Tiny Buddha's Guide to Loving Yourself: 40 Ways to Transform Your Inner Critic and Your Life by Lori Deschene Read Free Book Online Page B

searched the best treatment for this disorder. I discovered exposure response prevention (ERP). It's apparently the only game in town for this type of disorder, and luckily for me, Philadelphia houses one of the best treatment facilities in the world for OCD.
    Once I completed the ERP, my OCD immediately went into remission. I was a diligent student, due mostly to how limited my life had become because of my anxiety. Because I didn't want to hurt anyone, I had no friends (I didn't want to hurt their feelings), my relationship with my husband suffered (I didn't want to hurt him), I spent hours on rituals to ensure that I hadn't hurt anyone, and I had lost about ten pounds in two and a half weeks when I hit my wall.
    After the treatment, my anxiety lifted. I felt like a member of society for the first time in my life. But after about six months of freedom, something funny happened: I decided I didn't like having OCD anymore. I wanted that label off my back. But really, I didn't like the upkeep of remission.
    Anxiety sucks, and ERP proposes that you habituate to the anxiety by just sitting with it. No deep breathing. No chemicals to relax the mind. Just straight-up anxiety. Anxiety naturally wears off. It's not possible for the human body to remain in an anxious state forever. And the human body is so amazing that we don't need to do anything to make it go away. But in order to get through the anxiety you must experience it. I didn't want to do that. I liked having my little rituals to deal with life.
    So I un-accepted my limitation, just like that. The mind is a beautiful mechanism, really. I still find it so incredible that changing one's mind can have such wild repercussions. I decided to listen to my brain once again—to take the bait. I began fearing that I was a horrible employee, so I checked my email around the clock. I began believing that I was a bad wife and daughter, so the rituals around that came back with a vengeance. I began returning home to check on the iron. Basically, most of the symptoms and rituals were back in full play and I had to go in for treatment again. In that second round, I made a resolution to myself that I will always accept that I have OCD. And it will most likely never go away.
    I still cringed at the thought of having OCD. Let's face it, nobody wants to answer a series of questions from a shrink and then actually fit the profile of some well-known mental illness. But a mentor helped me see things differently. She suggested I look at my OCD as “cute” or “quirky.”
    “Cute?!” I yelped. You might have thought the woman suggested I run through Rittenhouse Square stark naked. I was appalled! But in that instant, something shifted. Her suggestion to look at a flaw as quirky was revolutionary. A good perspective. A new perspective. I began to refer to my OCD as one of my cute and quirky little additions to my personality. A nifty little surprise to the totality of my being. Something changed.
    Now, my OCD is fully in remission, with no medications. This means I don't suffer severe anxiety at all anymore. I don't ritualize. I don't waste hours of my day checking on things. And most importantly, I rarely pay any attention to the thoughts that float through my beautifully complex brain.
    Acceptance doesn't have to mean surrendering to bad news. In fact, accepting the bad part of anything can only take you so far. What if you began to look for the silver lining and accept that part? Let's say you struggle with depression. Studies show that people with depression may, and probably will, experience depression many times during their lives. So just getting out of the woods once is good, but it may come back again.
    I think a lot of the time people get through something and say, “I will never go through that again.” And when a smidge of depression creeps in, the person may try to run from it, and they begin to fear it, and they may try to “shake it off.” This is a really negative way to