Letter to the person newly diagnosed with OCD

A peptalk for the scared yet hopeful

Dear friend,

You have just received your OCD diagnosis or maybe you haven’t been formally diagnosed yet, but are pretty sure OCD is to blame for a lot of your anxiety and “stuckness” these past few years.

You are probably feeling many things. You might feel relief and hope that feels suspicious. You might have been startled by the instant recognition of past patterns when the OCD cycle was explained to you. You might blame yourself for not knowing this sooner. For not knowing. You might feel fear, regret, anger, even enraged that no one caught this, helped you, sooner. You might chastise yourself for hoping. You might doubt your diagnosis, your recovery process, yourself, your own ability to see up from down. You might be paralyzed at this crossroads, clinging to the safe prison of your old ways. It was prison, yes, but you knew what to expect.

You might be scared to lose yourself. Surrendering to a diagnosis may feel like a death of sorts. You’ll lose your certainty and smug superiority, you’ll lose your high standards and rules, you’ll lose your safety rituals, tedious as they may be. You might be scared you’ll lose your imagination, your creativity, your very being.

OCD attacks our thoughts, and what are we if not our thoughts? What are you but your thoughts and justifications, your ability to think and solve and understand? 

It feels foolish to hope for freedom, to imagine a life on the other side.

I’m here to tell you, your hope is not foolish. Scary as hell, yes, but not foolish.

The very nature of OCD recovery is counter intuitive. The way forward is through opposite action: whatever OCD wants you to do, tells you that you NEED to do to be a responsible person or avoid catastrophe or to make this God-awful feeling go away–don’t do it, or do it wrong, or delay it. The goal is to disrupt the cycle in some way, any way. This does not need to be perfect. You can take back the power choice by choice.

You may feel just as trapped needing to act a certain way for your recovery.  This won’t be forever. You may find that choosing the opposite action takes LONGER and may take you MORE out of the moment than just giving in to the compulsion. I promise you, it’s worth it.

One day, these won’t be exposures, they will just be part of life. One day it won’t even occur to you to do the compulsion.

One day you will be able to answer, what do YOU want or what would you do if OCD wasn’t in the picture? (I know this is an impossible question right now and you don’t need to answer.)

I hope you feel empowered as you fight back. As you do the scary thing. As you sit with the hard. As you allow and accept completely unacceptable thoughts and feelings. When you don’t die, when you make it through to the other side, I hope you feel like a badass, because you are. I hope you find you are stronger than you ever imagined.

There is grief in this process, too. You may mourn all the time spent on compulsions, chasing your tail, trapped by fear. You might experience depression as you recover. If the commands you took as truth are not truth and not urgent and not real problems to solve, then what was the point? What is the point? Where is your purpose? Who are you without OCD? You may not know and that’s okay. You may find you were addicted to conviction and without the sharp boundaries of right and wrong, life may feel meaningless, untethered. For a time.

Grief is allowed. Anger is allowed.

You might find you are more suspicious on the good days. You may have anxiety about not having anxiety. This is normal, too. You may not trust the good, trust yourself, trust the process, yet. And that’s okay.

Can you be willing to try one more time?

I will hold out hope for you. I know you have everything you need. You are persistent, empathetic, resilient, responsible, creative. You can put those qualities toward your recovery, instead of feeding OCD. You’ve been pushing past the fears every day already. Now you’ll have more tools. A framework. A hope of recovery.

Yes, you may lose your safe prison, but you’ll gain freedom, quiet, choice, trust, whimsy, spontaneity, creativity, and confidence. You’ll recover who you were meant to be.

It would be easier to stick to the old moves, the old pattern. The learning and re-learning is so tedious, you will trip over your own feet, it will feel like OCD is dancing circles around you. You will give in to compulsions and want to give up altogether. I hope you try again. I hope you take the next step and the next until one day this new way of being is automatic. Until you dance your dance without OCD taking the lead.

You’ve got this and I’m here to cheer you on!

Love,

Aly

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I’d love to hear from you! If you’re newly diagnosed with OCD, where could you use encouragement? If you’ve been on the OCD recovery journey for awhile, what would you add that you wish you tell yourself when you were first diagnosed?