Balancing Act: Navigating OCD with Trust and Acceptance

The OCD and Anxiety Podcast by Robert James Coaching Thank you for listening. Music. Hello and welcome to The OCD and Anxiety Podcast where we explore how to have a more positive relationship with anxiety disorders disorders, taking back control so that you can start living the life you choose and not the one chosen by your fears. Music.

Hello and welcome to episode 420. I hope that you're doing very well today and if you are struggling with OCD or anxiety and you would like to get some support with that, well you you can by heading over to my website robertjamescoaching.com there you can book in for a free session or if you prefer you can send me a message and let me know about what you're struggling with.

Today's podcast is all about walking the kind of tightrope of OCD and recognizing that it really is this balancing act between allowing and accepting your fears and trying to focus focus on on trust and it's it's an interesting episode i think uh it's it's a really important topic to uh to discuss about ocd if you do find the podcast helpful it would be amazing if you could subscribe most people who listen are not actually subscribed so if you could do that i would

really appreciate it also if you would like to leave the podcast a review that would be amazing so many thanks guys i really hope that you enjoy if you have any questions do please let me know and off we go.

So today's episode is all about walking the tightrope of of OCD and recognizing the challenge with that on one side there's a lot of fear and on the other side you know hopefully what we're focusing on is trust and we're recognizing that you know we need to have trust in order to keep stepping forward along that tightrope of life and you know this this episode is really about helping you to try to find the the kind of inspiration to do that because a lot of the time I think that's one

of the big issues with OCD is you know we're really struggling to find that inspiration to to find a way to step out into the uncertainty now of course I'm not actually suggesting that you should go and do tightrope walking that would be very dangerous however I think it is an interesting metaphor to to explore and I wanted to start off by talking about maybe one of the most famous tightrope walkers and that is a man named Philippe Petit and he is most famous for actually

walking across the tightrope between the the old twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York in 1974. And clearly this was a very dramatic stunt, very, very dangerous. Some would say foolish. But at the same time, this guy clearly, you know, is living his life by his values. He set himself a goal and a target. It was obviously very risky and dangerous, but he thought he could do it. And, you know, he kind of, he did.

And he's quite an interesting guy and has quite a kind of inspirational outlook on life. So I wanted to just share a quote that he has, his most famous quote. And it is this. Life should be lived on the edge of life. You have to exercise rebellion to refuse to shape yourself to rules, to refuse your own success.

To refuse to repeat yourself, to see every day every year every idea as a true challenge and then you're going to live your life on a tightrope and of course this is you know powerful and inspirational and it really gets us thinking about what we have to do in our own lives what is the tightrope of our life that that we need to walk in order to you know to manage OCD better in order to to find that balance between living our life by our values through creating meaning and not

allowing our fears to kind of take us down now obviously if you're on a tightrope the worst thing that you can really do is to.

Stare down at the floor if you're if you're walking on a tightrope you really want to keep your focus where you're going and I know this to be true myself from activities like surfing and mountain biking you know when you're when you're mountain biking you always want to keep your attention on where you're going if you're going over an obstacle you don't want to stare at the obstacle because you're likely then to kind of go over the front wheel you want to keep your

attention on where you want to go where the exit is and by doing that you automatically put your body in the right place and you're able to to overcome those obstacles and hopefully remain on the bike if you're doing it correctly and you know this is the the same i think with tightrope walking you have to keep your focus on where it is that you're going you're still aware of your own discomfort and your fear if i'm doing something on my mountain bike that's a bit challenging for me I'm very

aware of that fear I'm very aware of that discomfort but I also know that I want to overcome it and I want to push myself a little bit so I'm not going to take on a huge ridiculous challenge that could result in me having a very bad injury but I will you know push myself and find things that that are a little bit challenging and practice that skill of just being aware of my discomfort. I'm kind of pushing through it.

And that's helpful for me when I go off and do that kind of activity, you know, because I'm doing it in a positive way. I go with other people, make sure that I'm doing it in a safe way. And I find that to be helpful for me. And in this metaphor that we're talking about here today with the tightrope, in a way, the tightrope walker is doing exactly the same thing. They are recognizing their fear.

They're not trying to deny that fear. I think a tightrope walker, almost like somebody who's become very good at meditation from a lot of practice over the years, is going to be very good at accepting the discomfort.

Comfort there may be all sorts of things going on whilst you're on the top of that wire there may be you know wind happening you're you're you might be experiencing all sorts of different thoughts and anxiety very negative thoughts might come up during that process what could happen if this goes wrong you know so it's not that the tightrope walker is is not going to be experiencing difficult emotions they are but they recognize the importance of you

know keeping their attention on where they're going and you know really trying to have trust and hope that this process is is going to work out and you know for me that's very much a kind of spiritual idea and I really think this is something that's very important in in getting over OCD or at least learning how to accept it is trying to open up a little bit more to trust to recognize that yeah life is very uncertain. There are all sorts of things that are unknown about it.

But if we dwell on those things and just focus on them, that's kind of like just looking down at the floor whilst you're on that tightrope. You're going to start wobbling. You're going to start losing your balance. You're going to start getting yourself into a very uncomfortable place. And you don't want to do that. You don't need to do that.

You know, if you can take a deep breath, breathe very deeply down into your stomach, up into your chest, breathe out, let it go, refocus on where you're going and what you want to achieve, you know, and try to have hope that you can do that.

It may be difficult to really get that feeling, necessarily, of hope. That's something else, to get that feeling of confidence. I think to get that feeling of confidence, what you have to do initially is push through your own self-doubt, push through the anxiety, and keep going where you want to go. And by push through, I don't mean ignore it again or push it down.

I just mean recognize that it's there and get going in your life anyway because you can't change the fact that you're experiencing anxiety in.

That moment you can't change the fact that maybe you're getting intrusive negative thoughts in that moment but you can choose to put your attention somewhere else and ideally that attention should be on where you want to go what you want to do with your life what's most important to you and if you're a tightrope walker well that's going to be getting to the other side of that rope but if if it's uh you know you and maybe you are a an electrician and you're you know you have a

family and you have you know goals that you want to achieve you want to buy a house or you want to go on holiday somewhere nice this year or you really want to uh save up for an engagement ring for your uh for your partner there's all sorts of things that we might want to do in our lives and you know hopefully those things are not just about you know getting rid of anxiety you know if our goal if the end of the tightrope is just oh I just want to get rid of anxiety I just don't want

to have obsessions anymore that's quite a negative thing you know and it's not really an uplifting or meaningful goal I think we need to have you know things that are related to our values so you know saving up for a ring for example to propose to your your partner that's meaningful of course that's to do with love.

Connection relationships you know and if you were to focus on that you know okay well what am I doing today well I need to focus on my work because actually that's important to me in order for me to save up and buy this ring and you know I really I really want to do that I think getting married is going to help me in my life and I really care.

About my partner now we're starting to move our attention onto much more helpful things we're getting moving in our lives and we're not demanding that the anxiety be gone we're not demanding that the thoughts be gone we know and we recognize that when we get into that kind of habit or trap you know that we're going to go around in circles and because we can't do it we can't control our emotions in that way we can't stop ourselves from having intrusive

thoughts in that way but we can choose to get on and focus on things and you know often as a byproduct of that we do start to feel better we do start to get less intrusive thoughts. And so, you know, this analogy, I think, is really powerful.

If you can think of yourself as that tightrope walker, as somebody who's doing their best to recognize that, you know, that they're in a situation that's difficult, it's not easy to know that there's uncertainty in life, even if it's very, very small uncertainty.

As we know in OCD that small tiny 0.001% of uncertainty can feel so uncomfortable but actually you know you can deal with that discomfort you can walk that tightrope and focus on hope focus on your values focus on creating meaning despite the fact that you're feeling very uncomfortable and when we choose to do that so often that discomfort does begin to come down almost like the tight the tightrope walker as they're beginning to really make progress along

that rope and they they see the end in sight and they start realizing that they can do this they just need to keep putting you know one foot in front of the other keep their focus on where they're going and at some point you know you arrive there what happens when you arrive there well you recognize that you know you need to give yourself a new goal a new target you know and and And that's how it is. That is life.

You know, I think sometimes another thing with that is many people with OCD and myself included in the past, you know, I think we feel like there needs to be an end in sight for this kind of process that, you know, once we've done enough of the work, that's it. The OCD should be gone and we can just sit there and relax and never have to deal with it again.

In my experience that's not quite how OCD works you can learn how to manage it really well in the long term and deal with it really really effectively but potentially it's always there you know ready to come back if we start living our lives in a negative way again if we you know start demanding certainty again if we start getting caught up in the old thinking patterns again That's like just looking down from that

tightrope once more and starting that process of wobbling and getting lost and feeling very scared. As soon as we start doing that. Well, our eyes are off the prize. You know, we're not focused anymore on creating meaning, on looking for purpose and our values and getting on with life.

We've gone back into that process of demanding certainty, of wanting to know everything's okay, of wanting to feel better before we take action, you know, and recognizing that this is an ongoing kind of battle that, you know, Although the tightrope walker may reach their goal, they're always looking for the next challenge. And I think we do need challenges in life. That's what kind of pushes us forward and helps us to keep moving and evolving and growing.

And as long as we're doing that in our lives, when we keep on looking for little challenges, and they don't have to be huge things, they can just be just pushing yourself a little little bit just one or two small things each day that get you moving a little bit that get you leaning into your discomfort just a little bit and if you're able to do that well you can start picking up momentum you can start building a sense of positivity a sense that you can do this and you know over time that

can really really build up so there we go guys i really hope that you enjoyed that one if you have any questions at all about anything i've spoken about today do please let me know and I will see you next time.

Just a quick reminder that if you want to get a free session all you need to do to get that is to head over to my website www.robertjamescoaching.com and there you can leave me a message and we can arrange the free session and now just a quick reminder of my disclaimer Any information that you view on my website, Instagram page, Facebook group or anywhere else online or any information that you listen to on the podcast is for informational purposes only and is not intended

to be a substitute for actual medical or mental health advice from a doctor, psychologist or any other medical or mental health professional. Music.