Misguided feeling

Somewhat out of the blue came an OCD flare-up at the end of last week. Well, maybe not out of the blue; there was a bit of stress to trigger it. It has passed now. For many years I used to think that I had got over OCD and just had some residual habits left. I used to think this because I would recall how it was as child up until about thirteen when it would be excruciating. At about thirteen I found I could control it; I could just stop the rituals and tolerate the discomfort and it would subside. I would go cold turkey, I had discovered what I now know to be called Exposure and Ritual Prevention. At that time I (and for that matter most people in my world) had never heard the description Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and I had no name for what I was experiencing, was terrified that people would think I was crazy, was ashamed about it and received no professional help. It must be six or seven years ago that a therapist suggested to me that my OCD was probably not so much cured but (well) managed. Thinking back to the excruciating times between nine (when I think it started) and thirteen I thought 'no, it's nothing like that'. And that was and is true and I am not consumed by the compulsive need to carry out nulling routiens. But the therapist was right in some respects and much of my anxiety did and does still manifest in OCD. There is a particular flavor to it; an insidious gripping doubt coupled with a feeling of great peril a sense of responsibility and a need to make it safe. It being some aspect of life and more generally life its self. Such feelings cloud rational judgment and skew the perception of the odds of things going wrong towards the bleak. As a child I had seen emptiness too soon, way before I could cope with it let alone fully understand its fullness. OCD was a desperate attempt at control. In some way it probably helped me survive the awful feelings that triggered it; that is why we adopt such strategies. And like all attempts to control the world out there, it ends up controlling one's internal world. I am experienced now in observing my own body-mind and see much more clearly how thoughts and feelings resonate. So called rational thought has a lot more to do with the feeling of the thought than might be supposed. And it is in the feeling of things that the stickiness of OCD resides.

As a child I was particularly sensitive to unwholesome energies. I still am. This colored how I understood my OCD.  I perceived some malevolence that I felt I needed to protect myself against. It felt like somehow my (intrusive?) thoughts could make bad things happen and I would have to cancel them out with (what I now know are called) nulling routines and magical thinking. I realised that I was making some kind of a deal; I do the routines and the bad things won't happen. And that meant that there was some force that had power to do bad or stop it. And that force was thus not nice because the default seemed to be to do bad. There must have been (at least) two things happening here; 1) OCD - a psychological response to the feelings of vulnerability and the associated need to control, 2) a sensitivity to the energies around me. A mix of genuine spiritual insight (and sensitivity) and magical thinking was playing out in the experience of a sensitive small boy. When I look back on that boy now I see he has a radiant sensitivity to his inner and outer world and I wonder just how separate they seemed to him.

Now OCD is part of common speech (although I wonder how much people understand about it) and I have a far greater appreciation of the nature of life / the universe. And that appreciation is inextricably linked to the Three Jewels. The interesting thing about last week's flare up is that yet again I see that insight alone is not enough. The same stuff comes up. BUT it passes quicker. In that respect insight is enough.