Maybe you haven’t met Jonathan Grayson in person, and maybe you haven’t read his book—yet. But if you’ve been to the International OCD Conference, you’ve probably seen him leading a huge group of people through the hotel lobby, armed with a bullhorn. Ask a random sampling of these people what their favorite part of the conference was, and they’re likely to say it was this Grayson-led adventure, the mini-version of an OCD camping trip where people take a couple of hours out of their long weekend to face some of their biggest fears.
Of course, as an OCD therapist Dr. Grayson guides people through their biggest fears all year-round, not just once a year at the OCD conference. I’m so honored to share some of his insights here, and I hope you’ll find his advice helpful.
When did you decide to treat OCD specifically? Did you know while you were still in school, or did you decide after you’d been in practice?
The short answer is that I’m working with OCD because I wasn’t able to control my life when I wanted to. Before elaborating, let me give you some background. Before I had ever heard of OCD, in high school, the inherent uncertainty of reality fascinated me. I went through a long period of aggravating almost anyone who spoke to me by ending almost every statement with, “more or less.” “More or less what?” they would question, to which I’d respond, “If it’s more or less, does it matter?” For my college honors thesis, my supervisor commented, “You’ve picked a very ambiguous area as your focus—that’s just like you.”
My circuitous path to OCD began with graduate school. Using the shotgun method of applying (apply to as many schools as you can afford and maybe you’ll have a hit), I had applied to all of the schools that attracted me and was looking for a safety school. With typical East Coast bias, I settled upon the University of Iowa—what could possibly be in the middle of Iowa? Upon getting in, I discovered Iowa was a good school and that’s where I chose to go. If I had known it was good school, I wouldn’t have applied. Going to UI and working primarily with Dr. Tom Borkovec, who is well known in CBT circles, led to me getting an internship at Brown, where I worked with my first OCD patient. This still wasn’t the beginning, the deciding point, of devoting myself to OCD. On my internship, we were allowed to choose our rotations, though all rotations had to be filled. The one rotation I did not want, was the intensive alcohol dependence rotation. I got stuck with it. The basis of the GOAL groups, which played a significant role in my early reputation, came from that rotation. Finally, when looking for a first job, my wife and I decided to stay on the East Coast, but I didn’t want to go back to Philadelphia. The only job I could find was working with Edna Foa on her first OCD grant. At that time, we were the only OCD center in the country and her research on exposure and response prevention (ERP) is the foundation of all treatment today. So my devotion to working with OCD began in 1979 working at Temple University with Dr. Foa. So there were three critical occasions in which had I had control, I would have made decisions that would not lead to my present life. I like to think the alternative life would have been good—maybe or maybe not, I’ll never know. I do know I like this reality and feel so lucky to have a passion for my work. The takeaway: You may not get what you choose in the short run and the path to success is moving forward with whatever happens. Alternative realities/fantasies are perfect, but they because they aren’t real.
Not only is your book Freedom from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder: A Personalized Recovery Program for Living with Uncertainty well rated and well reviewed, it also won the Self Help Book of Merit Award from the Association of Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies. That’s quite an honor! Where did you get the idea for the book?
Thank you for the compliments. It is my heart and soul. I kind of wanted to write a book; I’m opinionated enough to feel and hope that I had something different to offer. However, it wasn’t until I was lucky enough to be approached by an agent about writing a book that it became real. The agent asked if could I write a self-help book about OCD that could be about 300 to 400 pages long. I had just completed a 25-page document for the OCD Foundation that I felt contained everything I knew about OCD. So, of course, I said yes. I had three goals in writing my book. I wanted to help people understand all of the ins and outs of OCD in a way that made sense. To say, for example, OCD is a neurobiological problem that is related to serotonin availability in the brain may be an explanation, but it is not something that helps the sufferer to understand the experience. I believe that treatment works much better if the sufferer has an explanation that makes both logical and emotional sense; that is, the logic of the explanation should be accompanied by an exclamation of “That’s me!” Freedom from OCD is written exactly the way I speak to sufferers—without the uhs and ums—in hopes it would make sense to sufferers and to give professionals the language to use. The second goal of the book has to do with the twofold problem all self-help books have: Will the reader follow the program outlined in the book and is the program actually doable (and individualized so that it isn’t a mechanical manual)? Hopefully the program I outlined achieved that. As to the original question, where did I get the idea for the book, it was simply the sum of my work with OCD. I often joke that I only know about 40 minutes of material that is not already in the book.
It’s incredible how much progress has been made in understanding OCD in recent decades. You started the first OCD support group in 1981. Are you surprised by how much awareness has grown since then? What do you attribute it to?
I’m afraid I disagree with the premise of the question. The core of treatment is still the same as what we were doing in the early ’80s; although, it is true we have found a number of ways to augment and facilitate treatment through the use of ideas from acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) and mindfulness. However, all too often I also see these same techniques and others used incorrectly. In ’80s, I assumed that by the ’90s OCD treatment would be easy to find and available everywhere, that I would be good for supervision, but not part of a small therapy community. Tragically, I still see people who suffer unnecessarily for years, not because they have OCD, but because of therapists who don’t know what they are doing. In their treatment guidelines for OCD, both the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association agree that ERP is the first line treatment for OCD. There are virtually no OCD experts who disagree, whether their prime focus is upon the psychology or biology of OCD. And yet, it is still hard to find providers who know how to treat OCD, even in major cities. Unfortunately, we have discovered that it is easier to help someone suffering from OCD than it is to change the behavior of mental health professionals.
I know many people who’d love to start a support group but aren’t sure how to go about it, and they may think they need to be therapists or “perfectly” recovered in order to be effective. Do you have any words of encouragement or advice?
The most difficult part of starting a support group are the initial logistics of where to hold the group and how to let the public know that it is available. I don’t think a therapist or “perfectly” recovered person has to run the group for it to be effective. My personal preference is therapist-assisted, meaning the sufferers run the meeting, but a therapist is there to troubleshoot; however, that is my preference, not a rule. The main quality required of the organizer(s) is dedication. There is a GOAL (Giving Obsessive-Compulsives Another Lifestyle) manual available to help people start and run a group. The manual is available in three places: It is included in Freedom from OCD, or it can be downloaded for free from the International OCD Foundation or from FreedomFromOCD.com.
What do you see as the most common misconception about OCD?
I think there are one and a half conceptions. The half is that most non-sufferers don’t realize that the core of almost all OCD problems is intolerance of uncertainty in the sufferer’s problem area—or to put it another way, in the sufferer’s problem area, there is an attempt to be 100% certain, e.g., I want to be 100% sure I’m clean, 100% sure I’m not gay (or straight), 100% sure I didn’t run someone over, and so on. There are two problems with this. First, research has shown us that the only people who are 100% certain are stupid. Since most people with OCD have above average intelligence, we won’t be able to help them be certain. The second problem with certainty is that it is not a fact, but an emotion like anger, joy, and sadness. We may be able to decide how to express an emotion, but not whether or not to have it. Certainty is an emotion that correlates with reality, but not perfectly. Most of the time, my feeling of certainty—terrorists aren’t waiting for me outside of my office; my car isn’t stolen; my wife is alive—turn out to be true. But that doesn’t mean the feeling reflects truth. In this country, I assume that most people on their wedding day feel certain they will be with their new spouse forever. Half of them will be wrong. Certainty is a nice feeling, but it doesn’t mean that you are holding onto a truth.
Failure to recognize intolerance of uncertainty is the half a misconception. The other misconception is the failure of non-sufferers to recognize the agony of having OCD. The reason for this is indirectly the fault of sufferers. For the most part, people with OCD are experts at hiding their symptoms and if they talk about their symptoms, they sound calm. We have a name for this ability: Competence, the ability to function when stressed as if everything is okay. It is a great skill and I don’t want anyone to get rid of this skill. I do want to help people to not have to rely on it as often as they do. The plus side of the skill is that it allows people to keep functioning and to hold onto careers. The downside is that non-sufferers assume that there is no pain to OCD, that you just do those “weird” things.
My psychiatrist once told me that since many doctors don’t understand what OCD really is, they’d sometimes refer patients who didn’t have an issue with OCD at all. He’d have to tell new patients that they didn’t have OCD, they were just really neat. Have you ever had to “undiagnose” someone with OCD?
I’m afraid the opposite is true. I regularly see OCD sufferers who were told that they didn’t have OCD, because they don’t check or wash their hands. Horribly and amazingly, these practitioners know nothing about pure O and other variations of OCD.
You run an annual OCD camping trip. Tell us about it. Why should someone with OCD attend, and what can they expect?
This question could consume more than a few pages. It has been a few years since I’ve run the weekend camping trip. Every year, at the International OCD Foundation’s conference, I do a mini-version of the trip in which I take 200 to 300 people through whatever city we are in to do exposure. It is hard to describe the magic. Imagine if I asked you to tell me about your favorite movie in five sentences. I might have an idea of the plot, but wouldn’t really be able to have an emotional feel for it. So let me just say that it is magic. People willingly do things they would never believe possible for themselves, everyone is sharing an intense camaraderie and having fun, and, although no one is likely to be cured in two hours, I have seen many people make a small permanent gain that carries over to the next year’s trip.
If you could give just one piece of advice to someone with OCD, what would it be?
Asking someone like me to give just one piece of advice may be the hardest challenge ever. The most important thing to remember about overcoming and coping with OCD is that the goal is living with uncertainty. It is a scary goal, because it means anything can happen. But it is a condition of humanity that we all live with, even sufferers. In the areas of your lives that are unaffected by OCD, you behave like everyone else. I assume almost everyone reading this does not want to be maimed, paralyzed, and disfigured. Despite this, you get into cars, cabs, and buses where some idiot might ram into you and leave you in a mess. And if this isn’t your problem, you cope with it the “normal” way: You hope you don’t have an accident and your plan is to not cope with it until you’re being crushed under the metal of a crash. Coping with uncertainty means being determined to cope with any outcome, no matter how horrific. Suicide is not an option. Some of you may believe you have situations too horrible to contemplate. Rather than go over them here, let me assure you, we have discussed them all and how to cope with all possibilities. If you doubt me, talk to an OCD expert or read my book. Why would I want to risk living with every possible uncertainty and every possible horrific outcome? Because there is no other choice that will allow joy in your life. In the end, the past is made of nice memories, the future of hopes, and the present is all we really have. We make plans for tomorrow just in case we survive. The result of learning to live with uncertainty is learning to have the joy of the present instead of missing that because you are in OCD land.
Alison Dotson 