#1 Compulsion to please
Sana, as an executive training head, was very popular among friends. She would be the first one to organize parties, had exceptional talent at mimicry, would entertain everyone, and be the first one to take your mug to the sink when you had coffee with her. She was well accepted by her friends and colleagues but she could never understand why she was dumped in all her relationships. She was loved, but not accepted.
Broken and tired of rejecting and being dumped by friends, boyfriends, and at the workplace, she was clueless about where did she go wrong, till she attended the Chetna workshop to discover that she was obsessed with seeking attention and being accepted. Her pleasing behaviour was her compulsion, to feel needed and accepted. However, she was always thrown back to her lack of rejection which had become her obsession to remove the same through compulsive behaviour.
#2 Obsession with love
Ahilya had a different story. She was obsessed with love even when in love and a relationship. She had the belief that she would be abandoned at some point in time. So she continued to stay obsessed in her search for love while in a relationship rather than absorbing and experiencing the love that was given to her. This made her go all out to compromise at anything to somehow remain in the relationship. She would not voice her desires and would lose all her worthiness just to stay in the relationship which was in no real danger of being lost.
She was trying hard not to get wet while walking in the rain. Her belief had become her obsession and she would erode her worthiness and be a slave in the relationship to hang on to the relationship even when it would become abusive. Her obsession to search for love and her compulsive behaviour to be at mercy to be accepted became a pattern that would manifest for her from one relationship to another.
#3 Compulsion to be perfect
Then there is Ulupi, an award-winning short film director, who was so obsessed with her unworthiness and hopelessness due to some failure in one relationship in the past that when she was recognized by this new company for her talent, she would get nervous even when she was recognized and trusted to handle multiple jobs. So obsessed was she, with the thought of being a failure, and her unworthiness that she would spend hours thinking about how to be perfect at the job and would lose out on prioritizing the jobs.
Her belief became her obsession and she remained compulsive in trying to produce the perfect shot over and over to prove her worth and miss out on completing the other work. She became good at shooting a dead man and sitting there to ensure he is dead.
#4 Obsession with the process of creating
Pavel was more classical than any one of them. As a serial entrepreneur and researcher, he would always get frustrated when whatever he had brought up beautifully, needed to be concluded to move to the next level. He would lose all his nerve and begin to find fault in what was created, secretly, trying to kill his creation and start dreaming of designing a better product than before. This led to a series of failures, but he would get up and build again. He took pride in being a seasoned professional.
Frustrated with the pattern, when he attended the Curedemy’s Chetna program, he discovered he is obsessed with the process of creating. When the creation got completed, he would feel abandoned, unloved, and empty. He had the fear of being left out. He found that he sought love and appreciation by beautifully creating something which probably no one else was able to do. This made him feel special in his own eyes.
These are some of the common examples of our students (names have been changed to ensure privacy), who enrolled for Curedemy’s courses and through the courseware, they could decode their patterns and discover their hidden OCD. We all have hidden OCD.
OCD – hidden or visible has at its root, a frequency of suspicion. It comes from a lack of trust, or more precisely from a breach of trust. The most common reasons, among all the cases of hidden and visible OCD, is a child growing up in a disturbed family, watching parents fighting with each other, feeling neglected in childhood, growing up away from the family, breaches the trust of a child and series of such episodes leads to the child beginning to suspect self in every aspect of life in his growing years.
OCD has two parts, Obsession, and Compulsion. We are obsessed with what we intrinsically feel we lack and compulsion is just an attempt of our mind to fill that lack.
You must have seen yourself being obsessed with money seeking extra value in every deal – be it buying vegetables or holiday packages, people seeking extra attention or extra value out of their visit to a restaurant. On the surface, it seems we are smart and extracting value for money and not getting fooled, but at the bottom of it, it is the obsession to seek love, and subconsciously demand from people that makes one feel extra special. Love me more than you love others. Treat me better. Where is it coming from?
A lack of love from the mother and the lack of appreciation from the father is the root of OCD.
