TRANSCRIPT
I’ve had a few people recently reach out and ask me my opinion on the subject of obsessive compulsive disorder, OCD. They’ve asked also if I think it is connected to deep historical trauma, and my answer is yes, and profoundly so.
Now, that doesn’t mean that what someone is going through when they have OCD is so obviously connected to trauma, because actually, Psychiatry as an institution doesn’t really even consider OCD to have a traumatic root. Instead, they say, “oh no, it’s biological, and here we have medicines for it.” But I don’t see it that way, and I don’t see the medicines as a good solution. I will soon share why.
What I see as the root of obsessive-compulsive disorder, if you actually consider it to be a biological disorder at all, or have this formal name, which I don’t, is that someone who has this problem historically in their past, long, long ago, experienced a lot of problems that were unsolvable, emotionally unsolvable. They experienced stressful, overwhelming, awful, terrible things that they can’t remember, that they don’t know, and that their brain was desperately trying to solve. Their mind was desperately trying to solve it, and years later, decades later, they are still trying to solve this problem.
The problem now is that their mind is trying to solve this problem, but the person doesn’t consciously have any idea what it is that they’re trying to solve. Often, that’s because the trauma caused them to become dissociated in a way, broken away, split away from their own inner self. So there really isn’t an inner awareness that this is the problem they’re trying to solve. Instead, their obsessions are the worrying of their mind. Their mind is trying to solve this problem, but instead is grabbing on to other external problems that are metaphorical for the trauma.
So basically, the mind is trying to solve this ancient historical trauma, is failing, is disconnected from this trauma, and is turning its energy elsewhere, is displacing its focus elsewhere. I think of it kind of like a car. When you put the car in neutral, but you put down the gas, it’s like the engine, but it doesn’t connect with the engine. So it’s really putting all its energy in the wrong place.
Maybe the person doesn’t even know that they’re traumatized at all. Maybe they have no idea. Then there’s the question of compulsions. What are they from? What I’ve observed in people, sometimes in myself too, is that compulsions are another attempt to solve this problem. They are an attempt to solve the problem of the obsessions by taking action, some action that will undo these obsessions. The problem is the compulsions, whatever they are, and they could be really quite varied. Some compulsive action that someone feels they need to do, and they feel this will bring them peace. Those compulsions are also metaphorical. They’re not directly in any way connected to taking an action that will solve the deeper problem.
The problem with both obsessions and compulsions is actually generally they make the problem worse. They hurt a person’s functioning in the world. It makes it hard to have a clear mind. It makes it hard to have good, clear activities. I mean, I think of people in some of the extreme cases that I’ve seen and people who I’ve talked with, who, they even have a job. They’re going to work, and halfway to work, they’re like, “oh, I forgot to lock my door.” And then they’re like, “well, maybe I did.” Like, “oh,” and then they can get up this, and then they get really obsessive about it, have to come all the way back, check out they did lock the door, going all the way back to work. Then, “oh my God, I think maybe I, maybe I, you know, didn’t lock it quite right,” have to go back again.
Or people going back home multiple times in the day. I’ve heard this too, to check the stove. “Well, maybe I didn’t turn the stove all the way off. Maybe the gas is running. Oh my God!” Or hand washing to remove germs. It’s like constantly hand washing to the point that their hands are completely raw and can even become infected because of this, because the soap has dried them out so much. And they’re trying to clean away some disease that isn’t there, whereas the disease actually is the trauma from long, long ago.
And the leaking gas in their stove, I wonder what that could be metaphorical for? Something that happened that was left undone, that wasn’t closed all the way properly, wasn’t resolved. Some awful and painful thing that happened maybe when they were even six months old. And then I think of psychiatry labeling these problems biological. “This is biologically based. This is nothing to do with nurture at all. It’s all nature. Oh, it’s even genetic. Look, it runs in the family.” Well, what I’ve seen often is that trauma runs in the family also, quite clearly and obviously. Traumatized people who don’t resolve their traumas traumatize others over whom they wield power, often.
I’m sorry to say, people who are really obsessive and really compulsive often are not in the best position to be loving and nurturing children. They might try really hard, but it’s pretty hard to be a good parent if you’re very obsessive and very compulsive. And it can pass it on in all sorts of various underlying traumatic ways, if only by emotional neglect of children.
So what’s the cure? What’s the cure for these problems? The way to solve it? Well, if you ask most therapists, ask psychiatrists, ask the psychiatric literature, they’ll say, “well, you need to give the person medicine. You need to give the person different various forms of psychiatric drugs.” I’ve even heard psychiatrists suggest antidepressants with, you know, anti-obsessive traits in them. That’s not enough. Often, you need to give antipsychotics and anti-anxiety medication, and well, I haven’t seen that take any step to solve the problem.
And then Psychiatry even goes so far as to say it’s actually not a problem to solve. We can just deal with the symptoms. We cannot cure it. We can just try to help the symptoms. And then I think, well, actually no, because a lot of times it really makes the problem even more deeply embedded if you give drugs for it. I think of like here a metaphor for this would be a child who’s doing their homework. They have mathematics homework, and they’re really struggling with some math problem. Their brain is really trying to solve this problem, and they go to their parents and they say, “oh, I can’t solve this problem. I can’t figure it out. It’s causing me so much stress.” And the parent says, “here, this will help you solve the problem,” and they give the kid two or three shots of vodka. And it’s like the kid goes, “I don’t really care about the math problem anymore.” They’re not going to ever solve the math problem when they’re drunk, but they might feel a little better for a while, and they might just go to sleep and forget about it for a little while.
I think that that’s kind of like psychiatric drugs for OCD, according to what Psychiatry says is good. And then I think, well, what is good? And then the answer that comes to me is the only answer that’s possible is to try to figure out how to solve these problems historically, solve these traumas at their root. And I don’t want to make it sound like it’s easy, but I can’t see any other way. I’ve never seen anybody make any deep progress.
Yes, there’s cognitive behavioral therapy that can deal with certain symptoms and help people learn how to function a little better, and I’m not going to speak against that because I think that can be helpful in some cases, but it doesn’t solve the problem at its root. It’s a question of getting down into those historical traumas, getting away from traumatizers to the degree that a person can have some perspective on their own history. Often when people are very close to their traumatizers, which many, many people are in their lives, especially if they have lives that have a lot of problems and they aren’t able to evolve in a functional way in society, out of their family, to be able to make money and work and things like that, it’s hard to get away. But I think it can be quite necessary in a lot of cases for people to be able to look more deeply at their history to see where they came from.
And to do all the steps that it takes to work out these traumas, not easy. Not easy to really resolve any traumas. It takes a lot of time, takes a lot of energy, takes a lot of focus and dedication. But even harder when the traumas are very, very early in our lives.
I think about that for myself. Even some of those earliest traumas that I have, ones that sometimes are even kind of vague. I have to put together the picture in various ways of what even happened to me. Hard to grieve them, hard to move past them, hard even sometimes to figure out what they are.
But I think, I think I’ve seen to a degree, some people have seen it to a high degree, some people haven’t seen it in too much of a degree. But what I think and what I see is that when people can get to the root, the core of the ways that they were thrown off their path, the core of the problems that their mind is trying to solve, then they can take their thoughts, their obsessive thoughts.
They can take their obsessive or compulsive actions and bring it all home. Bring it out of the metaphor, sorry, bring it out of the realm of metaphor and into that painful realm of what actually happened. And then they can take steps to work to solve the actual problem and dry it up at its root.
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