grace obsessed

One day out from Thanksgiving, I’m hoping you are having the most wonderful time with friends and family, whomever makes you happy. Maybe you appreciate alone time, as I often do, and hopefully you get a bit of that as well.

I’m kicking my post off today with a bit of background on my first therapist and what he shared with me. While I have had to move beyond some of the more basic strategies for coping with my OCD into techniques that are a bit more complex, I always remember the first. And they WERE helpful. The smallest things were helpful. They gave me hope.

The first therapist I ever had was named Stewart. My gosh, I can picture that cute little man. He was (or is, rather, as I’m pretty sure he’s still kickin’) about 5’5 feet tall, a petite and tidy little man who never went without sporting a sharp bowtie. Stewart defined kindness. Gentleness. As I was certainly nervous entering a psychologist’s office for the first time, worrying if he’d ask me to lay down on a couch (because I saw that on The Bob Newhart Show), he gave me a feeling that I made the right decision in coming straight from the start. They say that you know early on whether you vibe with your therapist. And the best among them will tell you honestly that if you aren’t feeling it, you should move on.

I worked with Stewart for the better part of five years. I didn’t leave because I was “fixed,” but because I had made progress. I wanted to try on my own. There were many entry-level strategies Stewart gave me to combat what he recognized immediately as OCD, but the very first, I’ll share with you here to start. When you have OCD, you feel that your mind is overflowing with thoughts you cannot remove (or maybe just one thought that is taking up all of the space), and so Stewart began by suggesting for me the following…

The Stop Sign technique is the simplest I know. Not simple because it’s easy to execute or sustain, but simple in that anyone can imagine it. Anyone can try it. Stewart would tell me that when it seemed I could not extract an incessant, intrusive thought, that I could not move on with my day, with my moment, rather, I should visualize a stop sign taking up all of the space in my brain. An alternate idea would be to picture blank white space filling the brain, so as to eliminate any unwelcome thoughts that may be there.

I have had success with both of these. In short bursts, that is. I am good at visualizing what the inside of my head might look like, and if I can replace the chaos of what I imagine to be there with the stop sign or blank white space, it actually gives me momentary calm.

I hope this basic strategy gives you hope today. I know how critical, how consequential, even a moment of peace, the smallest reprieve, can be. Take moments throughout your day, as I certainly did and do, to STOP.

More to come…