Truth, Sabotage, and the Stories OCD Calls Facts

Today I want to talk about two words that sit underneath most stuck recoveries: truth and sabotage.

Your mind talks as if it knows who you are, what will happen next, what other people think, and why a new approach cannot work. That is not truth. It is a guess built from your old programming. It feels like a fact because it is familiar.

OCD — or what I now prefer to call complex anxiety — uses that feeling of certainty to keep you small. It sabotages sleep, driving, work, travel, eating out, leaving home, play, health, honesty and calmness. It also sabotages the very qualities that would set you free: optimism, trust, self-honesty and the willingness to look again.

A man rang me after leaving the course. His doctor had told him OCD was genetic and could not be changed. I was saying that even if genes play a part, the conditioned brain can still be retrained. His ego decided I could not be right because I was not a doctor. He left. My name kept appearing in forums and under videos. He came back. He left again, because metaphors were not “the truth” he wanted. Then his doctor mentioned another patient who had recovered using this process. That night he broke down — old frustration coming out — and finally saw it: the condition had been talking him out of the very thing that might help.

That is sabotage wearing the costume of common sense.

Miguel Ruiz put it well: be sceptical, but listen anyway. I had to override my own mind when it said “that is ridiculous” and replace it with “let me test it, then I will know.” I escaped OCD by changing perspective, not by winning an argument with the thoughts.

Truth depends on content, context and viewpoint. One man will not wear an unironed shirt. Another never irons anything. Neither is the universal law of shirts. One wastes a lot of energy. That is the only measure that matters if calmness is the aim.

In my own recovery the hidden truths were uncomfortable. I had a dominant nature and had been living as a victim and a pleaser. I was cleverer than school had taught me to believe. Energy, frequency, and seeing myself as the Observer — the Self with a capital S, the rider rather than the frightened horse — were not scientifically tidy. They were useful. Forgiving someone so I did not have to keep their story in my head was useful. Making myself vulnerable in these videos was useful.

When I was ill, I thought life, parents and biology were sabotaging me. The person doing it was me: the little self, the eight-year-old, the animal-protective personality clinging to an old identity.

The patterns I see again and again

Some people turn the course into a new obsession. They replay every line, worry they are doing it wrong, and never get on with life. Learning becomes another way not to live.

Some cannot stay with anything that contradicts an old belief: “it is genetic,” “I am not enough,” “I am happy being closed.” A friend of mine had a fifteen-year story that she was fulfilled and single. Then she met someone, married at sixty, and a whole unused part of her life opened. The old story had been a lid, not a truth.

Some understand the ideas and do not apply them. A woman had a panic attack in a shop and could not remember a technique she had only learned in her head. Knowing is not retraining. Repetition on small fears, while you are still relatively calm, is what makes the tool available when you need it.

Some are simply too exhausted. Eighty-hour weeks, shift work, caring for everyone else. In those cases the anxiety is often a message: something in the life has to change, not just the thoughts.

Some are sabotaged by family. As you put yourself first, people say you used to be kinder, or “we don’t do that in this family.” Guilt is used to pull you back into the old shape. Anxiety is often trained in the home. It is not surprising if the person who reassures you is speaking from the same fear that helped build the problem.

Some shrink a nomadic or warrior nature to keep a quieter partner comfortable. The unused energy turns inward as health anxiety, contamination fear, depression or a terror of travel. About one in ten cases is boredom: not enough life happening for the personality that needs movement.

Some get a secondary gain from staying unwell. The role has benefits — care, lowered expectations, an identity. That has to be admitted if anything is going to move.

Reassurance is not the same as help

If someone says, “I think I hit a person on the way home, should I drive back and check?”
“Don’t worry, I’m sure you didn’t” leaves the what-if door wide open.
“You would know if you had. Sit with this” is harder and more useful.

I worked with a young man who barely left the house in case he infected his mother, and she died. She had been reassuring him about his safety. She did not know he had taken responsibility for her life. When that was said out loud, they both cried, then laughed, then went out to lunch. He only needed to protect her to the degree she protected herself.

A man who checked the hob all night was being met at his fear by a wife who knew cookers are designed to be on, that detectors matter more than the hundredth look at a dial, and that his “feeling of done” was not evidence of anything. She was calming the moment instead of changing the story.

A woman with health anxiety and a fear of vomiting was running her household, her children and her marriage from that fear. Her mother, who had nearly died when the woman was eight, was the main source of reassurance — and of the original programming. Managing the fear was not the same as living differently. Once the husband became the person who offered a normal perspective, and she stopped using her mother as the authority, the house began to change.

I do not reassure people that their OCD story is reasonable. I will help them calm the body. I will not agree that the feared narrative is the only way to see the situation. If you keep going to the person who built the old map, do not be surprised when you keep arriving at the same country.

What to do with this

Stop treating anxiety as the whole problem. It is often the symptom of worry, exhaustion, old conditioning, boredom, low self-worth and a life pointed in the wrong direction.

You are an emotional creature who learned to think. The little self tries to control emotion with more thinking. The larger Self talks you into life.

Who you copy matters. Who you ask for reassurance matters. Whether you test a new perspective, or reject it because it is not already your truth, decides whether this remains information or becomes a different nervous system.

There is no single Truth waiting to be found in the head. There are stories, and some of them imprison you. Try the ones that lead toward courage, then look at what actually happened. That is how sabotage loses the argument.

How to do this is detailed my course.