Looking for Good in All the Wrong Places
The mystery of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is compelling to patients seeking relief and therapists - like myself - intrigued by the intensities of obsession. I have become convinced that the disordered amongst us lead us to the door of important insight. The question is not what we can learn about those with OCD, but what we can learn from them, and what they can learn from themselves.
It’s a work in progress, but here’s some reflections from the front line. There’s a trend which has researchers seeking genetic explanations for contemporary maladies. With regards to this disorder, I’d like to suggest that seeking the genetic roots of a problem that may be, at least partly, spiritual in nature, parallels the mechanics of the disorder itself; a matter of missing the forest for the trees.
Why spiritual? Consider this: while OCD symptoms vary, there is a common thread that often links the afflicted: a compelling pursuit of “right action.” Their drive for perfection fuels unwavering loyalty to whichever virtue they endorse: cleanliness, safety, conscientiousness, amongst the favorites. Research reveals a higher incidence of OCD among devout Catholics compared to others who are non-practicing.
In my work with this illness, I’ve come to see those with OCD as bearing the burden of living in a society unmoored from moral clarity and spiritual depth. The evidence: recovery from OCD has people enacting their drive towards ‘right action’ in very productive ways. Take the anorexic who gained 25 pounds and became a bodybuilder, his obsessive thinking transformed into a newfound intense interest (née “obsession”) into wellness achieved by using nutritional strategies, a topic about which he became quite knowledgeable. This is one of many cases where a productive outcome convinced me that though OCD has different contributing factors, at heart, it may represent a special innate root force that needs to be properly released and channeled, a spiritual potential that hungers for healthy expression.
Unfortunately, in a society plagued by an emphasis on the tangible, finite world of appearances, consumerism and technology, the drive to enact righteousness in deed and thought becomes fixated on the very world it is meant to transcend. How painful to be locked in the minutia of mundane life when one has been endowed with a special capacity (read compulsion) to live on higher moral ground.
Perhaps the obsessives amongst us are lost shepherds, here to role model right action while simultaneously unmoored from clarity about how to do it and what to do. The task, in treating OCD, is to resuscitate the spiritual purpose; to help the symptom evolve into what it wants to be when it grows up.
We can, I think, be optimistic about the plight of those with OCD. Less so, with regard to scientists who may think they’ve got the whole thing in a nutshell when they may only have the nutshell. Will the scientists check whether spiritual giants amongst us also exhibit this genetic anomaly? And as conscientious, detail-minded researchers fix their steady gaze on genes, who will tend to the big picture — the spiritual malaise within which OCD and other problems of the day flourish?
In the meantime, the battle is being won or lost in therapy offices as some modern-day elders do their best to reintroduce goodness back into the lives of not-so-average Canadians.
Annette Poizner, MSW, Ed.D., is a therapist and educator and is the author of Kabbalah Cafe: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Minds, and many other books on the psychology of the wisdom traditions.
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