Brain Lock: Free Yourself From Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior (21 page)

Because Benjamin, who is now a school district administrator, came from a family of highly successful, efficient people, he felt guilty and ashamed; he was basically in denial. He knew his behavior was abnormal and reasoned that he must be a bad person, the rotten apple on the family tree. Until he learned he had OCD, a medical disease, Benjamin “had always operated under this kind of illusion
that one day my life would be a dream life, with everything perfect. I would be successful and happy. So it was very difficult for me to accept the fact that my life was going to be more of a struggle than other lives, that things weren’t perfect.”

While learning the Four Steps of behavior therapy, he also learned to take what, for him, were “major, major risks.” He forced himself to live with a certain amount of physical disorder, to touch things that he once would have felt were contaminated. Something as insignificant as leaving a drawer open, some papers askew, was a huge victory. While gaining the upper hand over his OCD, Benjamin also began to Revalue his life, to rethink his priorities. He says his struggle against his disease “made me much more sensitive and aware and empathetic to people who have disorders and physical disabilities. It also made me a much more spontaneous person, more realistic. Life is a risk, it’s a chance, and it’s also a great opportunity. That’s what makes it exciting and enjoyable. OCD was really difficult for me to accept initially, the idea that it will always be there to varying degrees. At the same time, I now know that when you heighten your self-awareness, it makes you more human. The degree to which you accept what and who you are measures your success as a person. You no longer operate in some fantasy world of perfection.”

Today, by Benjamin’s own assessment, his OCD is 80 percent under control, but, on a scale of one to ten, he rates himself only a five in terms of personal relationships. “I want to be more useful to other people, more helpful. At one time, I thought having an ordered environment—an orderly life, an orderly office—was the greatest good, but now I have transferred to things that are more genuine and lasting and worthwhile, less material. I want to be a better family member, a better person on a personal, intimate level. In the past five or six years, I’ve gone though a major value shift that started with seeing Dr. Schwartz. I guess the reassuring message here is that if you get the basic elements of your life under control, the natural tendency is to move toward things that are more emotionally gratifying.”

Like so many of our OCD patients, Benjamin has Revalued his life. He understands that “a person’s value is the degree to which they can accept and move forward with what they were given.”

KEY POINTS TO REMEMBER

• Step 4 is the Revalue step.

• Revalue means don’t take your symptoms at “face value”—they don’t mean what they say. See them for what they are.

• Work to Revalue in an active way, by seeing the reality of the situation as quickly and clearly as possible. Strengthen the clarity of your observation with assertive mental notes, such as “It’s not me—it’s just OCD.”

• When you Revalue and devalue unwanted thoughts and urges, you are strengthening your Impartial Spectator and building a powerful mind.

• A mind that can take note of subtle changes and understand the implications of those changes is a powerful mind.

• A powerful mind can change the brain by altering responses to the messages the brain sends.

• This is true self-command. It results in real self-esteem.

The Four R’s

Step 1
. Relabel

Step 2
. Reattribute

The Two A’s

Anticipate

Accept

Step 3
. Refocus

Step 4
. Revalue

PART II

Applying the Four Steps to Your Life

One who is slow to anger is better than a warrior; and one who rules his spirit is better than one who takes a city.

—King Solomon,
Proverbs 16:32

Though a thousand times a thousand men are conquered by one in battle, the one who conquers himself is truly the master of battle.

—Gotama Buddha,
Dhammapada 103

5

The Four Steps and Personal Freedom

T
he struggle to overcome the scourge of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) almost always begins for the most pragmatic reasons. Your life is being taken over by a strange power that seems to be stronger than you are. In this book, my goal has been to teach you the most effective strategies for neutralizing this opponent called OCD, whose tricks can be so devastating to those who don’t know how to fight back effectively. Like most other bullies and aggressors, much of its power comes from its ability to intimidate the naive and uninitiated. When seen from the clear-minded perspective of the Impartial Spectator, the true nature of this deceptive opponent comes into focus. With this insight, fear and dread begin to fade, and the path to victory comes into view. This is what training yourself to do the Four Steps is all about.

The power of the Relabel step is something that should never be underestimated. It’s the difference between knowing what’s real and living in fear of shadows. When you Relabel and make mental notes and remind yourself, “That’s just OCD—I don’t have to listen to that”—a very powerful process is initiated. A change in the value and meaning that you give to the unpleasant obsessive thought or urge begins. The power of the Impartial Spectator is called into play, which profoundly changes the nature of the interaction between you
and your internal opponent. Now the battle is being fought on your home turf—reality—not on the playing field of your opponent, who relies solely on deception and illusion. Always remember that a firm grasp of reality is your greatest ally in the fight against OCD because in the end, fear and false messages are OCD’s only weapons. If you Reattribute those fears to their true causes, as you’ve trained yourself to do, and Refocus on a wholesome behavior for at least fifteen minutes, you may not win every battle, but in the end, you’ll win the war. With the power of your mind, you will change your brain. Where once there was Brain Lock, a freer and more smoothly running thought process is now in place.

People frequently ask, especially early in treatment, “Will I ever be cured?” As I’ve tried to explain through the stories of courageous patients, a cure cannot be guaranteed, especially if you take it to mean that you will never have an OCD symptom again. But if cure means the freedom of never again running scared from the plague of OCD symptoms and not having the direction of your life dictated by the tyrant OCD, then that goal is within the grasp of essentially every person who suffers the misery of OCD. (I know this to be true. I’ve seen it too many times to doubt it.)

The larger meaning of the effort that people put into following the Four Steps is a message about what we all can accomplish when we let go of fear, practice mindful awareness, and decide to take control of our lives. The increased mental power that people with OCD develop, the power to notice small changes and understand their significance and to go forward in the face of pain and fear, have wide-reaching effects not only on the lives of people with OCD but on the lives of those around them. This greater mental power can go beyond the realm of OCD. It can lead you to a much deeper insight into what it means to Revalue your internal experience in light of new and more productive ends and goals. In doing so, you can expand your mental and spiritual horizons in ways you may not have considered before.

Consider the power of the simple question “Why am I doing this?” In many ways the entire Four-Step method boils down to bringing the perspective of the Impartial Spectator more clearly into mind when answering that question. No doubt, new information
about how the brain works helps people with OCD answer this key question more realistically and more courageously. Yet it seems crucial to realize that what these new brain discoveries have in essence done is enabled people to see their own minds with greater clarity. And doing so enhances their ability to find their true goals and objectives.

We live in an age when many people who fancy themselves sophisticated thinkers—whether they are doctors, scientists, or philosophers—can state with the greatest authority that the mind is just something that “somehow emerges” from and is fully determined by the physical properties of the brain. Anything that may be called a spirit, they’re too embarrassed even to talk about. Somehow it doesn’t seem sophisticated to them. For them, science must relegate the spirit and the will to the realm of mere superstition. To my mind, this is all very unfortunate. Far worse, I believe it reflects a profoundly false way of thinking. And one of the great accomplishments of our research on OCD, I believe, is that it helps us perceive more clearly just how the conscious and comprehending mind differs from the brain and cannot be solely dependent on it.

Consider what goes on inside a man who is fighting off an OCD symptom using the Four Steps. The intrusive obsessions keep bothering and imposing on him—“Go wash your hands. Go check the stove.” Before training in the Four Steps, he listened right away, which tended to make the Brain Lock worse and worse, tighter and tighter. After Four-Step training, his mental response is very different. He now says, “I know what you are. You’re just OCD, just an alarm system in my brain gone bad. I’d rather be dead than listen to you, you miserable brain circuit from hell.” Then he goes and listens to Mozart or practices his golf swing or whatever. He considers his goals, reflects on his options, exercises his will, makes a new choice, and does another behavior. In this way, he changes how his brain functions. Over time, his brain changes enough so that, with new advances in technology, we can measure the change, even take a color picture of it (as is shown on the book jacket). Now, although some academics may say that this is just an example of the brain changing itself, any sensible person can see that the person in our example is clearly
using his mental power
to make the effort and do
the work that it takes to change his brain and conquer the symptoms of OCD. A genuine spiritual (willful) process has taken place, resulting in a scientifically demonstrable biological change in the body’s main organ of communication—the brain.

THE FOUR STEPS AND THE REST OF YOUR LIFE

The really big message for people who use the Four Steps is that by strengthening the Impartial Spectator and practicing mindful awareness, you will increase your mental power in every other aspect of your life. Mindful awareness will help you in your relationships with other people, it will help you at work, it will help you with problems of mind wandering and excessive daydreaming. You’ll begin to see improvements in all the problem areas of life in which the cravings to which the mind is so vulnerable cause pain and distress.

For example, consider how much time and energy people spend ruminating and stewing about personal relationships. The Relabel and Refocus steps and use of the Impartial Spectator and mindful awareness are particularly helpful for modulating the intense ruminating that almost everyone does under stress—about boyfriends and girlfriends: Should I ask her out, shouldn’t I, should I call, should I wait? That’s one category. Then there’s the did-the-boss-look-at-me-funny? group and all those What-do-people-think-of-me? Am-I-good-enough? Do-I-look-okay? types of thoughts. And let’s not forget the life-would-be-great-if-only category. At the point that thoughts like these get out of control and start taking on a life of their own, they become extremely unpleasant ruminations. Anyone can become controlled by these types of thoughts. But people with OCD may be particularly vulnerable to them. However, I have seen many patients with OCD teach themselves how to break these streams of ruminative thinking when they learn the power of Relabeling and develop the technical ability to make mental notes. They can then use the Refocus step to get on a better track.