Putting It All in the Pot: Learning to Deal with OCD

The following is a story I wrote about how I better learned to deal with the many different types of OCD I was facing. The key for me was learning that OCD, at its heart, is trying to do the same thing in every situation.

The joy of a crock pot is that you can basically throw anything that you want into it, let the contents sit for a couple hours, and then voila!  You have something that is finished and ready to eat.  Well, the crock pot is not only an excellent cooking appliance but also it is an incredibly useful metaphor for dealing with OCD.  The crockpot is really the great equalizer as whatever is put into it is treated indiscriminately.  Applying this concept to how I addressed my OCD was critical in my road to recovery.

            While I had mild OCD for as long as I can remember, it never reached a point where I felt like I needed to do anything about it.  It was irritating, but it felt more like I was very superstitious rather than dealing with the first hints of mental illness.  However, in my early 20’s, my OCD evolved to a more severe form.  I still remember the day it changed vividly as I had been reading a book on a plane and a passage in that book triggered a specific and terrible OCD thought.  That passage and resulting OCD response opened the floodgates for OCD to come pouring through.  After 22 years of relative peace in my mind, I started getting constantly bombarded with new, horrible OCD thoughts of all varieties.  And these thoughts could come from anywhere.  One day I was driving my car and thought “what if I accidentally ran someone over” and then that quickly became a strong OCD fear of mine that would cause me to get out of my car and check to make sure I hadn’t hit someone after every time I went over a bump in the road.  Or on another day, after a pimple on my lip appeared and my leg muscles started twitching, I became convinced I had both herpes and ALS, thoughts that led to hours of unnecessary and anxiety-provoking internet research.  And these were some of the easier OCD thought processes for me to deal with!  Especially compared to OCD thoughts I had concerning topics like murder, rape, self-harm, and my own sexuality.  All these obsessive thoughts felt so different and thus I tried to deal with them differently.  Some OCD thoughts I tried to fix by reasoning with myself, others I tried to deal with by denying them.  For some, I had specific words I would say to myself to try to make the thoughts go away while for others I would just end up pacing my room, hoping they would dissipate as I tired myself out.  And this became overwhelming as every time I thought I had finally reduced the impact of one form of OCD, another would pop up in its place and I would have to develop a whole new method of countering it.  It was a struggle with seemingly no end as I knew that no matter what I did, OCD would always present me with someone else to worry about.

            Around the same time I realized that I needed to combat my OCD in a different manner, I had a conversation with my therapist in which she said that all OCD is the same.  And initially, I disagreed as I felt like all these various forms of OCD seemed different.  But then I really listened to what she was saying which was that in all of these situations, OCD is trying to put me in panic mode by trying to convince me that I am something I do not want to be or that some terrible thought I have is indicative of who I am or will become.  And then in order to “solve” these OCD thoughts, I was always doing some form of obsessive, compulsive checking, although the exact nature of the checking did vary.  But the key idea was that the process was the same, even if the actual details of what was bothering me differed.  Aided by this newfound understanding, I started telling myself to put whatever OCD concern was bothering me at that particular moment “into the pot”.  Identifying any and all OCD worries as items to be thrown into the crock pot helped me to remember that all these concerns needed to be treated the same way.  This strategy worked in tandem with my therapist’s advice that the end goal for dealing with OCD thoughts was treating them as insignificant and not worth one’s time.  So whenever I felt an OCD “attack” imminent, I reminded myself to put the thought in the pot and treat it as unimportant rather than something I needed to freak out over.  And this really helped me, although the journey was far from easy.  OCD, ever persistent and tenacious, then tried to convince me that my crock pot idea was another way to compulsively check and was making matters worse.  But I was able to move past this negative line of thinking as the crock pot idea wasn’t something I had to do in order to make my OCD go away, rather it was simply a general idea that was always in the background of my mind and just helped to provide a new way of looking at things.  I was exceptionally heartened to learn that this pot paradigm was helpful to others as well as I shared it at an OCD support group and people said that they would take the idea to their own treatment and therapy.  I am certainly not claiming that the “crock pot” method is a panacea; however, I do feel that its core idea is applicable to many people who are struggling with OCD.  OCD wants you to be scared and tries to overwhelm you with as many different problems as it can.  And so, rather than giving OCD what it wants and attending to each concern individually in a way that increases anxiety, I would recommend investing in a simple tool that goes a long way: the crock pot.