I’m no Ph.D. Don’t have my master’s yet, but I have definetly noticed a change in myself. I don’t know how this will vibe with the OCD, but I definitely believe that my life experiences and my OCD are linked.

Over the past three years, I went on the most impossible, horrible mining  excursion– within myself. I had never really liked myself, and I felt aweful in a roomful of people. Unworthy, poisonous, invaluable. You wouldn’t know it– I hid it well. People whom intimidated me came up to me and said that I intimidated them! THe truth was, I just wasn’t okay with myself. I didn’t believe my experience, nor what I got from it, was worth anything, and I thought it was all my fault.

It all started off when I dated a guy who is nearly a dead ringer, emotionally, for my father. I was unusually obsessed with my worth in his eyes (I hid this, but just came off as uncomfortable), and when he dumped me, I blamed myself completely. That broke my own heart. I just couldn’t live with that. Did my OCD just chase somebody away because they could sense how fast my brain was moving?

What I didn’t get was that–I shouldn’t be with somebody who frightens me into an OCD episode at ALL! There is nothing wrong with the guy–he is a rigid personality and rather unaware of his emotional body, and I am ALL about emotions, baby, so it would never work out. But I had to sleuth out why I kept choosing people who made me feel like I would never stack up, or like they wanted me as a mother.

Psychologists say all the time that we choose people who mirror our parents. "Hell no. I’ll never be like them. I’ll never date somebody like them," we all say. Oh yeah?

Deeply ingrained in our very psyche, where the invisible foundation of how we view all archetypes, is the influence of our parents. Remember being a little kid? Really go there. Really think about it. Remember how you thought that your parents basically got their instructions from God? That they knew EVERYTHING…but you didn’t know how. Jung talks about this in his essays on the embodiment of the masculine divine.

So what did you do, as a kid? You naturally wanted to be like them, since they had all that knowledge. They were grown up and knew how to live. I mean look! There they were! Alive right infront of you and raising you! ANd they knew if you were bad, and they knew if you were good, and you listened to their judgements on you and the world because THEY KNEW IT ALL!

Unfortunately, the reality was, they didn’t know it all. THey may have been the most screwed up people on the earth, but they were yours. You watched them from the earliest days and decided that THIS was how a man acted. This is how a woman acts. This is how a man treats a woman. This is how a woman reacts to a man, etc. Depending on gender, you try to live up to that role. You associate with it.

And you act somewhat like your parent. How they handle problems is SO grownup to you that you emulate them. It’s cool! I remember my friend pretending to get drunk and say, "I just can’t deal with him. I just can’t deal with my boyfriend," when we were playing dress up at age 9 or so. To her, that was grown-up. To me, that was really unstable.

What’s funny is your parents hardly realize who they are, themselves. They don’t really have an outside view to how they act. So when you act like them or react to them, sometimes they see it as no fault as their own. They don’t recognize themselves in you. So maybe they punish you or invalidate you. I kknow that for me, I was seriously confused. I was trying to get to that know-everything state of adulthood by emulating them, but I was getting in trouble. I figured I could A. just never do it right, or B. Only I was not allowed to grow up and have rights and a self. Or A caused B. I didn’t know that my parents, besides being too young, lazy, and selfish (they should not have had kids. They really didn’t want them. It wasn’t fun for them). And maybe they were failures as parents. Okay. That’s not really my problem, and I get angry, but i forgive them all the time because i no longer want them to have a hold on me.

OCD can come along in situations where the childhood was unstable and frightening. Don’t assume that just because your parents weren’t alcoholic or abusive that maybe there wasn’t some emotional abuse going on. Hey, fine. THat’s okay. But now you get to find where it was and FIX IT! I know I personally feel angry, sometimes, that I have so much crap to clean up after those two, but it is now MY life, and it is WAY more fun this way. I have WAAAAY more hope and excitement about life than they ever did.

Your parents are your survival when you are little. Your alpha and omega. You know that you cannot survive without them. It’s in every cell of your body that you feel this. Not your brain. Without them, you would die. So if you sense that they don’t want you, or that they can’t take care of you, many times, as a child, you think it’s your fault. Kids are egocentric. It’s a survival technique. It’s well known in basic psychology that security and safety are absolutely necessary in order to move on to higher pursuits. Third world nations have many poor and troubled people who cannot move into spiritual healing and advancement because they are focused on survival. If all you can do is think of how to survive, it can mess with you. Especially if you are a child.

I sensed, in the womb (I was shocked when I had this memory because I didn’t think it was possible. Well paint me blue and call me an ice cube!) that my parents didn’t really want me. From the VERY beginning of life, I KNEW in my very being that I would have to fight for my survival. I had hoped that they would come to love me, that they wouldn’t be able to help it, since I was their child. But they never did shape up as parents during the formative years. I believed it was because I wasn’t worth it. I didn’t know they were messed up. Deep inside, those beliefs remained with me into adulthood as my very premise for how life is. I didn’t even know i felt that way.

In the energy body, such as  is recoreded in Hindu belief and Eastern paradigms, there are seven major chakras in the body. THey are energy digesting and integrating points, and they are 100% real. They are energy, so not everyone can see them, but if you become very attuned to subtle energy, you can definitely feel their effects.

Each Chakra relates to certain developmental aspects of life, certain ways of  integrating energy, certain body parts, etc. The root chakra, the lowest chakra in the body, is the first one to develop. This chakra roots you to the earth, helps you rid yourself of negative energy, and, very importantly, when it is working, lends to your feelings of security and safety. If this chakra is disturbed in its growth and you don’t ever feel safe or secure, you may try to ground through other chakras. That’s not effective and can cause a lot of emotional and phhysical pain. FOr instance, I know a gal whose first chakra seems to be on lockdown. She grounds through her 2nd chakra, which is the sexual and relationship others chakra (among other things). She is not good at taking care of herself and relies on other people to give her places to live, to pay her under the table for jobs, to basically supply her food and housing. She is never without a boyfriend, and often, when with one, she doesn’t work.Although she wants a home and security, she has not found the will to provide that for herself. She is a dazzling woman who is very good at reciprocity and sharing, but she is fragile as well, and cannot handle opposing views of her actions. She came from one helluva messed up family that provided little security. She was sexually abused, and as a kid–remember, adults get their instructions from God or somewhere high up, so her sexual qualities became what worked for her.

Or some people get OCD. AN energy reading on my revealed that my OCD represented stability, an I-beam to hold up the roof. I didn’t have a secure youth, so I created this extreme control issue to help me to cope. I didn’t like it anymore, so I embarked on the journey to heal it.

Lots of energy work, help from healers, counselors and friends helped me to realize that I needed to walk into my memories of being a child, and, as an adult, intervene with the people who let me down. I had to become my own parent. This made me feel safe. I realized that ALL that I need to survive, at least on a soul level, is within me. I can provide myself with everythign that I need. But for years, I confused Need with Want. Wanting approval? No, I thought I needed it. Until I figured out that I had the connection to higher energies within myself, and that I know me best. Other people cannot possibly make the best judgements about me when they have their own shit-colored glasses on. Our bodies protect our souls. Nobody can take anything from you. Nothing.THey never could. It’s all there. You just have to wake it up.

Two final realizations among the many that came with my mining project (three years, y’all. Get ready to commit).

1. I have always felt poisonous. Apparantly, that is a common feeling from OCD, that you may inadvertently hurt someone just by being around them. I definitely got that vibe as a kid. In fact, nobody supplied me with help around the OCD issue until at age 14, I went on my own to find a school counselor who finally spoke up on my behalf. I had asked for help before only to be told to Grow Up. The OCD pissed off my family. They would tell me to go away, to stop bothering them, and once, a priest I thought I’d talk to asked me if I was on drugs. (I am no longer part of any religion).

Recently, somebody acknowledged things in me that I had been waiting my WHOLE life to hear. It was the most soothing, amazing incident for me. I felt my sould CRY with relief and joy when a friend finally said to me that they could see my compassion, my gifts, etcetera. For the first time, I felt like a good person.

I had always focused on my negative qualities because I really wanted to get rid of them, and I wanted to warn people that I could hurt them. That because I felt anger or jealousy sometims, that I could be an evil person.

EMOTIONS ARE INDICATORS! USE THEM! DOn’t judge them. They are trying to tell you when your boundaries are crossed, when someone is in your territory, when it’s time to move on, etc. They don’t make you bad. We tend to act on them when we deny them, or move into consistent guilt. Figure out why you feel the way you do. And without judgement or blame (you don’t have anything to feel defensive about. Nor to judge others on) simply try to rectify it.

This means accepting people as they are. We are all human. THE PREREQUISITE FOR BEING HUMAN IS MAKING MISTAKES. THat means we allllll do them. So step back, remember your boundaries, and without blaming somebody who might be overstepping their own boundaries, let them know! It’s a friend thing, really, allowing a person to know where the line is. It’s good for them to have that information about you, and about themselves. Overstepping a boundary is usually an accident or is caused by some kneejerk reaction from our childhood. So be forgiving of yourself and others and just accept people as they are. Watch them, observe them, enjoy them, don’t judge them, and see them with the eyes of your higher qualities. THey will make you laugh, smile, and be really happy to know them. And with the acceptance of yourself and others, and the realization of your compassion and higher qualities, you will naturally feel less jealousy, less judgement.

2. Boundaries are important. HUGELY important. Healthy boundaries are strong yet flexible. You know when you can bend them, but feel safe in knowing that you are there for yourself and can bend them back. Emotions will help you know these things.

Boundaries help you sort out what is YOUR crap, and what is really OTHER people’s crap. Are you projecting your BS onto other people because you are angry about life? With healthy boundaries, you KNOW that you do that. You OWN your reactions. You maybe let those close to you know that you tend to do that, and you stop making it their fault. This also allows you the room to work on the problem.

THen you start to see that, because you want your own room and time to work on your problems, that others probably need theirs. They make take longer, but with your boundaries in place, you’ll be able to react naturally to them. We help each other figure out how to treat one another, and gentle mirroring that reflects the dynamics of give and take between two people can be a very rewarding process. And many people may take you wrong, by the way, because not everyone has good boundaries or self knowledge. DOn’t assume, tho. Have the highest, most positive intent you can, and be compassionate (not arrogant) because you have been there yourself, and the natural state of the world IS somewhat sleepy.

These things have made my life so much more easier to live. THey have given me goals I wish to achieve, and have made me steadier within myself. I know that I can take care of me. I have been surrounded by people who don’t believe in me for so long that, although it can get me down at times, I know that I KNOW MYSELF BETTER THAN ANYONE, and if they can’t believe in me, that is their OWN pain they have to live with.

OCD has worked, I guess, in stabilizing me in a very unstable way. But only by becoming the parent I always wished I had am I healing.

Good luck to everyone. Namaste!