Who is Your OCD Monster?

A community member named Joe reached out to me and told me about going to a Halloween party dressed as his OCD monster.

A few years ago, I attended a Halloween party where guests were invited to dress as the parts of themselves they like to hide.

Well, Joe heard me say this and decided to abandon his plan to go to his Halloween party as a rock star and instead to go as his OCD monster. I'd like to compare and contrast our two experiences. My come out of hiding Halloween adventure was fun and liberating. So here are some of the costumes.1 person came dressed as a judge, like a supreme court justice.

She says that she tends to judge people or judge ideas or judge circumstances. Another came dressed as a negligent parent dragging her naked baby by the arm. Someone came dressed in a fat suit, which I thought was incredibly brave because I knew that he struggled with eating disorders. And me, I came dressed as a stick of dynamite. The part of me that I like to keep hidden is the part that can explode into anger.

And when it happens, the level of response is not tied to the level of the circumstance. So when I met people at that party, I gave voice to that part of myself. It was clear that we all have parts of ourselves that we don't like, that we'd like to have surgically removed if we could. However, I was not surprised by anyone's costume.

We cannot hide parts of ourselves.

Other people see it, and other people accept us even with those parts of ourselves. To evolve into the best version of ourselves, we name and own all of those parts. We understand that all of our parts are there for a reason. The part of myself that I now call the stick of dynamite was the way during my childhood for me to respond to injustice and powerlessness. Well, I'm not a child anymore.

I have much more functional ways to respond to injustices.

When I feel that dynamite going off in me, I can imagine just grasping the fuse of the dynamite and extinguishing it.

I can say to that part of myself, thanks for alerting me to injustice. I've got it. You go out and play.

That part of me will always be there. Now let's talk about Joe. Joe was an adult who'd been living with OCD for about a decade. He was married, and he had kids. Now Joe had already given his OCD a name and identity, the penguin from the Batman series.

Now, the penguin has this Napoleon complex. He's a small man who wants to be big, so he extends his height with a hat, and he extends his personal space with the umbrella.

Joe knows that his OCD has an inferiority complex. He's thin skinned and sensitive, and he doesn't like being mocked by others, so much so that the penguin will avenge those who made fun of him, even if his decisions are not rational. So Joe went dressed to this Halloween party as the penguin.

The words that came out of his mouth were the same words the penguin, his OCD monster says to him. Joe said, it was kind of like I was that character on Saturday night live Debbie Downer. I pointed out all the dangers at the Halloween party, dying of some food-borne illness, somebody actually getting killed with the ax that was part of somebody's costume, asking Dracula if you might have run over somebody on the drive to the party and drank her blood. Joe told me, on the way home, my wife asked me if I wasn't just overdoing it a bit with this penguin character. I told her, you don't understand.

The things I said tonight are the things that I deal with every day. I hear those things being told to me.

He said, my wife just started crying and said, I am so sorry. I really had no idea what your life is really like for you and what you deal with every day. I just see the compulsions.

I get why you would do the compulsions if that offered you some relief from all this abusive language. So what is the difference between Joe's Halloween story and my Halloween story? Well, the stick of dynamite is part of me. It evolved to serve me in some way.

Anyone who has a neurodiverse brain, ADHD, or autism, our goal is to accept how we are and embrace it to see some qualities that we would characterize as shortfalls, as superpowers.

However, OCD is more like a cancer or a viral infection or a terrorist.

Every time we get a cold, the virus hijacks the cellular machinery of our own body and turns healthy cells into virus producing factories so the virus will spread. For the virus particle, it's all about the virus. For OCD, it's all about the OCD. When Joe went dressed as the penguin, he was better able to separate himself, his true self, from his OCD monster.

And that's the goal of being freed from OCD, isn't it? It's not like OCD is ever going to go away, but we recognize that it is not us. It is something foreign, and we don't have to give our power away to it.

So if you have OCD, what about you? Have you given your OCD monster a name?

What is it? What would your OCD monster look like? Temperamentally, who is the OCD monster like? What special powers would your OCD monster like you to believe it has? What would happen if you would laugh at your OCD monster, talk back to him?

What if your OCD monster was not the powerful wizard of Oz, but that bumbling old man behind the screen. So even though Halloween's a year away now, what about playing dress up and coming to the dinner table as your OCD monster? Now, of course, your family would know about this ahead of time, but they would get some insight into what you go through every day.

For someone with neurodivergent conditions, the goal is to embrace the parts of ourself we want to hide. For somebody with OCD, the goal is to put distance between the real you and your OCD monster.

Of course, before you try any experiments like this, please check-in with your therapist first. So no matter what your wiring is, consider giving a voice to the parts of you that you try to hide. Madeline does daily downloads of her thoughts, and she said that when it's the true her with a thought, she'll write it with her right hand. And when it's the OCD monster, she'll write it with her left hand. If you are supporting somebody that you love with OCD, you might have an identity of a bad parent or a bad partner or a bad friend.

Give voice to that also. Let that part of you do the daily download. So that's what I've got for you today. Know that there are different parts of you telling you things about yourself and about the world that may or may not be true. If you do not have OCD, your goal is to embrace these hidden parts of you.

If you do have OCD, your goal is putting some distance between you and your OCD monster. This puts you in a better position to be freed from OCD. So that's what I've got for you today. And if nobody has told you yet today, I honor your courage.

Managing OCD might be the hardest thing I have ever done. You've got this.