Free Brain Lock: Free Yourself From Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior by Jeffrey M. Schwartz, Beverly Beyette Page A

over and over again in his head. But his most bizarre compulsion—one with which he still struggles—began in fifth grade. “I would be sitting in class and suddenly I would feel my pants were too tight.” He was unhappy in school, partly because his OCD made it difficult for him to concentrate, and he now wonders if this feeling of creeping pants was some sort of subconscious distraction technique.
    Although Michael has overcome most of his other obsessions, he says his OCD “seems determined to dig in for all it’s worth and win the final battle,” the battle of the too-tight pants. Or, as Michael somewhat inelegantly puts it, the fear that “my jockey shorts are going up my butt and are going to come through my mouth, they’re shrinking so much.” Before behavior therapy, he would sometimes shed his clothes in an attempt to shed the feeling. Now, he realizes that giving in to a ridiculous thought is the worst thing he could do.
    Michael finally overcame his obsession about pesticide contamination, an obsession so severe that “just seeing a can of Raid at the supermarket” traumatized him. “If I’d put my things down for the cashier and somebody ahead of me had a can of Raid, I’d have to take all my food, everything, and put it back on the shelves and restock my basket. I thought everything had been contaminated. Of course, I’d have to go to a different checker because I didn’t know if the conveyor belt was contaminated. Sometimes it would take so long that I would just have to forget about getting food.” If Michael saw an exterminator’s truck on the road, he would have to go home, wash his clothes, and shower. Always, he says, “I felt like this shroud of poison was kind of draped over me.”
    The moment of truth came when he was informed that the apartment house where he was living had been sold and the building was to be tented for termite treatment. Michael panicked. Should he protest at city hall? Get a psychiatrist’s note saying that the exterminators couldn’t be allowed in because he was mentally ill? Then he got hold of himself. “I thought, ‘Wait a minute. Just let them do it because maybe I’ll get better.’ I had resolved that this had to be done and that I wasn’t going to die. This was a really big thing for me.” One moment of clarity, after twenty years of suffering from this obsession. The work of using mindful awareness to know whatobsessions really are began to pay off for him in a big way. Michael then went one step further. When the exterminator came, Michael asked him for his business card. He took to carrying the card around as a reminder that he wasn’t going to die. By purposely exposing himself to what once had terrified him, he knew he was making himself better.
    Through practicing the Four Steps, Michael has learned to think of OCD as “this bad guy in my brain that can’t fool me anymore. I know I’m not going to die from pesticides. I know I can touch a table twice without touching it a third time” and nothing disastrous is going to happen. But those creeping pants still nag at him. “That’s part of my body. They’re on my skin. They’re there all the time, something I can’t escape.” Although Michael still has a modest amount of residual OCD, he’s well aware of the tremendous amount of improvement he’s made and of how much he has increased his ability to function.
    In the battle against OCD, he has learned, “You just do anything you can to sabotage yourself. It takes incredible drive, total effort, to resist it. It’s just intense pain, as bad as any physical pain.” He has learned, too, that robotlike performance of the Four Steps, without mindful awareness, does not work. This is Michael’s description of himself locked in combat with his OCD, practicing self-directed exposure therapy: “You’re thinking, ‘Well, if I touch this, my father’s going to die, but I’m going to do it anyway.’ So you touch it and you still feel