More about relieving and curing OCD

Here is my promised follow up on this subject. Remember that these discussions are also very helpful to people with other disorders such as depression and anxiety because there is a commonality of causes, which I will be discussing. In my previous blog post I wrote about what I call “justifiable” OCD, which is OCD that springs from overly checking scenarios where there could be a legitimate danger consequence, such as leaving the stove on after finishing cooking. So my advice focused on creating a system of assurance that you have done the proper “danger” checking and can move on with your day. With the bureaucratic system I proposed you can relieve the systems of the OCD and go back to being a normal albeit an extremely cautious person, ha. And that is not a bad thing. When I had a house and pets who depended on me I was very checking and checklist oriented myself, so I understand.

But now I want to talk about the more pernicious and damaging form of OCD which is non-justifiable OCD, to use my terminology. I call it non-justifiable because no matter how intense the OCD feelings are they are nonetheless an undue concern over a thing or phenomenon that is out of proportion to its actual importance in life. Non-justifiable OCD can be put into street talk, “You are obsessed with the bid-ness of something else, giving it an importance and street cred that it just does not have.” Let’s dive into an example that is not really classic OCD (like hand washing, walking a certain way, having obsessive gestures and motions, etc) but is enormously enlightening about the causes, mind set and cure for OCD. This topic is the obsession with numbers, counting and dates of the year.

Now I enjoy as much as anyone else glancing at the newspaper’s “What happened on this day in history” or that page on Wikipedia if I happen across that section of a newspaper or am on Wikipedia checking out who died or what’s the background and scoop about people and places in the news. But I have no urge to check what happened on this date if I don’t happen across that information. That includes my deep Catholic faith. If I am not attending daily Mass or I’m not reading scriptures for that date I have no urge to find out what saints are honored on a particular day. Trust me, the real St. Paul does not want people to obsess about his fall on the road to Damascus and meeting of Jesus on the same day every year. He related his story in his letters (epistles) so people would understand the meaning, not so people commemorate that day every year or worse make an occult linkage between that date and his fall. He would flip his gourd and bite his arm if he knew that some people are reading into his fall an occult linkage to the date the Church has designated (but has no way of knowing the truth of) as the holy day or feast day of his fall. Now the Church is correct to have these saint days because it is part of the teaching and celebrating the full comprehension of the body of the Catholic Church and Jesus Christ. So the Church is correct to have the feast days but it is incorrect for people to start making occult linkages between the date and the type of event. So “what happened on this day in history,” either for secular or religious reasons are educational and informative but should not have any influence on your day to day thoughts, activities and priorities whatsoever.

Here are more examples. My mother is German, emigrated here in 1949 four years after World War II so she is still very European in her outlook. Europeans make note of family events such as births, marriages, and deaths by noting them in the family Bible. So if they are Catholic they also track baptisms, first holy communion, confirmation, and the receiving of Holy Orders (becoming a priest). However my mother is depressive and borderline so she has put what has become an all too common distorting twist on what was a family record keeping and celebration event. She keeps the events not in the Bible but on a calendar, emphasizing the bad events, and uses them to alter her mood. She ignores the joys of birthdays, first jobs, and certainly of Catholic events (she does not remember dates of my baptism, holy communion and confirmation for example) but boy oh boy she loves remembering deaths, illnesses, surgeries and accidents that made her unhappy. (She does not remember surgeries of her children and their families, for example. If reminded she snarls, “I have enough problems of my own to remember.”) She has forged a chain of misery out of elevating the dates on which bad things happened and uses it to whip herself and others. My brother and I, for example, recognize that she spends January working herself into a depressive snit over the forthcoming February, which is a month full of dates she wants to feel bad about. She ignores the many good things that happen in February, focusing only on dreary dirges and rages about how she has “suffered” due to the sad events in the past of February. She will obsess about my father’s death anniversary in February, for example, but never once talk about the happy Valentine’s Days they had together. That’s an obvious example of someone who charges sad dates and events with a power way beyond what they deserve in a very dark OCD way. When I was stuck with her two years ago she was enraged that I was not a depressive mess on the anniversary of the date of my father’s death and we had quite a fight because I was watching TV instead of acting the mourning Queen (which is her job anyway). When I explained to her that yes, I think of dad on that day, but that I think of him and miss him every day she did not have a clue what I was talking about. She could not comprehend normal missing of my dad and thinking of him every day because she does not really think about him every day, but saves up all her drama for making his death anniversary torture for everyone around her.

Now I know people who follow occult matters and who obsess because my dad died on a “highly significant astrology alignment.” For goodness sake people are stupid and wicked. Just because my father died on one day of “astrology significance” how is the loss of a dad any more fraught with significance than a girl or a boy who lost their dad on an “insignificant” astrology day? My dad was a dad and a husband who worked in humble jobs. He was not a prophet or a reincarnated person (lest you’ve missed my messages there is no such thing as reincarnation.) OCD people give great significance to events way out of proportion to their importance and believe in causalities and relationships that do not exist.

Here is another example, the September 11, 2001 attacks. People in the occult obsess with the date and time the planes hit, and the birthdates of people involved. How stupid and pointless is that? How about worrying about when the bunch of terrorists first got together and had the idea? Events that are monumental are given birth to in gradual stages years in advance. So dates, numbers and time have no meaning at all and you are an idiot if you think so. To refute this mindset I did some research and found the first report by a New York City official warning that terrorists will target parking areas in skyscraper buildings. He had returned from a trip to the UK where he observed IRA terrorist techniques and extrapolated that to worry about what NYC could do to avoid the same types of risk. He wrote that report in August, 1984. The World Trade Center was bombed the first time in 1993 via a truck of explosives in the open parking garage. Why don’t we have a day of mourning and obsess every year about the date this guy’s report was issued and ignored? It’s August 6, 1984 by the way. I plugged that information into my astrology software to demonstrate to the retards who believe in astrology that they don’t even understand their own crap. You don’t obsess about the date and time and the “numerology” of the day the bomb goes off in the parking lot, or the day the planes fly into the building. You obsess about someone not doing their freaking job in heeding warnings by security people that are issued nine years in advance to the danger actually happening. And the fact that the date the report was ignored is “Leo” doesn’t mean crap. Or that the digits add up to 8+6+1+9+8+4=an “8” day does not mean crap either. It means that a bunch of idiots (of assorted birthdates) ignored the due diligence warning report of a security professional who went to England to learn about terrorist threats and not to play with a pendulum or count how many people in the room have a Leo Moon up their Leo Uranus.

So it’s time to talk about the causes of non-justifiable OCD. One cause is occult teaching, as I’ve described above. Many OCD sufferers have a family who deviated from mainstream and valid religion and faith formation in childhood to superstition, occult or other “New Age” beliefs. The second cause of OCD is genuine chemistry or medical imbalances or conditions. It can be as minor as sensitivity to food chemicals and too much carbohydrates to the still mysterious flaws in internal brain chemical balances that do genuinely disrupt some people (though not as much as the pharmaceuticals would have you believe in their advertisements). The third cause of non-justifiable OCD is a trauma. Many people who have this form of OCD had a trauma in their early life and the feeling of not being able to control the circumstances and the subsequent pain of the trauma causes them to try to over-control their surroundings by seeing sinister causes and effects. This is especially true if the person was traumatized as a child because children have “magical thinking.” This is a term to describe how youngsters do not have enough life experience and knowledge at their age to fully understand cause and effect in life. An example is the child who thinks his parents divorce because of something he did like not cleaning his room or that they don’t love him enough to stay together. A child who experiences a trauma is very vulnerable to potential future OCD, especially if the trauma is untreated in our very fake society that challenges a child’s sense of reality anyway. For example, years ago most people lived on farms. Rather than being a rare occupation it was THE most common way people supported their families, by growing their own food and raising their own livestock. So a child knew about eggs and chickens and chicken dinners at a very early age and it was natural. If there was a death in the family even the youngest child understood, having been a part of the cycle of birth, life and death from the very beginning on the farm. But today children are totally divorced from reality, and by reality I mean life affirming and stable reality. Reality is a good thing, but today it is often used as a label to deliver an unkind message. But the farm child of 100 years ago would never think that her dad died because of “something she did” and have the magical thinking that children are vulnerable in the past forty years. Today’s children are raised on vibrating electrons of unreality from day one. I would only be exaggerating slightly to say that a child could see a false connection between turning off a TV and having the image of people “disappear” with the disappearance of a member of the family who suddenly passes away or leaves the family. So trauma, such as abuse, a sudden loss, or a chaotic home with violence and substance abuse and no predictable virtuous structure can definitely be causes of OCD later in life. What is the first thing a child learns? Children learn how to count. What do many OCD sufferers suffer from? An undue obsession with numbers, counting, the significance of dates and numbers and the feeling that they must “participate” in the “control or counting” of these numbers or something will be “off or bad” in consequence. Adults with number and counting obsessions are reverting to the first thing that they as children experienced success with and some control over!

So one of the first principles of alleviating and curing OCD is to recognize that the props and activities that you utilize in your OCD relates back to where you had your first childhood “success” and felt that things were understandable and in control. For example, some people obsessively wash their hands. What does this go back to? One of the first things that a child learns, usually lovingly in even the daftest and most dysfunctional house is how to wash his or her hands. Hardly a child has not had the experience of a mom or dad helping them to stand on a stool or chair to reach the sink and learn to wash their hands like a big boy or girl. Often they had to wash their hands before eating so washing hands is a ritual before reward. If someone is traumatized or grows up in an out of control household it is not at all surprising that the person reverts to the behavior that was their last pleasant and in control learning experience. The adult mind will tell you that they are washing their hands obsessively because of all the germs “out there.” But the reality is that the adult is reverting to understandable positive ritual behavior that was learned before chaos and trauma intruded into their lives. This is why the OCD hand washer will do it until they are raw and pained sometimes trapped in the house or apartment being never satisfied with the washing. It is not a chemical imbalance (though one develops over time as one behaves dysfunctional without being relieved) that causes the hand washing and it is not the over concern about germs that is causing the hand washing, even if that is what everyone says. What is causing the OCD hand washing is that the person feels he or she has to revert to early positive childhood behavior because somehow they have felt derailed and a loss of control over positive reward and experience due to a trauma or familial/societal chaos. OCD counters revert to obsession with numbers because learning to identify numbers and to count was their most positive childhood experience that they can revert to. I’m sitting here trying to think of other examples (in person dialogue is always so much better because people can actually ask real questions and present examples!) People who OCD about what is being put into their food or drink (outside of the very real concerns about unclean food or drugs being put into bar drinks) are reverting under stress to the time when as a baby or child they did not have to worry about what was in their food because whatever mommy or dad gave them was fine. So under stress OCD food, drink, poison obsessions can be traced to the person reverting to a time when they felt the safety net of the baby bottle, the pureed food, and the meals prepared by family members that they can trust. When trust has been lost and when a trauma or dysfunction takes hold the adult reverts to obsessing about the last thing, in this case eating, where they felt they were in control and could implicitly trust without even thinking about it. I think these are sufficient examples that you can examine your own OCD experiences and immediately see the potential cause(s) and why your mind and your body “chose” through reversion to childhood the mechanism of the actual OCD behavior.

Knowledge is power and even having this conversation with you through this blog posting is going to have a hugely positive effect on you. (Again, don’t stop using any medication a health care professional is giving you without consulting with them first). OCD is in a large part a feeling of being unable to control life around you, due to that trauma, occult “education” and/or chaotic household environment. So knowledge is medicine to someone who feels they lack control because it is that golden answer to “Why me?” You should feel great relief at knowing that whatever your mechanism of OCD is (or hopefully you can soon say “was!”) it is your body and mind trying to do a good thing. You are not a freak or damaged. The body and mind are trying to self heal by reverting to positive childhood experience. So some go back to that universal childhood joy of learning to count. Others go back to the rituals of childhood, so important in otherwise chaotic lives, such as washing hands. Still others yearn for the time when they could trust other people and society in general, so they obsess about food and beverage as they unconsciously try to recall the time when mom or dad prepared the safe meal in the sippy cup, or the sandwich and cookies after school. So I have just given you a huge part of your self control back to you by helping you to understand that there is a positive self healing reason that your body and mind selected a particular OCD as a coping mechanism. And this is the hint as to how to cure OCD. You need to expand your repertoire of where you can draw on normal life for positive reinforcement, control, and healing of traumatic or chaotic conditions.

Here is another thought for you. Those of you who are Christian and/or involved in programs such as AA know the expression, “Let go and let God.” Well let me tell you this is more than a wise saying or a positive mindset, it is an actual prescription. Think about history of humanity. Pagans felt out of control of their environment so they did many superstitious things including sacrificing to idols to “appease angry gods.” While people didn’t suffer from things like OCD in those days, religious ritual is a cure for OCD because it is giving back to God things that you obsess about controlling but rightfully should not even be trying. (The reason people did not suffer from OCD in Biblical times is that everyone had to work to glean food and survive and anyone who had a disorder contrary to healthful living just would not have thrived or survived). But where I can help you see the parallel is that suppose each and every person in a tribe worried on their own about doing sacrifices to the “theoretical angry gods.” You could easily see OCD develop as some people spend all day sacrificing and doing weird rituals rather than tilling the field and feeding their families. So people realized that they needed a designated holy person to perform sacrifice and ritual on their behalf. I’m deliberating using non Christian examples so that everyone can relate to what I am saying because I’m talking about an individualized disorder, OCD, and a tribe that lacks a central performer of ritual would have many individuals having to guess the best they can. I’m not saying that there are “angry gods” nor am I saying that sacrifice as taught by God to the Israelites and understood in Christianity and Islam is a meaningless superstition. I am using an example of how people all went through their own search for control in the days before they understood the natural forces at work around them, before they adopted the great moral codes for behavior, and before they received inspired instruction from God directly. People could not afford to have large segments of their population running around performing sacrifices, having counting rituals, developing their own “what if” superstitious practices and other non productive activities because literally people would die unless every man, woman and child were involved in the gathering and preparation of food, water and shelter. Today, however, people can still eat and survive with a roof over their heads and be as OCD as you can imagine. Back then people would die very quickly, within days, if any segment of the population ran around doing their own superstitious and ritual thing. Primitive people would have crumbled under the burden of each of them thinking that they have to carry the burden of “controlling and appeasing angry or capricious temperamental demanding gods.” So people around the world learned to “let go and let the high priest or the shaman.” I think I’ve used this example enough to give you background to human nature and its linkage to the potential development of OCD. Oh, but one more point. People who lived near unpredictable things with big consequences, like volcanoes, would feel a greater stress to understand and engage in mitigating ritual. People who lived in fertile and gentle environmental surroundings where food is plenty and the weather is steady would have less of a sense of angry or temperamental gods and forces of nature to understand and appease. Likewise children and later adults who were raised in and subjected to “volcanic” and chaotic abusive conditions are going to be more vulnerable to OCD than children and later adults who grew up in steady Eddie surroundings where people were well fed and felt safe and consistently secure. Children who grow up in steady and secure well understood family and community environments are less likely to develop OCD later in life. And this is where again I remind people with depression and anxiety disorders that they share in the same potential scenarios as those I am directly addressing with OCD, so these insights should help you too.

God communicated with early humans, from Adam through Abraham for a reason. Not only does God love all living things, including of course humans, but God wants people to understand life and be as healthy and joyous as possible. God did not want to see people churning through idols and superstitions, especially since MANY pagan beliefs resulted in the sacrifice of infants, children, men and women. I always wonder when daft New Agers have their eyes shining in admiration about some “calendar” or “mythology” of ancient pagan people when those same people were trying to get better crops or more lavish treasure by throwing babies into fires and cutting the hearts out of the poor stupid people in the next village. People wonder why God sounds so “pissed off” in the Old Testament and in the Qur’an. Well, any decent human being would have been pissed off too as babies were spitted on spears to sacrifice to some stupid idol that didn’t exist to get some advantage that came down to weather, hard work, not being at war and a bit of luck. If you read the Bible carefully you can get a sense of the rage of Moses for this very reason. He goes to God to get the good news and finds that he can’t even be away for a few days to get God’s word for the people without them worshipping idols, and this is what is important, who demand human sacrifice!

This is why God gave what sounds today like bloody and weird instructions for sacrifice to him in the Temple. God recognizes that 1) the mental wiring of humans simply needed a sense of feeling in control of the forces they could not control in reality and 2) people forget reality and who they are unless they have ritual that reminds them that they are not God themselves and that all that they have, including their harvest, is due to the generosity of God in the first place. So God teaches humans to sacrifice a portion of what they have to him so that they can feel the right amount of control (by doing proper ritual) and that they remember who they are (they need to give back to God so that they don’t start to think that all goodness comes from humans themselves). Jesus replaced the animals, grain and gold of Temple sacrifice with the liturgy of the sacrifice of the Mass. The Prophet (PBUH) linked sacrifice to the annual Haj. So the proper mindset is still maintained that people are doing right by the one God and what he requires.

This is why OCD sufferers are sometimes deprived of the structure of “letting go and letting God.” They, because of their trauma or chaotic conditions, feel that they are personally doing business on behalf of the universe. This is especially true if New Age and occult “beliefs” have contaminated their thinking. You’d be amazed how many people consciously or unconsciously think they are players in the workings of the universe. You’d think a hurricane or two would remind people otherwise but people are persistent in their self inflation and disbelief. OCD sufferers are often unconscious victims of what is the common temptation of society today which is to over inflate the individual’s role in the workings of the universe and ignore the specific instructions and teachings of God that are the actual antidote to many mental disorders. Don’t get me wrong on this; I’m not saying that there aren’t psychotic Christians or religious folks with mental disorders. That’s the reverse of what I’m saying. Mental illness and trauma, disordered and chaotic family and social conditions strikes every one of all classes and faiths. What I am observing is that certain conditions are becoming more common and severe as a result of the safety net having been removed. A child who is brought up to understand a loving God in a structured family and faith is less likely to have to fall back on obsessive counting if and when a trauma occurs, for example. The purpose of this blog posting is less to predict if a disorder can be avoided and more about how to understand the disorder and relieve or cure it where you can. I am pointing out that OCD sufferers often do not have the benefit of the safety net of feeling that “God is handling whatever they are obsessing about so they do not have to have obsession rituals in God’s behalf.”

I can give you a very whacky example. After September 11, 2001 I was doing some of my undercover work examining the whole New Age phenomenon. I was shocked to read on a very popular astrology board that people were actually stating that the souls of the dead were “trapped” in a “golden cloud” above the World Trade Center and that they needed some spooky New Age prayers and thoughts to help “free them.” Good God what have people come to that they would believe and propagate this crap? Who in their right mind thinks that God doesn’t have the whole dying/soul goes to heaven, purgatory or hell thing really worked out kind of smoothly and might I also add perfectly? God would leave people hanging and chilling after a horrible disaster because what, God is getting a pedicure somewhere? God can’t handle a few thousand souls? (Though no one remembers the 100’s of thousands who died in Chinese earthquakes decades ago and somehow God handled all those souls without the Internet ghouls to help him out.) This is an extreme but informative example of how some very inflated people think they are players in the universe. On a microcosm and individual level, non-justified forms of OCD sufferers unconsciously think that they have to do certain things to “help the universe out.” This is the unjust burden that they carry. They feel like something terrible and wrong will happen if they don’t do their counting and their rituals. This is especially true of people who have kind of elaborate rituals of behavior as their form of OCD, since they are not just reverting to a childhood mode of comfort and control that singular form of OCD sufferers experience. These behavioral OCD sufferers who develop elaborate models of behavior are trapped into thinking, consciously or unconsciously, that the basics of life and death are somehow incomplete unless they stick their hands and noses into it.

Again a quick look back in history helps illustrate this. Pagan folks often wanted to help their loved ones by giving them provisions to take with them to use after they died, since they did not understand that material goods do not accompany the dead. But they wanted to help their loved ones so they buried food, tools, sometimes even slaying their animals to go with them to serve. The Egyptians developed a whole elaborate belief system on what they thought would happen once a person died and tried to work it to the best advantage by providing surroundings for the dead person and ritual that would be supportive of what they thought the gods on the other side were doing to the soul of the departed. But even they did not actually think that the gods on the other side actually needed the help of a human to handle a death! They did not say, “Step aside Anubis, I know what to do better than you!” Ha ha. It is only today in this incredibly fake culture where everyone has their 15 minutes of fame and delusional feelings of grandeur that people think they actually have to get personally involved in God’s bid-ness. Look at movies like “Men in Black.” The universe is a series of toy marbles of universes that freak alien children are playing with? You think this is just “entertainment” and not a reflection of what self inflated images some people have of themselves as players in the matters of God and men? Virtually all entertainment and media promote an occult self importance that is simply invalid, untrue and unhealthy. A segment of the OCD suffering population is very sensitive to this propaganda, either consciously or often unconsciously. They start to feel that yes indeed, unless they do certain rituals there are universal consequences. “Reality shows” and so forth reinforce this belief by linking their subplots to political, religious and commercial events, so it is possible to see some minor event magnified in what seems to be a universally significant way! This was what first clued me off to checking out what was really going on in the New Age circles of crazies. I started wondering why trivial events were deliberately being attached and linked to universal events.

So it is very important that OCD sufferers recognize that their actions do not have any influence on the universe or global events, and that their feelings and impulses are individual cycles of trauma and self healing attempts and coping mechanisms. Here are my suggestions to reprogram your self and alleviate some of your OCD symptoms and driving causes. If you have the sense that unless you perform some of your OCD ritual that something “bad” will happen: 1) imagine that you are writing a memo or post it note to God. In your mind write on the memo “To God, please handle this. Thanks.” Attach the vague feeling of worry or compulsion that you have to the mental memo and send it to God. Trust that God will “handle” whatever crisis you think is possible if you do not do your OCD ritual. Trust me, you are not responsible for whatever you think you are. But the best way to short circuit that dire feeling of compulsion is to “forward with attachment” your even inarticulate package of worry and foreboding to God and trust him to “handle it.”

2) Be aware that whatever you are compulsive or worried about is already also “being handled” by the truly spiritual people of the great mainstream religions. So after doing my first suggestion of sending to God your “handle this” memo, spend a moment being aware that people are already “on the situation” and that you do not need to “do” anything about it. Trust me the Pope is on top of a lot of the situations that people (Catholic or not) feel uneasy and compulsive about. All of the Christian patriarchs, priests and performers of holy ritual as specified by God are “on top of the case” of whatever is giving you conscious or unconscious unease. They are doing it without your having to worry about it or even without your having to send them a reminder ha. Another example of someone who is “on top of the situation” is the King of Saudi Arabia, The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques. He has responsibility for welcoming God’s guests to God’s places of worship for up to a billion believers in the world. As the host on behalf of God for millions of faithful at a time, trust me, the King is on top of things. I mention the men of Christianity and Islam specifically because unlike cult and pagan beliefs they do not require people to give them money or buy into their version of manipulated spirituality because the true men of God are working for God, not themselves. The Pope and the King would do exactly what they are doing whether they were wealthy or poor, whether there was one believer left on earth or a billion. Because they “work for God” and do not have a personal agenda you can trust that men like this are “on top of the situation for you.” Know that whatever “needs to be done” that you feel a vague universal compulsion about is already being handled by them.

3) Go see and see for your self that “it is all” being handled. People often whine about why they should go to Church if “they have God in their heart” and if it’s not entertaining enough. See other blog postings by me about why people need to celebrate in community their faith and why they need to attend Mass. But here in the context of this topic is yet another reason. When you do go to Church (or mosque) you are observing and witnessing, and hence being reassured first hand, that people “are on top of the situation” and that they are “handling it.” There are few things more stabilizing than witnessing that Orthodox Christianity, Catholicism, mainstream Protestant and non-denominational houses of worship and mainstream Islamic mosques are “handling things” for you. They are following the instructions of God and they are on top of things. They will do this whether you are there at Church or mosque or not but by being there YOU gain the advantage of witness and assurance that quell the vague and mostly unjustified fears and compulsions that you may be feeling. This is different than attending AA or another support group. When you attend AA or a support group you are learning coping mechanisms and having the community of fellow sufferers to learn from and gain strength and support. When you attend Church or mosque you are watching people who don’t have the burden of your problems handling them and others for you! That is not to say people do not have problems. What I am saying is that they are performing God’s overall work rather than being gathered together to deal with a situational problem such as addiction or a disorder like OCD. You need to detach the unconscious inflation that your disorder is associated to the spiritual and physical working of the universe. The best way to do this is to observe, witness, and participate in the group that is serving God and “handling things” on that level. Then you can isolate and shrink your profile of symptoms to understanding that they are your individual coping and healing mechanism and not part of some unfathomable problem. God has given clear instructions and advice for dealing with the realities of life and there are millions of people who are busy “handling” what God has told them to do. For example while visiting with a family friend Native American medicine man years ago I discussed with him his tribe’s belief that all the prayers they say are part of universal benefit for the salvation of humankind. Unknown by many people they are “handling it.” You don’t need to find out “who is handling it best” or run off and join a cult, heaven forbid, since that starts most of the problems in the first place. You need to plug back into the mainstream religions who serve the one God and witness that you do not need to have weird qualms that unless you walk a certain way and do a bunch of ritual actions that something bad will happen.

Another way to look at this is to think of food cravings. You know how when you are low on vitamin C often you will get a craving for a citrus fruit or juice, or if you are low on salt you get a craving for a salty food? OCD people who dodge church or mosque have the craving nonetheless to “handle the universe’s bid-ness” and so you develop this weird connection between your original individual trauma or chemistry imbalance and the grand movements of the universe. You have the correct instinct that “things need to be done.” But you are dodging the very place where God’s business is being performed! So when you have the craving that is the compulsion recognize that you don’t need (and indeed should not) allow your body and mind to invent skewed individual pagan and superstitious thinking. If you craved salt would you go into your basement and try to invent a salt substitute? I sure hope not. If you crave salt and you worry that you (and the universe) are not getting enough salt, how about going to where the salt is being distributed and consumed and getting some for yourself? And observe the universe is getting enough salt? (Please no crank email about too much salt causing high blood pressure, lighten up, it’s an analogy ha). You know what I intend with this analogy, I hope.

4) If you have OCD do NOT use any mind or mood altering drugs including marijuana! Weed is not harmless. Weed accentuates the false linkage between your condition (your OCD based on trauma or other original cause) and the false believe that your condition has some dire universal significance. The same applies to alcohol, do not abuse alcohol though if you are not an alcoholic it is OK to have a normal and healthy consumption. But I must totally warn you that there is no "OK" amount of pot at all and there is no medical "alleviation" of symptoms of OCD through use of pot. First let's look at the salt analogy. Using pot is like eating more of salt depriving foods when you are having a salt shortage already. In other words the pot strengthens the wrong linkage between your OCD and the sense of doom/universal significance of your individual condition. Everyone should stop using pot period no weed none whatsoever ever any how or any way. But in the context of this topic I need to explain to you that pot does not alleviate OCD but worsens it and pot actively blocks you from being cured.

Whew! This is a lot of information and I hope you and your family and friends find this helpful.