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I was thinking the other day about some of my favorite TED Talks and how influential they’ve been in my OCD recovery. TED curates some great talks, so the fact that they’ve had an impact is not surprising. What is interesting, however, is that these OCD-recovery-influencing TED Talks, including today’s focus, Susan David’s “The gift and power of emotional courage,” have nothing directly to do with OCD. And yet Dr. David’s talk and the TED Talks I will feature in subsequent posts sparked big aha! moments for how I approach my OCD.
Dead People’s Goals
Let’s start with a quick quiz: When you do an OCD compulsion, you’re doing it because:
(a) You are keeping bad things from happening
(b) You are trying to push away your anxiety
(c) It would just be too risky not to
If your OCD is answering this question, it will always answer (a) or (c) because that’s how it keeps you stuck. It waves really scary content in front of you (e.g. “You might have run someone over!”) and then uses a combination of (a) and (c) to get you to do what it wants (e.g. “You’d better go back and check right now to make sure someone isn’t lying there bleeding and dying! You can’t NOT check because that would be irresponsible!!!!) Anyone taking that harangue as truth would have a hard time not turning around and driving back to look for bodies.
But (a) and (c) are just part of OCD’s lies, because the actual answer to this question is (b). We do compulsions to get rid of anxiety or discomfort. Which brings me to my first aha! moment of Susan David’s TED Talk, when she says:
“I've had hundreds of people tell me what they don't want to feel. They say things like, ‘I don't want to try because I don't want to feel disappointed.’ Or, ‘I just want this feeling to go away.’
‘I understand,’ I say to them. ‘But you have dead people's goals.’”
Dead people’s goals! Brilliant! It’s such an insightful way to describe what all of us with OCD are trying to achieve when we do compulsions: we are trying to get rid of anxiety or discomfort we don’t want to feel. And I love how this short phrase reminds us of the utter impossibility of this goal, because we won’t get to be anxiety-free until we’re dead. This is doubly poignant because, for so many of us, OCD is obsessed with premature death. Yet when we listen to OCD we are, in effect, trying to act like dead people: people who won’t feel any anxiety or discomfort ever again.
So the next time OCD wants you to do a compulsion in response to some intrusive thought, say, “That’s a dead person’s goal, OCD. I’m not going to do that compulsion because I’m committed to life with all of its emotions, including anxiety, which I can handle.”
The Price of Admission
My second aha! moment in this TED Talk came when Dr. David said, “Tough emotions are part of our contract with life. You don't get to have a meaningful career or raise a family or leave the world a better place without stress and discomfort. Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life.”
Wow. Let me repeat her last line again: Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life. So if you want meaning, what my Beyond the Doubt partner, Jeff Bell, and I call “Greater Good,” then pursuing discomfort is the way to get it.
This is especially important for those of us with OCD, because sometimes we can get bitter that we “have to” do our exposure and response prevention therapy. But we don’t “have to.” That phrasing, “have to,” is OCD’s language, with the unstated part at the end “…or something bad will happen.” When we tell ourselves we “have to” do something, we are motivating through fear, which actually makes us less likely to be successful.
We can instead say that we, in fact, want to do exposures, because people who want meaning in their lives regularly push themselves outside of their comfort zones in order to achieve their goals and dreams. And that’s all exposure is: pushing yourself and your OCD out of your/its comfort zone so you can live the full and meaningful life you want….and deserve.
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