Framing OCD as a Heroe’s Journey

The OCD and Anxiety Podcast by Robert James Coaching. 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 425. I hope that you're doing fantastically well today and if you are struggling with OCD or anxiety and you would like to get some support with that well you can by heading over to my website robertjamescoaching.com there you can book in for that free session or if you prefer you can send me a message and let me know about what you're struggling with in today's podcast i'm going to be talking about how to frame OCD as more of a hero's journey something that

is really about trying to see the challenge of OCD from more of a growth mindset if you can because when we can do that i think it really does help us and having a better perspective a better a better take on how to kind of deal with the very challenging situation which is to have ocd if you find this podcast helpful be amazing if you could follow and like and if you could subscribe that really does that really does us help most people who listen do not actually subscribe

so many thanks and off we go, I'm going to start today with a quote by Joseph Campbell. The fundamental human experience is that of compassion. And this is a beautiful quote and it's absolutely spot on in my experience. Everything really comes back to compassion, self-compassion. When we have it, everything is so much easier when it comes to anxiety and OCD.

And you know it was really nice when i looked up a quote for today's podcast that i managed to find this one on compassion by joseph campbell because joseph campbell is the mythologist who really brought this idea of the hero's journey into the popular imagination and what he did is he went all around the world going to different cultures and and looking at various different indigenous groups and you know he was speaking with them and what he wanted to find out is.

Really is is there a kind of meta story that we that humans typically tell and and actually he found that to be the case that most or almost every single culture from around the planet tends that to share this idea of the hero's journey sometimes it's referred to as the mono no myth and it's really this this kind of idea that in order for for us to grow we have to go through challenges we have to you know accept difficult challenge take it on overcome it overcome any obstacles

that may be in our way and and return having learned a lot from that challenge a typical idea of this would be you know the the knight going out to to slay the the evil dragon the idea here is of course that the the dragon is is the fear and that the hero is learning to face that fear down is not allowing the fear to consume them and this is a really great metaphor for us when it comes to to OCD of course what we have to learn to do is to to kind

of face that fear to to not allow our fears to to dictate to us how we're going to live our lives and let's be honest, that's what OCD wants to do. It wants to kind of take over our life. It wants to make our fears and our obsessions the center of everything. And it wants us to get stuck on them, to keep thinking about them all the time, to go round and round looking for, looking for certainty about them. And actually, you know, the hero's journey in this respect is learning to let go of that.

Our dragon, when it comes to the OCD hero's journey, is really learning how to pay attention and observe the anxiety, but not get so caught up in it. So let's explore this a little bit more. So at the beginning of the hero's journey, there's a kind of call to action.

And this really is a kind of realization life isn't the same anymore for whatever reason something's a bit different OCD perhaps or anxiety has come along and it's really turned things upside down you know and we're struggling we're finding it very difficult to to deal with this this new thing OCD that might be in our lives or perhaps it's different for you perhaps the OCD has been there for a long long time you know and it may be if we if we try to

to look at this through the lens of the hero's journey that this call to action you know has has has been going on for many many years one of the issues though is often we don't really accept that call to action we don't want to listen to it we don't necessarily want to.

Change because maybe we feel comfortable in our current situation we may not like the current situation because we're experiencing OCD all day long and we're really struggling with anxiety but you know often there is a sense of familiarity that that comes with these kinds of things we're we're more used to feeling this way than we are perhaps of you know taking on an adventure or experiencing things in in a different way or experiencing uncertainty we'd

rather hold on to these kind of unhelpful but familiar coping strategies that that kind of keep us stuck and so i think a really. Uh important part of the hero's journey is is reflecting on that is is that you in some way do you feel stuck do you recognize that perhaps there is a call to change that ocd if we can view it through that kind of lens that that perhaps OCD is actually wanting us to get into our lives a bit more.

And if we can see it from that perspective, that doesn't mean that we don't recognize how difficult OCD is. Of course, it's an incredibly hard thing to experience and to go through. So we're not denying the reality of having OCD, but what we're trying to do is we're trying to reframe it, as a thing that is coming along in our lives and it's making us, you know, maybe see things in a different way.

It's making us to try to start living our life in ways that are more meaningful, purposeful, perhaps, you know, ways that encourage you to take on challenges or to live more in the present, to be more accepting, to allow more uncertainty. All of these things are actually really, really positive things. Here's another quote, and this one's from the Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology. The core often comes at an important moment.

Old life values have often been outgrown and a certain sterility has set in.

In whatever its form the call awakens the hero to his or her special destiny and you know I think if we can see it like that if we can say okay you know I really dislike OCD and it has been holding me back for for many years or many months or however long it's been for you personally.

However you know can I can I see that if I accept the challenge and I actually really try to commit uh to to overcoming it in a positive way even if that's just taking a few small steps each day you know then you can start actually you know making progress and this part of the hero's journey is really it's called kind of crossing the threshold it's when we actually you know start the process we're moving out of the shire if we were talking about lord of the rings which really is

a classic kind of hero's journey and so we're we're kind of accepting that challenge we're moving we're moving forward however as we do we're going to come across various different challenges and temptations and of course some of those challenges and temptations are going to include the compulsions that keep us trapped you know we are going to deal with all sorts of setbacks facts potentially, uncertainty. Moments where we feel really lost or unsure about what we're doing.

We're going to feel that maybe we, you know, we're not taking the right path, maybe that, The chosen tools that we're using, maybe acceptance commitment therapy or exposure work, they're not working for us. Maybe they work for other people, but it's not working for us. And we start to have all of these doubts, but we keep moving forward. We keep recognizing that, yeah, these are challenges that are coming up.

But rather than seeing them now as these immovable objects, these horrendous compulsions that are always going to keep us trapped, Now we've got onto this hero's journey, we start seeing them as more as challenges, more as things that we can overcome if we have the right kind of mindset about them. So we keep moving forward, we start making more and more progress. But of course, as we do this, other challenges are going to come along.

And as I'm sure you've probably experienced with OCD, every now and then, there's a really big challenge that comes along sometimes you might call it a big setback and in terms of the hero's journey we can we can call this the the abyss and this is when you really feel like you've hit rock bottom again or you feel that you've gone back to square one and as I've spoken about before my opinion is that you don't really go back to square one you know that But growth,

well, it involves this process of you actually moving out into your life, taking on these challenges, having setbacks here and there, but then kind of getting back on the horse and carrying on again. And that's what I think we have to do. And so, you know, at times, though, there are these incredibly difficult setbacks that we have.

But if we can keep those in perspective in those moments when we are really feeling challenged, we need to be a bit more compassionate with ourselves, as the quote stated at the start.

Compassion is is maybe the most important thing of all and when we are struggling and we're having these big setbacks we need to be patient and compassionate with ourselves and to recognize that we're on the right path that this is a setback and that if we just keep moving again just start trying to build up again from where you are by just doing small steps well you can get yourself out of that abyss out of that feeling of being stuck you start moving again

and before you know it you're really back on the path the next step is the transformation or the revelation you know and this is when you are really beginning to to get some success with with the approach you have perhaps developed a lot of skills in relation to acceptance commitment therapy or cognitive behavioral therapy perhaps you're doing exposure work and mindfulness on a regular basis maybe you're using breath work

activities maybe you're finding exercise to be very helpful for you and you're learning how to bring more acceptance and compassion to the OCD you're starting to allow a bit more uncertainty into your life and all of these things are kind of like revelations where where, you know, maybe before you kind of understood them on an intellectual level.

But now that you've kind of got out there on this hero's journey and you've taken on the dragon and you've learned how to accept that dragon, rather than actually slaying the dragon, I think really what we're talking about here is learning to put a bit of an arm around that dragon to realize that, you know, when we bring compassion to the situation, that's really what we're doing. We're bringing more acceptance to our fears.

And in doing so, we're, we overcome them but it isn't a superficial realization it's a realization on on a deeper level and that's something that you can't undo it's something that goes deeply into your nervous system and you've you know you're you're living your life in a different way and that's really the the next stage or the final stage then is you kind of return into your life as the quote-unquote hero in some ways no we don't want to big ourselves up too much of course but we want to

recognize that actually we've just done something we've just done something very very difficult we've learned.

How to bring more acceptance and compassion to OCD and our fears that is something very very hard to do and you know if you manage to do that then you've most probably really grown as a person you've probably developed wisdom and now that's something that you can share with other people it's you're able to kind of help other people in your life you're able to bring more compassion to other people's struggles you know you you have more strength and this is something then that you

know you can you can actually make a positive difference to to the people around you because of of the experiences that you've been through and I think if you're able to to kind of see OCD through this kind of lens it can be really really helpful and again I really want to stress the importance of of recognizing what I'm talking about here is. Is all about trying to bring more of a positive and actually more of a compassionate view to OCD.

I think sometimes when we convince ourselves that we have this horrendous thing called OCD and we're stuck and we want to focus on how difficult it is and how negative it is and how awful it is.

Okay like all of those things are true but I think if we focus on those things it tends to keep us more stuck if we can bring this perspective of you know okay I'm somebody who does have these challenges but I'm going to really try to get into my life to bring more determination to bring more acceptance and compassion and I'm going to I'm going to overcome this I know it's going to be difficult at times but you know i'm going to try to commit to taking small steps

each day and perhaps you know the first step that everybody should really be thinking about taking is is working with a therapist or somebody to really help you highly recommend that you do that in order to get the right support with with overcoming ocd and anxiety but yeah i think if we can frame the challenge of OCD in this way it can really help us to actually take the action we need to take in order to improve our situations

so really hope that you found that helpful if you have any questions at all 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. Music.