hard to minimize my compulsions and rumination, which are feeding my OCD. Basically, I am trying to reclaim my attention and focus every time I’m ruminating on OCD (the content) or the recovery and trying to focus on the present. But this is very hard because OCD really wants me to focus on itself and ruminate about the recovery, which keeps me stuck in the loop.
I feel there is a fear of losing control or being even more ashamed if I fully focus on the present and ignore OCD completely. This fear and shame is feeding the monster. My job now is to starve the monster with total acceptance (not agreeing with the content of OCD but accepting it as a temporary situation) while, in the meantime, not trying to ruminate and keeping my focus on the present. This is going to be the hardest challenge in my life, but I’d rather have a hard, painful, and exhausting recovery path than a hard life forever.
