You know how you get reassurance and it feels AMAZING for approximately four minutes and then the anxiety comes back, roaring even louder?

That is simply how it works.

When you have OCD or anxiety, certainty is a bottomless bag. The answers you get are just never enough. Whereas other people can settle for “good enough”, the OCD brain aims for certainty, which is just not achievable. Are we certain of.. anything? Are you certain you will wake up tomorrow? Are we certain, on our next drive to the grocery store, that we won’t get in a fatal accident? Can we ever really know anything for sure, at least the way OCD wants?

I personally don’t think so.

And yet.. we keep asking for it. We keep asking our therapists, partners, ChatGPT, Reddit, even our own damn brains in the middle of the night: just tell me it’s going to be okay. Just promise me I’m a good person. Just tell me the thing I’m terrified of happening will not happen.

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This never works. The truth - the full, hard, sometimes unsoftened truth - is the only thing that actually does. Whereas OCD wants certainty, life offers “probably” at best. Here are some truths that OCD hates.

• You might get sick.

• The people you love are going to die some day (I know, I’m sorry, I told you we aren’t softening anything here).

• You will say the wrong thing. Some of it will be on accident, some of it will be on purpose.

• Something bad might happen on your drive to the grocery store.

• A relationship can feel completely right and still end.

• Your intrusive thoughts don’t make you a monster, but you cannot be 100% certain of that, at least not the way OCD demands.

• You are probably a good person. Because, again, probably is the best any of us can get.

OCD hears “probably” in a way that feels completely unacceptable, but these are the truths that every. single. person has to walk with - every day. Most people can settle for “probably” fine. They have things like confidence, faith, and trust (which are, inherently, uncertain by the way). They know they’re “probably” a good person and go “awesome, moving on”. They have a thought about something maybe happening on the way to work and just keep driving.

The OCD brain has such a hard time doing this. It needs the 100%, but the 100% does not exist. Not for anything, not for anyone. Are we certain that the sun will rise tomorrow? ALMOST certainly yes, but not certainly. OCD also will always ask you about the specific things you can least afford to be uncertain about - that’s always why it feels so real and important.

But you know what sucks even more than having to come to terms with those realizations?

Relying on reassurance, which is made up. At least recognizing “something bad might happen, I will handle it if and when it comes up” is solid ground. OCD can’t argue with reality the way she argues with reassurance, because reality isn’t up for debate.

The clearest example I have of this lately actually isn’t clinical. It’s personal and it involves my son, three animals we loved very much, and the different ways those deaths went depending on how much truth I was willing to give him.

The first was Rocky. Yes, a hamster. I think Eli was 4 or 5 when he died. Eli was getting ready for school one morning, then OPE - yeah, Rocky was definitely dead. It was my son’s first experience with death. My husband, Tate, and I were gentle and careful and also, in hindsight, kind of a mess about the language we used.

“He’s resting now.” “He’s not going to wake up.” And other things to that effect.

We gave Eli the full truth eventually, but buried under so much softness and confusion, it was hard for him to find it and make sense of it all. His grief got tangled up in all the questions. Rocky went to sleep? Does that mean I could go to sleep and not come back? Does that mean mom and dad could go to sleep and not come back? (Is it any wonder this kid didn’t sleep for the next week?) - The softening of the truth didn’t really protect him. Instead, it left him with more uncertainty in the end - not less.

I’ve always been a big believer that soft-pedaling the truth does not actually protect people. When you tell someone with OCD “you’re probably fine, I’m sure it’s nothing”, or when you tell it to yourself, you’re giving them a version of an answer that will evaporate into thin air in a few minutes. They need even more of that reassurance. And then more. And more and more and more. The OCD/anxiety loop tightens and strengthens and it’s never good enough. My intention with giving Eli a softened version of the truth was to protect him from discomfort (and, to be honest, to protect myself from the discomfort of seeing my son sad), but it didn’t really do that. It just made things messy and more confusing.

Mission not accomplished, as it typically goes with this reassurance stuff.

And because the Universe just LOVES for me to learn lessons, or something, another animal we loved died a few months later.

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I dug up this live Q&A I did for my community back in June of 2023, back when my OCD and Anxiety Recovery Blueprint course didn’t even exist yet and I was looking for volunteers from my community to pilot it. It’s now 3 years later and we have over 800+ students inside. WHAT?! Anyways, past me had some absolute OCD and anxiety recovery bangers in here, so I cleaned it up for you.

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This one is mostly for paid subscribers, but I’m leaving the first chunk open because a few of these ideas are too good to gate.

Years later and I still say it all the time (are you sick of it yet): your subtype does not matter.

I know it feels like it matters. I know your OCD feels unique and special and unlike anyone else’s, and that whatever it’s latched onto for you feels like THE thing. But if I’m answering a question that’s clearly about contamination and you struggle with harm OCD, I don’t want you tuning out. It all works the exact same way underneath, because at the end of the day, this is the doubt disorder. One moving target, and the target is uncertainty (if you struggle more with just right or disgust, that’s fine - swap uncertainty with discomfort).

That reframe alone may single-handedly be the most important thing I could give you, because you stop playing whack-a-mole with themes and start going after the actual machine.

A few of the things I covered on this Q&A call:

• The backdoor spike. What to do when the thoughts stop giving you anxiety and then that itself makes you anxious. “I’m not worried about it anymore, what does that mean about me?” That’s just another OCD question, really, so you treat it like all the others.

• What “Pure O” actually means. Take it from the guy who coined the term: there’s no such thing as obsessions with no compulsions. The compulsions are just in your head.

• Mental compulsions, the sneaky kind. Reviewing, analyzing, self-reassuring, arguing with a thought, even hating a thought and wishing it gone. All of it count, and all of it feeds the thing.

• The $100 mindfulness trick AKA how I get clients to actually catch themselves ruminating in real time.

• Emotional reasoning - why people with OCD treat a feeling like a fact, and what to do with a weird body sensation instead of investigating it for 34439804 hours.

• Core fears and the balloon-and-string analogy. How to find the one fear looping all your themes together, and the client story where “contamination OCD” turned out to have nothing to do with contamination.

• Why some themes stay sticky and how you’re answering the telemarketer’s phone call without realizing it.

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If you only take one thing from the free part, take this: you don’t have a contamination problem or a driving problem or a relationship problem. You have a problem with how your brain processes doubt. Fix THAT issue and the themes stop mattering as much. More on this here.

Okay. Here’s where I get into the actual tactics, the stuff I’d normally only teach inside the Blueprint including the 86×27 method, the bird story that shows exactly what resisting a compulsion looks like in real time, and the telemarketer framework for thoughts that won’t shut up.

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If you had chest pain and went to a general practitioner, they’d run some tests, stabilize you, and send you to a cardiologist. They wouldn’t just try to treat your heart condition themselves - that would be terrifying. They can’t do that, they don’t know how to do that. That’s where a specialist comes in, like cardiologists who are trained to actually fix the heart. The system (GP) routes you to the right person (cardiologist).

Mental health doesn’t work like this.

Mental health works like if you went to a GP with chest pain and they said yeah, I’ve seen a few heart things, I’ll just take a crack at it, how’s your childhood going? And then they tried to treat your cardiac issue by validating everything right back to you, throwing you some meds that may or may not work, and challenging a maladaptive belief here and there.

Unfortunately, I’m not being very hyperbolic because this is basically the equivalent of what can happen when someone with OCD walks into a standard therapy office.

The average time between OCD symptom onset and receiving an accurate diagnosis and appropriate treatment is 17 years. Seventeen. That means people like you are spending nearly two decades in the wrong office getting the wrong intervention, sometimes getting actively worse, while a treatable disorder gets louder and their world gets smaller and nobody thinks to say… hey, maybe I should refer you to someone who actually.. like.. specializes in this.

What makes me really want to flip a table like Teresa Giudice from The Real Housewives is that it doesn’t HAVE to be like this. The medical field already solved this problem (one of the 9834094 they have). We just refuse to apply the solution to mental health.

In a sensible world, therapists would work like physicians. General practitioners would handle the basics - a hard season, a breakup, some situational anxiety, the stuff that doesn’t require deep specialization. And then, for the deeper issues, specialists would exist. Therapists who have done additional training, additional supervision, actual credentialing in a specific area: OCD, eating disorders, trauma, personality disorders, kids, whatever. And these specializations would actually be regulated to ensure quality (not like Psychology Today where any therapist can say they specialize in anything without any vetting process). The GP recognizes when something is outside their scope and refers out. I literally remember my roommate in college having to declare a speciality before going to medical school (oncology, pediatrics, psychiatry, cardiology), like.. why do we not have to do this as therapists!?

Instead, we have a system where every licensed therapist is theoretically qualified to treat everything. OCD. Psychosis. PTSD. Eating disorders. Childhood trauma. Relationship issues. All under one credential, which means a therapist who has never once received specialized training in OCD can see a client who has been suffering for a decade and just... figure it out as they go. With a real person whose life is on the line.

I don’t want to dig therapists, I hope it’s not coming off that way. Most I know are really devoted to their clients and they do this work with the best of intentions, never knowing any other way. What I’m doing is digging at a system that doesn’t require therapists to know what they don’t know. It’s a system that lets someone practice OCD treatment without ever having learned what OCD actually is. This system that has produced, as a direct and measurable consequence, that statistic we saw above. Seventeen years. That number is not an accident, and it does not have to be that way.

The mental health system needs to mirror the medical model. Require therapists to designate whether they’re generalists or specialists. If you’re a generalist, great, you see those low need cases on an every-so-often basis, and if you see something that flags a need for more specialization, you break out your little Rolodex (or whatever they use), and you refer out. Require real credentialing for specializations, not just continuing education hours that could mean literally anything. Make it so that treating OCD (or any other disorder) requires proving you know how to treat OCD (or that disorder). Wild, I know. Almost unthinkable, even.

Until that happens, as a client, you’re kind of on your own to figure out whether your therapist actually knows what they’re doing. I hate that. And as a therapist, you’re on your own to develop that additional specialization. For example, if it weren’t for me actively going out of my way to seek out internships, jobs, research opportunities, and education that specifically dealt with OCD and anxiety, I wouldn’t know what I know. I hate that this is the world we live in. But it is, and knowing what to look for might save you years.

With that said, here are five red flags, specifically “your therapist is missing the OCD piece and that piece could be why you’re still stuck” flags, and what you can do about it.

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When I was five or six years old, I was convinced I was personally responsible for the safety of Isaac, Taylor, and Zac Hanson.

If you don’t know who Hanson is, first of all, who even are you, and second of all, they were an ABSOLUTELY ICONIC band in the 90’s, they were my entire world, and there were three of them. I actually wrote to them as a kid and advocated to be the fourth Hanson band member, because I’ve always been a dreamer, ya know.

Somewhere in my little kid brain, I developed this certainty that if I didn’t do everything in threes (go through a door three times, tie my shoes three times, write something again three times), something terrible would happen to the Hanson brothers. I didn’t know what the terrible thing would be, I just knew that I, a six-year-old in Pennsylvania, was responsible for the wellbeing of three teenage boys from Oklahoma who had absolutely no idea I existed.

For the record: the Hanson brothers are fine. I think. I’ve seen them in concert a few times since then (see below). Turns out Zac Hanson did not need me to survive and thrive.

This is actually the least embarrassing picture from the night, I’ll spare you the videos of me scream singing.

Growing up, my obsessive-compulsive tendencies came up in other ways, although, of course, I didn’t realize it was OCD at the time. I also couldn’t step on cracks (y’know, my mother’s back), couldn’t walk under ladders, was afraid to raise my hand in class because I was convinced something weird would fly out of my mouth the second I did. I was a quirky kid, but I didn’t think any of it was wrong. I thought it was how the world worked, I thought the thoughts I had were legitimate, I thought the outcomes were my responsibility, and that was the damn deal.

Nobody told me otherwise until I was in college.

If you grew up with intrusive thoughts and nobody told you these five things, hi, this is for you.

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1. You are not the only person having these weird ass thoughts.

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve worked with people who think their particular set of intrusive thoughts are going to send me running for the hills. They’re always so convinced they’re the only person in the entire world who’s had these thoughts. I remind them that I’ve seen it all, none of it rattles me, and then urge them to try and surprise me and they can win a prize if they do.

They never win the prize.

Most of the time, based on our previous conversations, I can already predict the thoughts they’re going to tell me, anyways. OCD is wildly predictable like that when you know its patterns and tricks.

Afterall, we’ve already determined that everyone experiences intrusive thoughts, they’re human nature. In fact, researchers took two lists of intrusive thoughts (one from people who have OCD, one from people who don’t) and gave them to professionals. The professionals could not tell which list belonged to which group.

DO YOU KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS?!

gosh i love this man, as well as any opportunity to include him as a gif in anything i create

Other people are having the same thoughts as you! Yes, they’re having the taboo ones, the harm thoughts, the fears of doing something unforgivable. They’re thinking of punching that grandma in the face, they have that random thought that says maybe they looked at their naked baby for too long, they’re thinking they may not totally 100% love their partner, they have brief flashes of terminal illness.

People who have never been diagnosed with OCD are walking around having those same thoughts and shrugging them off. They’re simply the ones not treating the thoughts like emergencies.

I sat with a 35-year-old woman once (two kids running around in the background, successful career, absolutely gutted by OCD) and told her some version of this. I talked to her about how her brain generates thousands of thoughts a day and that not every one of them comes from her or says anything about her character. She was floored, like, truly floored. She could not comprehend that a thought could pop up, not necessarily of your own accord, that a thought could exist in your brain without being a confession or evidence of something wrong with you.

She cried because she had been carrying the weight of every thought she had ever had for her entire life. I think it was a bittersweet moment for her. Like she’d been led astray for so long, like someone had ~forgotten~ to give her a very vital piece of the puzzle, but it was, at the same time, so.. simple?

The difference between you and all those other people is not the type of thoughts you’re having. What sets you apart from people who don’t have OCD is your reaction to the thoughts. You’re fused to the thoughts - you think they mean something. When you realize they can be random brain nonsense - AKA brains braining - you make space for a world where maybe you’re not a monster, after all.

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Hi Substack! Okay, so this is a little different.

I had to film a video answering Q&A questions about OCD, anxiety, and intrusive thoughts for another platform. And then I thought, why not film it here first so you guys have it!? Two birds, one stone kinda thing. You’re getting the video recording and the full written version below, and you’re getting it before anyone else.

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If you’re new and just popping in: hi! I’m Jenna. I’m a licensed professional counselor specializing in OCD, anxiety, and intrusive thoughts, and I have personal experience with all of it. You’re in the right place.

Let’s get into it.

What problems or patterns do you specialize in, and what drew you to this work?

I specialize in what I call weird mental experiences - intrusive thoughts, intrusive images, impulses, feelings, urges. The thoughts that come in out of nowhere and feel ego-dystonic, meaning they conflict with your values. These are usually the thoughts that feel really scary, and you feel this desperate urge to get rid of them somehow or feel better about them.

What drew me to it: as a kid, I struggled with what I now know to be OCD. One pattern that stands out looking back - I felt this need to do everything in threes. I loved the band Hanson (if you know, you know, and we’d get along great), and I felt it was my singular responsibility to keep the Hanson brothers alive. If I didn’t do everything in sets of three (tie my shoes three times, walk in and out of a door three times, rewrite something because it didn’t feel right), one of them would die and it would be my fault.

In hindsight: obsessive compulsive. At the time: just how life worked.

I also struggled with social anxiety as a kid, afraid to raise my hand because of what people would think. But I knew, even without language for it, that the only thing worse than being anxious about something was letting that fear voice win. So even when raising my hand felt terrifying, sitting there and shrinking felt worse. I was competitive with my anxiety from a very young age.

Eventually I learned that what I was doing was exposure and response prevention. That’s what got me into this work.

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What misleading self-help advice do you see most often, and what’s the truth?

The mental health field is still stuck on trying to get people to feel better, to get rid of their anxiety, to eliminate intrusive thoughts - so there’s a lot of thought stopping, snapping a rubber band against your wrist when a scary thought shows up. Reassurance, too, when a client is scared, the first instinct of many therapists is to reassure them. And for OCD, that is the opposite of helpful.

What we actually need is to build capacity. Not feel better about a specific subtype or theme but build your capacity for anxiety, for discomfort, for intrusive thoughts. Build more tolerance. Feel more capable of handling difficult things.

I tell my clients and students: I’m not interested in you feeling better. I’m interested in you getting better at feeling.

Because if you’re living a life that’s worthwhile and meaningful, being triggered, having anxiety, having scary thoughts = the tax, that’s the price of a fulfilling life. And if we’re not teaching people to get better at tolerating that, we’re missing a massive part of the work.

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Do you ever log into Instagram or TikTok and you’re like, damn, girl, how do you know me SO well?

You clicked on one video about latte art at 11 PM on a Thursday (not that I know anything about that) and now your entire For You Page is about Nespresso tutorials, niche varieties of K cups, third wave coffee culture, and a seventeen part series on whether coffee is slowly killing you. You clicked once, and the algorithm did the rest.

Your brain does the exact same thing.

It starts by something catching your attention - whether this is an internal trigger, an external trigger, a thought, a feeling, whatever. Your brain registers this on some level and is like “hey, here’s this thought!”. If you engage with it - say, by thinking about it, analyzing it, giving it attention, doing a ritual about it, avoiding it, or simply checking to see if it’s still there, your brain logs that as “important”, just like if you were to engage with some random latte art video out of nowhere. What you pay attention to, your brain thinks about more. What you try to get rid of, your brain registers and thinks about constantly.

What happens when something feels important AND dangerous? Your brain is going to put that on your mental “For You” page every time.

This is your brain doing its actual job. It’s just trying to keep you alive, engage with the events and information you’re showing meaning to, based on the information you’re giving it. The information you’ve been giving it, knowingly or not, is that certain thoughts are important and certain thoughts are dangerous and certain thoughts need your immediate engagement. So, your brain serves you more of those thoughts. Like a well-meaning, irritating, wildly incorrect social media algorithm.

And yes, avoiding the thoughts counts as ‘engagement’, too, in this metaphor (here’s a video where I go over specific, subtle ways you might be engaging, in addition to just physical and mental compulsions). Trying to get rid of the thoughts does not count as simply acknowledging it and scrolling by, which is what we’d aim for. Those are the thoughts that don’t necessarily show up in your feed again because, well, you’ve scrolled by. Quite literally not for you, so it doesn’t get to your For You page again. Checking to see if it’s still there also counts as engagement - like going back to the profile and actively searching for that particular post and clicking on it. Anything other than simply letting the thought exist and continuing to move on with your day could technically count as “engagement”.

Moral of the story: Your brain learns from what you pay attention to. Every time you engage with an intrusive thought, you’re giving your brain the message that this content matters, and your brain will show you more of it. This is just how your inner brain algorithm works.

People get tripped up thinking compulsions are the obvious things, like hand washing, checking the locks, and rituals you can see from the outside. But engagement can be a lot more subtle than that. For example..

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The cure for OCD has been discovered! It’s celery juice, apparently. Truly thrilled that after 18 years of working in this field and almost being admitted into an inpatient facility for this disorder myself, that the answer lies simply in my local Piggly Wiggly’s produce section.

It was produce! It was produce the whole time, you guys! I guess I’m all done here now.

Except, no.

I’m nowhere close to being done.

The celery juice thing sounds funny and ridiculous until you realize it’s right up there with rubber bands, ice packs, and a $297 supplement pack from someone with good lighting and absolutely zero clinical training with none of it labelled.

The mental health space is incredibly unregulated. Anyone can wake up and decide to teach OCD recovery strategies. Some of those people are BRILLIANT. Some are touting celery juice like it’s the absolute miracle cure. And some people really can’t tell them apart until they’ve already paid and lost another year to this condition.

A few months ago, someone slid into my DMs to tell me they’d been following an OCD coach for two years. They were doing all the things - they paid for the course, watched the videos, implemented the strategies, and their symptoms just got worse. Significantly, measurably, spending even more hours a day on rituals worse. When they finally asked why it wasn’t working, the coach simply said, “Sometimes it gets worse before it gets better.”

Do you think they talked about ritual prevention? No. Extinction bursts? No. Letting anxiety be there without interfering? No. Holding off on exposures until the person could actually develop the mental muscle of tolerating a single modicum of discomfort? Willingness? The natural nature of anxiety and intrusive thoughts and how they are naturally occurring, human experiences? Attention as a mental compulsion? Mental compulsions.. at all? Compulsions.. AT ALL? No. None of it.

This coach wasn’t being intentionally cruel or money hungry. I think they’re just, sometimes (not always), completely unequipped. And that's somehow worse.

So let’s get into it. Here’s what the mental health space continues to get wrong and what to actually look for instead.

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Someone even quoted Haddaway in the chat and now it’s stuck in my head all over again.

Here are the highlights, including how to talk to your partner, the overthinking tools, and the part about ~trusting your gut~ when your gut actually is… OCD.

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We need to talk.

You’re still chewing on that thought (ahem, ruminating, worrying, whatever you want to call it) because your brain has convinced you that this time - THIS time - if you just think about it a liiiittle more, you’re going to land on something that finally makes it stop. (psst click here for a free video where I talk about this a lot more)

You’re not. I’m sorry. I so wish you could get to the promise land of mental solutions and relief you’re wanting, but you’re not going to get there, at least not by doing this shit. Because OCD and anxiety are a bottomless bag and there are just some things in the world that you don’t get to know the answer to.

Here’s the very quick, very unsexy explanation of what’s actually happening in your head.

The two-minute version of what rumination actually is

Rumination is when your brain gets stuck on a thought and keeps going over it on a loop. It’s not productive, though it does feel like it’s getting you closer to an answer. Your brain has learned that going over it FEELS like doing something, and doing something feels better than sitting with uncertainty.

Basically, continuing to think about it feels like you’re solving the problem, except you’re not actually solving the problem. In fact, you’re actually creating more problems.

You may also call this worry (I don’t believe there’s a functional difference between rumination and worry). “What if this happens, what if that happens, what if…” on repeat until you’re exhausted and nothing has actually been resolved.

Let’s just call all of these things, together, “mental compulsions”. Mental compulsions are what happen when you try to think your way out of the discomfort. These unobservable actions can come in many forms, like replaying the conversation, reassuring yourself in your own head, analyzing why you feel this way, running the mental trial for the fourteenth time this week. All of it feels like solving. None of it is solving anything. It’s just anxiety getting stronger every time you go through that loop.

And the loop has been running for a while now, hasn’t it.

Here are some questions I desperately need you to check yourself with before you continue to wreck yourself with these unconstructive thought patterns.

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QUICK! Before you go any further, this is a two part series because Substack was like whoooaa ma’am, this is too good, slow down, we literally cannot fit all this into one article. So here’s part 1 if you missed it.

Now onto part 2 and episodes 6-10.

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So I pulled this from my ~vault~. Now it lives here.

Because suffering is optional and you deserve to know what’s getting in the way.

Backtrack a bit: A few years ago, I ran a live event. Before the event, I did a private podcast - 10 episodes about 10 reasons your recovery has stalled despite doing everything you’ve been told to do.

Once the event was over, I took it down. Never to be seen again .. da da da DAAAA until NOW, because I love Substack so much I could scream from the rooftops.

You get 5 for this article and 5 for the one before this because Substack basically looked at this and said “ma’am, this is too much” so.. this is part 2. Click here for part 1 if you missed it.

Ten episodes. Four(ish) minutes each AKA shorter than the amount of time you spent ruminating so far this morning. You get the audio clips and a nice little summary for each. Bing bang boom.

First episode is free, the rest are available with a free trial or a paid subscription.

Basically, you've been doing the work and wondering why you're still here. These ten episodes may be why. Enjooooyyyy.

PS: This was recorded 1-2 years ago. If I mention anything time-sensitive or otherwise embarrassing, just smile and nod. I am one woman. I have a lot of thoughts. I do what I can.

Episode 6: You’re Tackling Every Subtype But Missing the Root

You’ve probably identified with at least one OCD subtype (harm, relationship, contamination, postpartum, moral, existential, health, on and on) and spent time treating each one like it’s a separate emergency that needs its own solution. OCD doesn’t care about the topic. She cares about the doubt, the fear of uncertainty, the fear of being wrong about something that matters to you. As long as you keep chasing each new theme as though THAT is the actual problem, OCD just rebrands, puts on a new disguise, and sends you right back to square one.

The core fear (the one [or few] underneath every subtype you’ve ever had, the one that keeps showing up wearing different costumes) is what you should be tackling. When you identify it, your exposure work gets sharper. Your rituals become easier to resist (because you can defuse and step away from the superficial content that feels so jarring), and anxiety stops feeling like a new emergency every time a new theme rolls in. You start seeing the pattern instead of chasing the content. When you stop giving every new disguise its own treatment plan, OCD stops finding new places to run.

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How can you go from jamming to Katy Perry in the shower one minute to crying on the floor the next?

You have a 14 year old dying dog, that’s how.

Who’s a good boy!?!?!?! This picture is from an “end of life” photoshoot we did with Asic 3-4 YEARS AGO. We laugh that he is actually a cat because he has 9+ lives.

One thing about me, I romanticize things. Suppose there are two people having coffee together. I could spend the next ten minutes constructing an elaborate backstory for them - how they met, what they’re celebrating, whether they’re falling in love or already in love or just two people who found each other at the exact right time. Beautiful stories I made up entirely in my head. It’s cute, it’s endearing, it’s romanticizing - for the most part. I can see beauty in things other people would overlook.

But there has to be an opposite of romanticizing, because I also do that in the opposite direction ALL the time and it’s not always cute nor endearing to say the least. This has been my brain for 36 years, even more so for the past few years with my dying dog, and I did not have a word for it until now.

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We shall call it ~tragedizing~, and I bet this happens more often when you have OCD and anxiety. It’s the same urge as romanticizing - to create a story out of nothing - but in a different direction. Instead of spinning beautiful fictions around neutral things, you spin heartbreaking ones around things that are already hard. With tragedizing, there’s a dramatic, emotional narrative - the same way romanticizing makes beautiful things more beautiful, tragedizing is when you make heartbreaking things even more heartbreaking. It’s when you can’t just let the hard thing be hard, you have to give it a story or meaning, an ending you haven’t reached yet.

Whyyy do we do this? Please tell me I’m not the only one.

Because Asic, my soul dog, my 14 year old soulmate, is dying. I named him Asic because we ran together. Half marathons, 5Ks, injuries, he’s seen me through all of it, he even won some awards in his glory days.

We adopted him in 2012. In fact, I chose him from the shelter BECAUSE of an intrusive thought. He was blind in one eye, and I was going to pass on him because I didn’t think we could handle the responsibility of a dog with medical needs. Then came that intrusive thought that said, “Wow, what a horrible person you are, passing on a dog who could need you just because he’s blind”.

THANK YOU, INTRUSIVE THOUGHT. First time I’ve said that with my whole chest and meant it. Without that compulsion right there, I wouldn’t have my dog. So thank you thank you thank you. Ya bitch.

Since then, Asic has had heartworm, cancer, an owl attack and I still feel like I’m missing some ailment. He has congestive heart failure, getting worse by the week. Every vet within a 30 mile radius has no explanation for why or how he is still alive.

I used to sob-cry about this. Like can’t-catch-your-breath, eyes-puffy-in-the-morning sob - except he was 5 and full of life. Now he’s 14 and the end is near. I’ve said it before but now it feels more real than it ever has. I do not know if he will be here by the next big event or milestone.

This tragedizing comes up in little moments, like when I wonder if Asic came up the stairs just to spend a little more time with me.

As we gather around him as a family, is he thinking oh wow guys this is nice, what the hell are you doing - or is he thinking wow, this is so nice. I’m so sad to be dying. I loved you so much. Thanks for giving me a good life.

I don’t know. I will never know. And that is its own specific kind of hell, the not knowing. Anxiety and OCD notoriously hate not knowing.

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So I pulled this from my ~vault~. Now it lives here.

Because suffering is optional and you deserve to know what’s getting in the way.

Backtrack a bit: A few years ago, I ran a live event. Before the event, I did a private podcast - 10 episodes about 10 reasons your recovery has stalled despite doing everything you’ve been told to do.

Once the event was over, I took it down. Never to be seen again .. da da da DAAAA until NOW, because I love Substack so much I could scream from the rooftops.

This is exactly what I built this space for - the stuff that doesn’t fit in an Instagram caption. The four-minute, no-script, recorded-live conversations that actually change how you approach this.

Here’s what we cover in these 10 clips. Well, 5 for this article and 5 for the next because Substack basically looked at this and said “ma’am, this is too much” so.. part 2 is coming.

You’re solving the thought instead of the pattern. You’re coping like a pro and still miserable. Your therapist is nodding a lot and you’re leaving exactly the same. Nobody has talked to you about mental compulsions. Your exposures are too safe. Annndd we talk about the other 5 in the next article.

Ten episodes. Four(ish) minutes each AKA shorter than the amount of time you spent ruminating so far this morning. You get the audio clips and a nice little summary for each. Bing bang boom.

Episode 1 is free, the rest are available with a free trial or a paid subscription.

You've been doing the work and wondering why you're still here. These ten episodes may be why. Enjooooyyyy.

PS: This was recorded 1-2 years ago. If I mention anything time-sensitive or otherwise embarrassing, just smile and nod. I am one woman. I have a lot of thoughts. I do what I can.

Episode 1: You’re Trying to Solve The Thought, Not The Pattern

You have a thought. Something dark, something weird, something you’d never say out loud. And your brain - bless it - goes straight to work. It says, let me figure this out. Let me Google it. Let me text someone. Let me replay that one more time just to be sure. You’re trying to solve it, calm it down, and get to the bottom of it. Seems completely logical, unfortunately is completely wrong. That whole thing you’re doing IS the compulsion. And you’ve been doing it this whole time wondering why you’re still stuck.

OCD does not care what the thought is. Contamination, harm, relationships, your eternal soul - doesn’t matter. It only cares what you do after the thought shows up. The second you try to solve it, you’ve handed your brain a memo that says “this is important, this is real, keep sending it”. Episode 1 is about stopping that - not the thought but the pattern that follows it. Because that’s what’s actually keeping you here, not the content, not your brain, not some deep unresolved thing from childhood but the pattern. And the good news is patterns can be interrupted because they’re predictable AF.

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(If this is your jam, I talk about it more for 1 hour and 40 minutes over here. Big rabbit hole, bring snacks because I could talk about this forever and I kind of did.)

Someone with social anxiety replays conversations after they happen, scans for evidence they said something wrong, texts people at midnight asking if they’re mad, needs certainty they didn’t screw it up.

Someone with relationship OCD replays the same conversation with their partner, scans it for evidence something is off, goes down Rabbit reddit holes until 2 AM to see how they can tell if they’re in the right relationship.

Someone with generalized anxiety wakes up already running worst-case scenarios, spends the whole day trying to think through every possible outcome of every possible problem, calls the same person three times to ask if they think it’ll be fine.

Different content, but the mechanism is identical.

I could run this comparison with health anxiety, harm OCD, contamination OCD, existential OCD. The story comes out the same. The content changes, but the cycle doesn’t.

OCD and anxiety disorders are not meaningfully different. Plenty of people in my field disagree with this. That’s cool with me, call it whatever you want. My interest is in what’s driving this thing and how we correct it, not what we decide to call it. The DSM disagrees too, but the DSM gets rewritten every few years by a room full of people who argue about it constantly and have reclassified OCD more than once already. Sooo. Yeah. I’ve been doing this work since 2008 and feel pretty comfortable with this take.

There are three things (one may show up more than others) I see that run the show regardless of your diagnosis, your subtype, or the specific ~theme~ your brain is currently stuck on.

• Intolerance of uncertainty. Your brain decided that not knowing is the danger. You think if you could get the final answer, the one that sticks this time, you’d be okay. You keep looking for it -in your head, on Google, in the same question to the same person for the fifth time this week. Certainty was never actually available, at least not the way your brain wants it, which is why it never works. It just keeps moving the goalpost because you can never be sure enough.

• Aversion to discomfort. The anxiety feels bad and the thought feels bad and your brain has decided that feeling bad needs immediate fixing. So your brain tries. The loop tightens every time it does, getting stronger. This is you basically having a shit relationship with anxiety. You want to get rid of anxiety and discomfort rather than learning to tolerate it and build capacity for it. Which leads me to the third issue..

• The belief that you can’t handle it. You’ve built a story that if you sat with this discomfort without doing anything about it, something bad would happen. You’d fall apart. Everything would just suck so bad that you would literally combust into a poof of… I guess anxiety. Or dust. Anxiety dust. You’re afraid of losing your shit. You never find out that you wouldn’t, because you never sit with it long enough to discover you’d handle it just fine.

With that said, I don’t care if you’re anxious about social interactions or going to heaven or hell or whether you left the stove on, and I don’t care about the frequency of the thoughts. I don’t care how often you’re having them. I don’t even care how vivid they are! I don’t care when they started! I don’t care whether you have them in the morning or at night or alone or with other people or with your dog!!!!!!!

To correct the issue and move you forward, I care about three things.

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