I think back to an event in a drive-in movie in Newark, New Jersey. Intoxicated with the light soap fragrance of my date. An indelible memory yet at 78.
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
I parked and set the window speaker and I felt it coming. The urge to explain to my psychiatrist. The overwhelming urge to explain. Feeling drained from me.
I could not carry on the simplest conversation. My attention imploded unto itself. I lost all interest in what was happening around me. Unable to escape the desperate thoughts that already filled notebooks stuffed in dresser drawers. The sickening urge to write them down, to explain to my psychiatrist.
No notebook, so I took a pen from the glove compartment and went to the men’s room, writing delicately as possible on sheets of toilet paper so as not to tear them. The floodgate opened. When I returned to the car the movie was almost over. The girl asked me to take her home and I did. But I absent-mindedly pulled out with the speaker still in the window, cracking open the driver side window of my father’s late 1940’s Chevy, that he lovingly called Bessie.
It’s All About Attention
Live Life Now
I would counsel obsessed-teen-me with Metacognitive Therapy (MCT). This involves living with a kind of cognitive dissonance, ie, accepting the overpowering need to explain his thoughts, but rather than focusing on his thoughts, focusing on the obsessive patterns of thoughts like the need to explain.
I would teach
him Open Focus, to practice shifting focus from his narrow obsessions to a wider, softer ambience.
You cannot control, chase away, or suppress thoughts. Trying to makes the thoughts even more obsessive.
But you can direct your focus and attention. When you learn to focus on the space around things, you shift from faster beta brain waves to a relaxed alpha wave pattern. With practice this shift becomes instantaneous.
I would teach him Attention Training Therapy (ATT) so he could learn to shift among sounds, including the sound of the voice in his head. He would practice with two to five sounds, sometimes focusing on two, three, all at once or focusing on just one of the several competing sounds.
Metacognitive Therapy
Attention Training Therapy is a part of Metacognitive Therapy, a form of Mindful Meditation. Mindfulness takes willpower and a benefit of mindfulness is that it builds willpower in all areas of life. We can use willpower to pay attention to the quality of the mind without becoming blinded by the things we are concerned about.
Not to focus on “what” he needs to explain, but on the obsessive patterns of thinking like the need to explain. He can step back and look at the mind. Then he can see the problem is not what he needs to explain, but his incessant need to explain. By stepping back and becoming an observer, he takes in a wider sense of awareness and perspective.
He would treat thoughts like passing clouds, allowing them come and go nonjudgmentally without clinging.
Any feeling, thought, or emotion, negative, positive, even violent is okay. Allow it “to be.” Step back from dialogues, from deliberations and concerns over past and future events, from thoughts, feelings and urges. Move from a narrow straight-jacket perception of self and the world to an open-mode perception with the potential for revaluing and growth.
Open Focus Training, Attention Training Therapies, Metacognitive Therapy (MTC), Mindful Meditation, and Ki Breathing are a core strategies in Total Self-Renewal Through Attention Therapies and Open Focus.
Live Life Now
Mainly, I would counsel him to get on with his life. In the car with his date at the drive-in, focus on the girl next to him. Don’t try to control the urge to explain and don’t focus on it. Live life in the moment, now, not explain it away to a psychiatrist.
And I would tell him I love him, because he had never been told that before. And he needed to feel loved and love himself in order to love.
“If monkeys have taught us anything,” Harry Harlow asserted in reflecting on his experiments, “it’s that you’ve got to learn how to love before you learn how to live.”
To that I say, Amen & Amen!
Self-help books that help:
Total Self-Renewal through Attention Therapies and Open Focus
The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body
