Question: is there a way out of the anxiety? 👌🏾↙️⬇️↘️✅

The gateway to escaping those unhinged levels of anxiety which you experience while battling OCD is your capacity to see through them as clearly as possible. Key-word: “Capacity” - meaning, it’s all in your hands. Your level of “seeing” will promote your recovery by giving you the motivation and desire to work through the symptoms. However, receiving that clarity through recovery always starts with the decision to decide before you feel the certainty, that you know it’s OCD. Certainty is a quality of living that exists beyond and separate from doubt. Reflect on the way you were certain about things in your life including yourself before you got hit with OCD. Without needing to explain it to yourself, you rested comfortably in truths that needed no reassurance. Those same truths, your OCD is now causing you to doubt obsessively. There is a division (though it’s blurred) between you and your thoughts. There is no division between OCD and doubt. This tells you that you are not the problem. The thoughts are. More importantly, it’s your engagement with them which makes them real in your own mind. Though, the thoughts are illusory, your belief into them and the corresponding fear create a toxic bond which you are much better off without. Recognize that OCD is a bundle of anxiety which is perpetuated by doubt and fed by your fear. Themes change but the process remains consistent. You need not manage the thoughts, only how you relate to them. It’s hard to see in the moment, but through mindfulness/stillness you can get to see that when you feel doubtful, you are simply immersed in “feelings” of doubt, and not reality. You feed the doubts by fighting back or attempting to prove them wrong. It was never a threat, yet you keep the story going when you do anything other than ignore — as you would when a random song is stuck in your head. Don’t take the bait and turn it into a project which we all know leads nowhere (definitely not out of your head). Take a seat in the front row of your mind’s eye with awareness. Watch the OCD parade as it passes by with all its tricks and performances. Let it all pass you by, as it always does. The difference between choosing awareness over your compulsive behaviors is that though both lead you to calmness, with awareness/response prevention (though more challenging), you gradually take your power back from the tug that pulls you into mingling with those absurd, meaningless, stressful thought loops which are intrusively occurring. Like playing a sport with a sprained ankle would worsen it, OCD feeds on your fear and it is rejuvenated through your reactivity. You heal your mind by quieting your mind so it can sort itself out. It’s as voluntary an act as you can allow yourself to treat it.. Learn to stand by and do your own thing as your mind goes bonkers. It’s cool. So long as you remember the ultimate truth which is that you’re suffering thoughts and not reality, you can remind yourself that your only battle is with yourself and what you choose to believe and not believe. Believe that it’s a lie, just as you believe the truth is a lie. That is the only part you have control over, and the good news is that it’s all in your hands. Give it a try.. ☮️❤️