1. Name the Beast – The first step in tackling any obsession: Identify the thought. What is my fear? What is my doubt? Describe it in one sentence, or in a few words. Name the fear: “I am afraid that if my co-workers find out that I was hospitalized with severe depression that they won’t respect me anymore, and they won’t assign me any projects.” There it is. There’s the beast. You named it, and by doing so, you can rob it of some of its power over you.
2. Find the Distortion – Once you have named the fear or doubt, try to see if you can file it under any of the forms of distorted thinking that Dr. David Burns describes in his bestseller “Feeling Good,” like all-or-nothing thinking, jumping to conclusions, magnification (exaggeration), or discounting the positive (ie “None of my accomplishments count”). Your obsession almost always involves at least three forms of distorted thoughts. So consider Burns’ ten ways of untwisting distorted thinking to help me to undermine my obsession.
3. Pencil It In – Simply tell yourself, “Sorry, it’s not time for that. You’ll have to wait until 8 in the evening, when I give you, My Head, 15 minutes to obsess your heart out.” Record in your journal everything you are dwelling on for 20 minutes every night: that you are a horrible mom, an inadequate writer, that no one likes you, and so on.
4. Laugh at It – Laughter can make almost any situation tolerable. And you have to admit, there is something a little funny about a broken record in your brain.
5. Snap Out of It – Literally snap out of it. Wear a rubber band around your wrist, and every time your thoughts turn to an obsession, snap the band as a reminder. Or, write your obsession on a piece of paper, then crinkle it up and throw it away. That way you have literally thrown out your obsession. Or you could try visualizing a stop sign. When your thoughts go there, remember to stop! Look at the sign!
6. Pull Over – One of the most helpful visualizations is to imagine that you are driving a car. Every time your thoughts revert back to an obsession, pull over on the shoulder, because your car is misaligned. It’s dragging right. Once you’ve stopped, ask myself: “Do I need to change anything?” Can I change anything? Can I amend this situation somehow? Do I have anything I need to do to find peace? Spend a minute asking the questions. Then, if you don’t have anything to fix, it’s time to get your car back on the road again. This is basically a visualization of the Serenity Prayer. Try to decipher between what you can’t change and what you can. Once you have made the distinction, it’s time to start driving again.
7. Learn the Lesson – We often obsess about our mistakes. I know I messed up, and I’m beating myself over and over again for not doing it right the first time, especially when I have involved other people and hurt them unintentionally. If that’s the case, ask yourself: What is the lesson here? What have I learned? Just like the first step – naming the obsession – describe the lesson in one sentence or less.
8. Forgive Yourself – After you take away the lesson, you have to forgive yourself. This is a hard one. Especially for perfectionists. And guess what? Perfectionists are natural ruminators. Julia Cameron writes about this in “The Artist’s Way:” “Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead. It is a loop – an obsessive, debilitating closed system that causes you to get stuck in the details of what you are writing or painting or making and to lose sight of the whole. Instead of creating freely and allowing errors to reveal themselves later as insights, we often get mired in getting the details right. We correct our originality into a uniformity that lacks passion and spontaneity.” Forgiving yourself means concentrating on the insights gained from mistakes, and to let go of the rest.
9. Imagine the Worst – Imagining the worst can actually relieve the fear that’s triggering an obsession.
10. Put It on Hold – Sometimes we start to obsess about a situation for which we don’t have enough information. So it’s useless to worry. Therefore put your obsession “on hold,” like it was a pretty lavender dress at a boutique that you saw and wanted but didn’t have enough money to buy. So it’s there, waiting, when you get enough money – or enough data.
11. Dig for the Cause – So often the object of the obsession isn’t the real issue. That object or person or situation is masking the deeper issue we’re too afraid to face.
12. Reel It In – We all know how fast obsessions can take on a life of their own. A slight hitch in a project becomes a massive hurdle, a friendly gesture by a friend turns ugly and threatening, and a minor criticism from a colleague turns into a 150-page dissertation about your flaws and inadequacies – you know, everything that’s bad about you and why you shouldn’t get out of bed in the morning. Granted, buried within any obsession are usually pieces of truth. But other parts are way off in fantasyland – with about as much accuracy as there is in a juicy celebrity tabloid story: “Celine Dion meets ET for drinks.” That’s why you need some good friends that will help you separate fact from fiction.
13. Interrupt the Conversation – Here’s where a bad habit can come in handy. Are you always interrupting people? Can’t help it? You get curious about a detail in someone’s story, and you want to hear more about that, not the end of the story? That’s how an obsession works in your brain – like a conversation over coffee: “This is why he hates me, and this, too, is why he hates me, and did I mention why he hates me? I’m sure he hates me.” Practice some of your rude manners and interrupt. You don’t even have to say, “Excuse me.” Ask yourself a question or throw out another topic. By doing so, you catch the snowball as it’s accumulating matter, and you throw it back with momentum because, as most of us learned in physics, a body in motion stays in motion. Now your internal conversation goes something like: “These are the reasons he should like me, and this, too, is why he should like me, and did I mention that he probably likes me? I’m sure he likes me.”
14. Stay in the Present – When you are grounded in the moment, you’re not thinking of what bad things can happen to you in the future, or dwelling on the mistakes of your past. To get yourself into the present, start with your senses. Try to hear only the noises that surround tiy – cars, birds, dogs barking, church bells – because if you give yourself the assignment of listening to the actual sounds around you, you can’t obsess on a fear. Likewise, concentrate on seeing what’s in front of you. At the very moment. Not in the year 2034.
15. Give it Back to God – The last step is surrender, as usual. “Okay, God, I give up! Take the bloody obsession from me!” It’s acknowledging that the last 14 steps haven’t gotten you where you need to be, and so you don’t know what else to do but give your ruminating mind to God and let him deal with it. Obsessions are almost always rooted in our attachments. So if we can think of them as borrowed from God – that God alone is the owner of this thing about which we are obsessing – we tend to become less greedy and possessive with our gifts, material and otherwise. In this way, we are mere stewards of whatever God has graciously given us.
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