A lot of the time, people will ask us, “What was it that eventually made you take the leap? What was it that finally convinced you that this is what you needed to do, that this is what OCD is about, or that this is what recovery looks like? What eventually made you face your fears? What finally made you break through the chains of demotivation, anxiety, and guilt?”
And when people ask that question, I think they’re often looking for a very specific kind of answer. They think that if we can give them the exact thing that finally clicked for us, maybe that same thing will help them break through their own chains.
But it doesn’t really work like that.
It can be very different for each person because everyone has different motivations. And it’s not necessarily one single motivation either. It’s actually a synthesis of different motivations that build up over time and eventually contribute to a series mini-breakthroughs.
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So, what were some of my motivations?
One of them was observing the adults in my life and seeing the mistakes and patterns they had been stuck in for many, many years, and seeing how frustrated or unhappy they could become about certain aspects of their lives. Not that they were unhappy people. They weren’t. But there were specific things in their lives that they were deeply unhappy or frustrated about. And as someone who was the youngest person in the house, with three older siblings and pretty much everyone else around me – cousins, aunts, uncles – being older than me, there was a lot for me to observe.
I had the opportunity to watch how different stories in my family played out over the years. I could see the long-lasting effects of situations that had happened many years earlier, old dynamics that were still ongoing, and old mistakes that were sometimes being repeated. And somewhere in the back of my mind, all of those observations were accumulating.
It wasn’t a conscious, sentence-by-sentence thought where I was saying to myself, “Okay, this is what my family has gone through. These are the mistakes they’ve made, and I’m going to make sure I never make those same mistakes.” It wasn’t like that. It was lots of small observations that gradually poured into each other and eventually formed a kind of synthesis that contributed to my breakthrough.
(Sometimes people imagine that whatever eventually helped us break through the chains of OCD was some kind of coherent piece of wisdom that suddenly clicked in our minds and changed everything.)
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Another motivation was that I had certain passions, dreams, and interests that I wanted to explore and try to achieve. Not that I was guaranteed to achieve them. I knew that. But I wanted to at least give myself a good shot at doing those things.
Then there were my family and friendship dynamics, which were being badly affected by my OCD. My demotivation, depression, guilt, people-pleasing, avoidance – all of these things were influencing how I behaved in my relationships. And I could see that the people around me were becoming increasingly unhappy and frustrated with me. Sometimes they didn’t say it, and sometimes they did. But I could see that there were problems developing in those relationships and friendships, and I didn’t want to keep perpetuating that.
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Actually, when I look back at my initial foray into mental health in general, I’m very glad that my approach wasn’t, “I want to find justifications for my behavior.”
I was much more in the mindset of, “I know I’m fucking up, and I want to know exactly what I need to do about it. Even if there are ugly parts of myself that I don’t want to look at, I want to be willing to look at them. I want to confront them and sit with that discomfort.”
Of course, that wasn’t always easy. It wasn’t, “Okay, here’s an ugly part of myself. Let me confront it. Done. Onto the next.” Obviously, it didn’t work like that. But looking back, I think there was something valuable about that approach. I wasn’t trying to filter everything or make everything look nicer than it was. I was trying to see things in their raw form.
And, in my opinion, that’s also a big part of working on worst-case scenarios: trying to look at things in their raw form and being willing to sit with the discomfort that comes with that. I think that was important for me in trying to maintain my friendships and relationships as well.
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Then there was another motivation, which was simply that I was getting very fed up with myself. I wasn’t happy with myself. I wasn’t happy with how I was behaving. I was tired of being in the same place. And I think there has always been a part of me that doesn’t like continuing to fight against something when I eventually realize that I cannot control the outcome. I couldn’t guarantee that I would never be depressed again. I couldn’t guarantee that my friends would never reject me, that a relationship would definitely work out, or that I would definitely achieve all of my goals and passions. Those are not things I can completely control. I can influence them. I can work hard. I can make better decisions. I can give myself the best possible chances.
But I can’t guarantee the outcome.
And eventually, I started realizing that the same principle applied to my anxiety, my guilt, my feelings, and my mind. I reached a point where I thought, “I’m tired of trying to change this.” And I think a lot of these different moments and motivations eventually came together into one feeling: being fed up. That fed-upness is part of what helped me take one leap at a time.
Now, you might be sitting here thinking, “Momin, I’m fed up too. I’m fucking exhausted. So why am I still not taking the leap?” And the answer might be that, despite being fed up, there is still a part of you that wants to cling onto certainty, comfort, and control.
For me, eventually, I just didn’t want to hold onto that anymore. I could see that after years and years of trying to do that, there was no real change. There was no result. Fundamentally, I was just becoming more exhausted and burnt out.
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So those were some of the motivations that contributed to me wanting to work on things. But other people will have completely different motivations. Someone who is married with children might be motivated by wanting to improve their marriage and be more present for their wife and kids, or their husband and kids. Someone’s parents might be their motivation. Someone’s career might be their motivation. Someone who has come from a poor background might think, “I really want to work on my OCD because I don’t want to stay poor. I don’t want to repeat the same lifestyle my parents had. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life stressing about money. I want to give myself the best chance of earning a good living and having a good standard of life.”
All of those can be valid motivations, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with any of them.
The thing that can become problematic is the way we start fixating on those motivations and turning them into guarantees. For example, if I had approached recovery with the mindset of, “I want to work on my OCD so that I can 100% save my friendships, no matter what,” that could have become compulsive. Because then I would be working on recovery in order to guarantee a particular outcome.
But I don’t need to turn that motivation into a demand that I must guarantee a particular outcome. That distinction is really important when we talk about motivation for OCD recovery.