Mack Harris

Hi, I am Mack, an OCD sufferer for 35 long years. I started my fight against OCD in early 2001. I struggled so long because of a faulty belief system, which is why I never got better.

I have done just about everything and never got better. I wanted to tell you all this because what I have learned over the years is that understanding OCD and how it works is essential.

If you do not understand how it works, there are great chances that you will remain stuck in your OCD behavior, just like me.

It’s not until you truly understand how OCD affects you and your brain you can do something about it. If you want to get rid of OCD, you must learn as much as possible about how it works.

Over the years, I have tried many methods, and nothing helped to reduce my OCD. When I started to understand how OCD affects my brain, I finally could dismiss my OCD as just OCD! And guess what?

My journey toward freeing myself from the prison of OCD began when I researched more about how this mysterious disorder worked.

I found out that my brain used certain vital elements to keep OCD working. Some of the main factors that supported a tight grip on me and controlled everything I could think or do all came down to these few things:

A faulty belief system is like a filter, which decides what is right or wrong, safe or dangerous. I thought something terrible would happen in my flawed belief system if I didn’t carry out repetitive behaviors.

Faulty core beliefs were part of a false belief system that always kept me focused on the content of my thoughts all day long. 

It gave OCD lots of power over me because I thought that if I didn’t do what the faulty core beliefs told me to do, then something terrible would happen, and what I did understand was that,

OCD is automatically triggered; when intrusive thoughts or images come into my awareness, I automatically jump into response mode, where I do what OCD demands me to do. This behavior pattern took over control of everything I did.

The automatic behavior pattern of responding to intrusive thoughts or images kept my OCD going. 

I want you to understand this; if you do not change the behavior pattern of giving in to your OCD, it will continue to demand more and more from you.

Everybody has intrusive thoughts; you are not unique. 

Learning this helped me understand that I don’t need to be ashamed of having intrusive thoughts. Why I have OCD is because of my behavior pattern toward intrusive thoughts and images. 

After I truly understood how OCD worked, it became clear that my faulty behavior pattern needed to be changed. I needed to act like a “normal” person who doesn’t let intrusive thoughts or images control. 

I can see why so many suffer for years; if you don’t fully understand how these factors work together, your OCD will keep feeding you with doubts, unwanted thoughts, and images. 

The more I understood how OCD was working within my faulty belief system, the easier it became to see the truth. It worked so well because I now knew what to do when OCD thoughts and images popped up in my awareness.

I could now free myself from OCD as I disregarded those thoughts and images, just as if they were saying something irrelevant, something that didn’t matter to me at all!

Because I could see how OCD was using the content of my thoughts to feed my faulty belief system with energy, I could now learn how to discard those thoughts without any further ado.

Disregarding is not an easy task; it takes lots of energy, courage, and self-control to ignore OCD thoughts. But if you do not learn how to discard the content of your OCD, then you will end up like me, suffering for many years.

I want to encourage you all today to let go of your faulty core beliefs. Don’t let OCD demand that you behave the way it wants. You are in control, not OCD!

I will leave you with this question: How would your life improve if you defeated OCD? I know that if you genuinely understand how OCD works and take action to change the way it directly affects your life, then your life will not only improve, it will become fantastic.

I can assure you that there is nothing more valuable than your time on this earth and the possibilities of the future. Be optimistic!