Bridging Mysticism and Science—A Personal Journey Through OCD with Therapist Ryan Kuja
Episode Notes
Are you curious about how science and spirituality intersect in understanding and treating mental health conditions like OCD?
This week, therapist and spiritual director Ryan Kuja shares his incredible journey through the complex world of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). From a young age, Ryan battled intrusive thoughts and repetitive behaviors. Feeling isolated and overwhelmed, at 17, he cried out to God—a pivotal moment that launched him into an unexpected exploration of mysticism, neurobiology, and the intricacies of diagnosis. This episode is designed for everyone, whether you or someone you love is dealing with OCD, or you're simply interested in gaining a deeper understanding of the diverse human experience.
Here’s what we cover:
* Ryan recounts the pivotal moment at 17 when his struggle with OCD drove him to seek divine intervention
* The difference between OCD and common intrusive thoughts—what sets them apart?
* An overview of the latest and most effective treatments for OCD, from clinical approaches to innovative therapies
* Ryan shares the spiritual practices that have not only helped manage his OCD but also enriched his spiritual journey
Resources:
- Episode 129
- Brain Lock by Jeffrey Schwartz
- ryankuja.com
- Instagram @ryankuja
If you liked this episode, check out:
- Episode 129: Understanding Your Anxiety—A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Calm, Advocating For Yourself, and Cultivating Inner Resilience
- Episode 51: The 12 Common Thinking Traps, Mind Reading, Mental Filters, and How To Stop Taking Things Personally
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- This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/BESTOFYOU and get on your way to being your best self.
Music by Andy Luiten/Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author. While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Transcript:
Alison Cook: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I am so glad you're here with me this week. We have a beautiful and insightful and compassionate episode lined up for today. We're diving into a topic that touches so many lives, whether directly or indirectly, and that's OCD, or obsessive compulsive disorder.
Now, if you listened to Episode 129, which was all about understanding your anxiety and different types of anxiety, you know that anxiety is really complex and nuanced. It has a lot of different manifestations, and OCD actually falls under the umbrella of an “anxiety disorder”. I don't always love the language of disorders, but that's the language that our current society uses.
I wanted to touch on OCD in that episode, but there are so many misconceptions about it and it's so misunderstood that I decided to dedicate a whole conversation to it, and that's exactly what we're going to do today. This episode is for all of us.
If you've been diagnosed with OCD, or if you've ever wondered if what you're experiencing might be OCD, maybe you have a loved one who struggles with it, or maybe you're simply curious about it and want to have a greater understanding of this shared experience of what it means to be human. There's something for everyone in this episode.
As you'll hear from our guest today, it can be incredibly freeing to realize there is a name for what I'm experiencing, and OCD is the right name. It can be equally as powerful as you listen today to realize, oh, this isn't what I'm experiencing. I may be dealing with something else.
Maybe I have some perfectionistic streaks. Maybe I have some generalized anxiety. Maybe I have some high sensitivity, as we'll touch on in today's episode. But what I'm dealing with actually isn't OCD. Either way, when we understand how to name something accurately, it can be really life giving and freeing and set us on a path toward healing.
Toward the end of the episode, we're also going to get into what effective treatments can look like, some of the most common misconceptions about OCD, and we're also going to talk about how spiritual practices can both help and sometimes hinder someone with OCD.
I'm so honored to have Ryan Kuja with me today. Ryan is a therapist, a writer, and a spiritual director who speaks openly about his own journey with OCD. His insights are so compassionate and so grounded in both his personal experience and professional expertise. You can learn more about Ryan at ryankuja.com or on Instagram @ryankuja.
Tune in for yourself, a loved one, or if you want to learn more about the complexity of the human experience and how God meets each and every one of us exactly where we need to be met. I know this conversation will leave you with a greater understanding and empathy. I am so thrilled to bring you my conversation with therapist Ryan Kuja.
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Alison Cook: Ryan, thanks so much for joining us today. I am so thrilled for this chance to get to know a little bit more about your story, both personally and in your work as a therapist and how you approach things. I've come to have so much respect for you based on some of your writings online and through some mutual friends. I'm so glad you're here.
Ryan: Thanks for having me. It's an honor to be here.
Alison Cook: I cannot wait to dig in, because you have such a beautiful way of describing what it means to be a healer. I love how you frame this work that we do that way. Before we get there, I would love to learn a little bit more about your journey
You talk about how you’ve been down this path and do this work out of healing what you've been through. You even write on your website, “by the time I was 24, I had been diagnosed with OCD, PTSD, depression, anxiety, and panic. I intimately know the affliction of mental health struggles”.
Can you take us back to your younger self, that pre-24, pre-diagnosed younger self? What were some of the cues and signals that you were experiencing that set you out on this journey?
Ryan: Yeah, so it goes way back. I think the seeds of some of the clinical issues that I mentioned, the OCD, the PTSD, depression, anxiety, I think the seeds of a lot of that was there when I was quite young. I remember worrying a lot as a kid and being highly sensitive. But it was really at age 10. My mom was in a car accident.
She was okay. She wasn't extensively injured or anything, but I experienced it as traumatic. Now, I wasn't with her, but following the car accident that she was in, these obsessions about her dying in a car accident developed. The obsessive terror was, mom is going to die in a car accident. There are compulsions that developed around that to try to reduce the anxiety.
I would flip on and off light switches. I would repeat odd phrases over and over in my head. I remember in fifth grade riding the bus to school, and at a certain point in the bus route, I would put on a certain hat at a certain time. I knew as a 10 year old that this didn't make sense. But I couldn't not do it.
I would even try to ride with her when she was in the car. If she was going to the grocery store, I'd always want to come. I remember having an understanding that accidents take place in these split second scenarios. So if you're three or four seconds earlier or later, you might avoid a car accident.
My mind would think, if mom leaves the house a few seconds later, maybe she won't get in a crash. Maybe I should delay her, but what if that actually is when the accident would happen? This would consume me. The OCD symptoms were the first clinical manifestation that I experienced.
Alison Cook: Boy, the way you describe that, I want to pause here for the listener. You're describing so clearly what's going on. Often people misunderstand OCD. You have the intrusive thoughts that something's going to happen to mom, but then it's followed by a compulsion. You have to do these behaviors, even though parts of you know they're not necessarily logical or rational.
Ryan: Exactly.
Alison Cook: I'm sure that was incredibly confusing at the time.
Ryan: Incredibly confusing. I had no category for it, no language for it. I thought I was weird. I thought I was crazy, doing these very strange things, and I hid it from everybody. So I didn't talk about it. I didn't bring it to anybody. I had no understanding that OCD existed.
It was very disorienting and confusing, and I felt this really strong sense of aloneness amidst this fairly overwhelming suffering. And it would wax and wane. There were years between age 10 and 17, and I can talk perhaps later about what happened when I was 17, that shifted things at least for a while.
So I didn't know that OCD existed. I had never heard of OCD. I didn't know other people suffered with this. I didn't know this was a neuropsychiatric condition that was diagnosable and treatable. So I felt the overwhelm of these symptoms plus isolation and loneliness in it.
Alison Cook: Yes. That makes so much sense that you're experiencing it and then you feel so isolated from other people. You didn't tell anybody until 17?
Ryan: I didn't tell anybody and I was a master at keeping it hidden. So for example, the flipping on and off of light switches. I would do that only in rooms that nobody else was in. You think, how does somebody hide this for all these years? It's certainly possible.
A lot of the compulsions I had were what's known as mental compulsions. Again, repeating certain phrases over and over in my head, or things that others and family members couldn’t necessarily pick up on.
Alison Cook: Yeah, you could keep them private, but again, that splitting off internally had to be incredibly painful. Ryan, you talk about a mystical experience that happened at 17. Could you tell us a little bit about what happened there? Because it seems as if that really set you off on a whole different exploration.
Ryan: Exactly. By the time I was 17, I was in the throes of this psychological affliction. I really felt like I was at the end of my rope. Like I said, it would wax and wane. I was a competitive cyclist during my teen years, and looking back, I think when I was training and cycling a lot, the exercise alone mitigated some of the intensity.
But as I got away from that, it became more severe, around age 17. I really hit a low point. I was in my bed one night, and for the first time in my life, I reached out to something, anything, God. I didn't grow up in a religious family, but we were culturally Catholic. We went to church during Christmas and Easter, but there wasn't a focus on God or spirituality or faith.
So this was something very new to me, something I hadn't done before, but it was really organic–like supplication, this reaching out from an afflictive space. Something profound happened. I felt infused by divine love. I felt God's presence enveloping me in this really clear embodied way, and I also heard a voice.
It wasn't audible, it was like a still small voice coming from within me or something. These mystical experiences are often hard to put into language by the nature of them, but the voice said, I'll take care of your mother. It was very clear, very simple, very direct. I'll take care of your mother.
I was infused with this love and this peace and it really catalyzed the healing of the fear. The obsession, of course, was terror that my mom was gonna die in a car accident. I sensed and really felt in my heart and in my body and in my mind this sense that this God who I didn't know existed, who I'm meeting in this very experiential way, is going to take care of my mom. I don't have to.
So it healed the fear. The obsession dropped away and the compulsions dropped away. I literally woke up the next morning and the OCD symptoms had vanished.
Alison Cook: Wow. So it was really a transformational encounter with God. Where do you go from there? Did you understand that it was God in this experience? How did you process that at such a young age?
Ryan: So it's interesting. I didn't tell anybody about it because I felt like it was a bit…there wasn't shame or anything around it, but it felt odd. We're not a religious family. I didn’t have religious friends. There's no mentor figure. What do I do with this?
Again, I was alone in it, but it was aloneness in the new freedom of this, versus the old kind of prison. I knew I wanted to start going to church. I knew I wanted to start reading the Bible. It instigated a fledgling faith and I became a Christian. I became a follower of Jesus through this event, on the heels of this mystical experience.
There was a short period of real freedom. This is April of 2000, when I was 17. So by the time I went off to college in August, a few months later, things had shifted. I still didn't know that the OCD had been healed. I thought that the fear had been healed. So I still didn't have a category or know that OCD was a thing.
I knew something happened that changed me deeply spiritually and psychologically, and I didn't yet have the language and the education around neurobiology and neuroscience and how the brain and nervous system were interplaying with some of these symptoms.
But all that to say, the OCD then returned with a vengeance. A different type of OCD, religious OCD, also known as scrupulosity. I became terrified of, for example, certain passages in the Bible that say to be perfect like your heavenly father is perfect.
It wasn't so much a terror of that passage. It was more of, oh, so this journey of becoming a Christian is about now being perfect. I became obsessed with sin. What is sin? What isn't sin? What is okay to do? What's not okay to do? And I'm going off to college, and is it okay to drink when you're under age? What's okay sexually?
All of this obsession with doing things right and doing things perfectly took root as religious OCD.
Alison Cook: Oh gosh, Ryan, when we put ourselves back, I think about those young versions of ourselves. At this age that you're at, we're processing really heavy stuff and we have no clue what we're processing. You're saying so much here.
First of all, I want to point out, and I had wanted to ask you about this, that all the isolation you experienced both with the OCD and then with the religious experience is in and of itself traumatic. Would you agree?
Ryan: Certainly.
Alison Cook: There's already some trauma to the system there, of all the ways you're having to hide these things. Then you have this beautiful experience. It's real. It changes your life. It removes symptoms, but then the symptoms come back and they come back in the form of religiosity.
I want to pause there because I think of so many people who have had a very transcendent experience with God. I had one in my early twenties, and it's so transformational and it's real and it's life changing.
Also, you still have to go into the healing work. It's not “one and done”. Yeah. That had to be so confusing, when it came back, as you said, with a vengeance.
Ryan: Absolutely. It was very confusing. There was a dichotomy between this divine love that I met in that mystical experience, but then I'm reading the Bible literally. I'm reading it literally because I have no idea that there's a historical cultural context.
Alison Cook: Like when Jesus has to pluck out your eyeball, it's not literal. You're not supposed to do that.
Ryan: Exactly. There is this sort of dichotomy around, what's real? Is that experience I had even trustworthy? Because this is what I'm reading. I'm also encountering authors and preachers who are saying things that are fear inducing. So the whole thing really consolidated around fear and shame versus the experience of God when I was 17 in my bed that night. There is this almost irreconcilable, what is real and what isn't?
Alison Cook: You had this real experience, and then when you start reading the Bible, you go to church, you're hearing people describe a more fear-based approach, and that kind of worked together with this predisposition to OCD.
Ryan: That's exactly right. Exactly.
Alison Cook: The fear-based religiosity works together with this part of you, mentally, that goes right back into the obsessions, and then I'm assuming compulsions. I'm curious, because I know some folks who struggle with religious scrupulosity, religious OCD, the compulsions become more like constant confession. They take on a religious tone.
Ryan: Yep. That was one of mine. Confession.
Alison Cook: What did that look like for you? You're trying to balance this dichotomy of wanting to have this loving God in your life, but now it has become this whole other beast.
Ryan: Yes. The beast overshadowed that experience almost completely for a number of years. It wasn’t until I was 18 or 19, after one or two years, until finally I open up a bit to my mother. And she's sensing, he's not doing well. By this time, depression has started to constellate OCD, which is so common.
In my clinical work, I've never met somebody with OCD who doesn't also struggle with depression. There's such a high comorbidity between those two, which makes sense for many different reasons.
Alison Cook: You can feel helpless. You feel trapped. Yeah.
Ryan: Yeah, the shame and the guilt, feeling like I'm not good enough, feeling like I'm this bad person, thinking like all my desires were wrong or broken. So there was a very deep seated sense of toxic shame and brokenness.
I went to see a psychotherapist, or it may have been a psychologist, and got diagnosed with OCD. I remember there being a little bit of weight lifted, a little bit of relief. I had these symptoms and my obsession with sin, and I remember thinking it was an absolute sin to miss church on a Sunday morning. There's no excuse, unless you're definitely sick or have something that is a manifestation of this disorder called OCD that other people have.
I started to read books about it. I remember reading a classic, Brain Lock by Jeffrey Schwartz, and some other books specifically on scrupulosity and religious OCD. I finally got language for my experience and found that there's treatment available. I did start an SSRI medication around that same time, and that helped some.
I remember sensing a little bit of freedom, that everything wasn't so serious. If you didn't go to church, oh, that's okay. You miss a Sunday, that's okay. I was starting to understand that the Bible with these difficult texts weren't necessarily meant to be read so literally. There is this sort of movement, a little bit of freedom there, in terms of theology and spiritual understanding and reading the text. The SSRI medication also helped some of the symptoms.
Alison Cook: So you started to have some relief. At what point did you decide that you wanted to go down this journey of becoming a therapist yourself?
Ryan: After these experiences, I'm thrust even further into interest in mental health. It was a need. It was like survival. I was reading everything I could get my hands on, with regard to not only OCD, but also I was experiencing lots of generalizing anxiety. I had been diagnosed with PTSD when I was 23, and I had encountered some pretty good EMDR therapy with a therapist in Denver.
I remember thinking around that time, I could see myself doing this. I could see myself in her chair. There's something about this one-to-one engaging with depth, and she may have been the first good therapist that I saw. Somebody who was very empathic, who I felt seen by, and also had a good map for the psyche and the brain and using EMDR.
We could also talk about theology and spirituality. There was more expansion and imagination in that realm and in the work with her. I was also going to spiritual direction around the same time. This is maybe 2008 in Denver. I also remember thinking about sitting in spiritual direction. I could see myself in the other chair. I could see myself doing this, but I didn't pursue it.
My first career was in international relief mission and development, and I still have this really strong drive and passion to live among and serve the economically marginalized, especially on the African continent that continued to feel like a calling for a long time. I think it was a calling. It eventually pivoted and it was time to step away from that.
It was a number of years of noticing subtle and not so subtle draws to do therapeutic work, which eventually led me back to seminary. I completed a theology degree because that interest was very strong, and then a spiritual direction certificate program. I then went back again to pursue clinical mental health counseling. So it was a winding, circuitous journey.
Alison Cook: Wow. As you're pursuing your own healing, you begin to notice the cues that you might actually take this and become someone who helps others.
Ryan: Exactly. Yes.
Alison Cook: So Ryan, put on your professional hat here for those listening. When you think about OCD now, how do you understand it and what feels important for you that other people understand about it?
Ryan: What first comes to mind is how many misconceptions there are out there. I hear and see all the time, whether it's on social media or somebody in passing, saying things like, I'm so OCD about how I have to organize my clothes. Or yeah, I'm a little bit OCD about X, Y, and Z.
There's no malice there, but it's so insensitive, and in a way, ignorant to the reality of suffering that occurs with people who do have OCD. I think OCD is still quite stigmatized. There are lots of stereotypes about it. There's lots of misrepresentation in popular culture, lots of caricatures of OCD.
It's looked at as somebody who's quirky, and it trivializes the pain of people who are actually facing OCD. Like we mentioned earlier, the hallmark of it are these recurring intrusive obsessions, which are associated with anxiety and distress. The compulsions act to reduce the anxiety generated, and it often interferes with people's daily functioning, their social and occupational functioning, and their relationships.
Often people spend hours every day as a result of OCD focused on obsessions and compulsions. There are many different types, from religious OCD to contamination OCD to harm OCD, where someone's really afraid they're going to commit harm to somebody. There can be sexually intrusive thoughts, P-OCD, which is pedophilia OCD, the fear of becoming a pedophile or acting in such a way, and relationship OCD, which is the need to have certainty around if you're in the right relationship or not.
A lot of OCD hinges around this need for complete certainty. Contamination OCD involves the need for complete certainty that there are no germs on my hands or whatever it may be. The obsessions are generally unwanted, they're intrusive, and the psychology term is ego dystonic–they don't align with a person's values or desires.
So for the person who has POCD, pedophilia OCD, that pedophilia for them is the most disgusting, grotesque, awful thing, basically, that they can imagine. Of course, that's the thing that has a charge and is sticky. That's the thing, because it is so ego dystonic. It sticks because it causes distress.
Things that don't carry a charge, these intrusive obsessions don't manifest around that. I've had a number of clients who have these intrusive violent thoughts about hurting their pet, their dog, and they love their pet.
Alison Cook: They would never hurt their pet.
Ryan: They're the type of person who would never hurt the dog, so that the hallmark of it is, it's unwanted, it's intrusive, it's ego dystonic.
Alison Cook: Even in your case with the religious obsessions, all you wanted was to be with this God who had showed up for you in such a loving way. The charge was, if I commit this sin, I'll go to hell. I'll go to hell. That had a charge for you. In fact, all you were trying to do was follow God.
Ryan: Exactly. Yeah, so the obsession with the anxiety and the distress of the performance of the compulsion, whether that's a ritual kind of outward behavior or an inner mental compulsion then brings temporary relief. The compulsion brings this temporary relief.
It lowers the anxiety, which is the whole function of the compulsion, but it's this loop that repeats again and again. It tends to strengthen over time, and it can really consume someone's life. It can really take over. Often people feel shame about it. They hide it.
What's interesting is that there's some research that's been done–I believe the number is like 90 percent of people in the general population have occasional intrusive thoughts. The thing about somebody with OCD is it sticks. There's repetition. There's an issue with stopping, and some of that is neurobiological.
It’s related to the OCD circuitry in the brain, but underlying this is something interesting that I've noticed. I'm not sure what research has been done in this realm, but there seem to be traits of high sensitivity in people with OCD, and I see that as the bedrock or the foundation on which OCD eventually develops.
One of the predispositions is this high sensitivity. Yeah. It could be moral sensitivity, a really strong sense of right and wrong, good and bad, values, that sort of thing, or heightened existential sensitivity, like an awareness of existential givens of life and death.
So there's this kind of temperament that underlies OCD. One way to think of it is like the soil on which the tree of OCD grows.
Alison Cook: Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. Not everybody who is highly sensitive will develop OCD, but it does make sense that if you have OCD, underneath that is this high sensitivity. It's beautiful. The clients who I've worked with who've had it, there's an incredible sensitivity to things that can be so beautiful. And yet it can also create a lot of suffering.
So with all that said, Ryan, how do you begin to break that cycle? I know you've talked about medication. I'd also love to hear about specific interventions. We talk a lot on the podcast about IFS, this idea of parts. Even as I'm listening to you, I wonder if there is a way in which it's helpful?
I would love for you to correct me if I'm wrong. A part of you is having the fear and the anxiety, and then the other part is coming in with the behaviors to try to resolve that. Is it helpful to work with the different parts? What have you found to be helpful for folks?
Ryan: Yeah. Really great question. The so-called gold standard in treatment is something called exposure response prevention, where in a controlled setting, in the office with the therapist as well as at home, the client is exposed to what activates the obsession/anxiety. Then they prevent the response. The response prevention is not allowing the compulsion.
The idea is, when you sit with the anxiety, when you allow the anxiety to be there without reducing it through the compulsion, it'll eventually lower. So ERP is the so-called gold standard. Now, it wasn't super helpful for me. The data shows that it's effective about 50 percent of the time, but there's high dropout rates and it's difficult.
It is evidence based and it does work with about half of people. The research says ERP plus SSRI medication is about 70 percent effective. But, it's interesting. The field seems to be shifting some for a while. I honestly experienced it from many clinicians, or hearing stories from clients with OCD who had seen these OCD experts who only did ERP, like it was ERP or nothing.
Like this is the only thing and this is what we have to stick with. This is the only thing that there's an evidence base for. There's no connection between OCD and trauma. Almost this therapeutic dogmatism or fundamentalism and now that's starting to shift. There's research that's starting to come out about the links between trauma and OCD.
There's nothing that says trauma causes OCD, but there certainly can be associations, especially with certain subtypes of OCD. But let's take the parts perspective. Yes, I think the parts perspective can be extremely helpful and we can weave in the parts perspective with things like ERP, with things like mindfulness based cognitive therapy, sometimes even EMDR.
There's some research that shows EMDR can be helpful. So from a parts perspective, for me, it's really quite simple. I think that it's about an extreme protective part. I see OCD as an extreme protective part that's overactive, that's really trying to help prevent whatever bad thing from happening.
I had a client who was terrified, basically, that if her hands weren't perfectly clean, she was going to cause a deadly illness to one of her family members. Obviously the role of the part is to protect the family, to make sure somebody doesn't get sick. So the way I understand it from a parts perspective is that it's this overactive, extreme protective part working really hard to try to help.
This part desires 100 percent certainty, which isn't really possible in our human experience. 100 percent certainty isn't possible, but we can learn to relate to this extreme protective part as one who is trying to help. So less resistance to it, less trying to overcome it, more compassionate engagement with the part.
My main role is as a trauma therapist, and I have a few clients I see who have OCD. I don't see myself as an OCD specialist, but obviously I work with it and it's deeply personal, as it's part of my story. I don't do much cognitive work, generally. I focus more on parts work and nervous system work and polyvagal theory and somatic work.
But with OCD, I think the cognitive work is really important. It's really important to weave that in, given that people are experiencing OCD generally up around their head as intrusive thoughts,
Alison Cook: Yeah. You can hear the beliefs. The all-or-nothing thinking, some of the thinking traps that you do have to attack, so that when you're present to that part, even understanding its good intention, you also have the self-led ability to gently let that part know that reframe of we might have a germ on us, but that doesn't mean someone else is going to get sick, or whatever it is. I could see how that is really vital combined with a lot of these other things.
Ryan, I could talk to you about this all day. You're such a wealth of wisdom and you see all this with such nuance. In your work now, in your own life, where does the role of spirituality come in? Because you talk about that powerful mystical experience that did give you relief.
How do spiritual practices help you to this day? How does your spirituality work together with what you understand about the brain now, and some of these different neurobiological aspects? How does that factor in?
Ryan: I think there's some really beautiful intersection there. I think the intersections between spirituality, neuroscience, and psychology are some of the most fun and the most powerful places to explore. New vistas open up. As I think about my own experience, spiritual experiences and conversations with that really wise priest have helped me immensely.
So things that weren't necessarily therapy brought about those sorts of experiences. Certainly given what we know about the brain, they brought about neurobiological changes. I also think about weaving in a little bit of little tiny touching into the nervous system. Those experiences catalyze safety and connection.
Those experiences allowed a tether back into the ventral vagal state of safety and connection. That state of home, at least what Chuck DeGroat would call home, where there's safety and connection. It's a sense of, I'm okay and the world's okay. It's not one of the self-protective states.
With OCD, there's a sympathetic dominance. There's a hyper-vigilance. Any time there's fear or anxiety, we're talking sympathetic. A lot of the spiritual experiences I've had, or even currently when I'm able to rest in a sense of connection to God, that’s movement back into a state of regulation, back into a state of connection. We've largely historically thought of certain practices that are more therapeutic and there are certain practices that are more spiritual. The reality is, there's so much interplay, and spirituality is going to impact our neurobiology and vice versa.
Alison Cook: I could imagine, from your earlier experiences, the simplicity of the deep breaths, where you're regulating that nervous system, but there's a contemplative approach to that might be more beneficial than perhaps something like scripture memorization.
I'm throwing that out there and it could be different for other people, but there are certain spiritual practices that might be more conducive to you finding that safety with God, that don't trigger the OCD.
Ryan: Absolutely. Yes. Having grown up Catholic, and I remained Catholic for quite a while, not anymore, but one of my practices used to be praying the rosary. Absolutely. I've experimented with returning to that, and it doesn't work.
It doesn't bring about that sense of safety, something about the recitation and the repetition. It just doesn't, but practicing the Examen, for example, doing the Ignatian spirituality contemplative practices really resonate with me. They often do facilitate a subtle shift away from sympathetic dominance more into a subtle place.
I think that authentic spirituality is embodied. I think authentic spirituality can, and in a way, maybe even should, lead us into a deeper connection to our body and our emotions, rather than bypassing. I found that's been really important in my process.
Alison Cook: I love that. As you've traveled this journey, I love how you describe yourself as a wounded healer. You've been through a lot. You are helping a lot of people. You've helped a lot of people by sharing your story today. What words of encouragement would you have for someone listening who has struggled with OCD?
Ryan: Yeah, I think so many things. Often folks struggling with OCD have tried several things and nothing's worked. For those folks, I would say there's hope. There's another approach out there. There are things that maybe could be helpful, a few things that come to mind that are maybe newer modalities that are shown to possibly be helpful.
Things like ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, transcranial magnetic stimulation. There's some research that says that can be helpful. Maybe you haven't tried an SSRI. That could be a good tool, even if for the short term. Things like neurofeedback, EMDR for OCD, IFS, usually there's something that we haven't tried.
I would say there's hope and maybe something else would be a good fit, something that you and your psyche, your soma, your nervous system actually could use and resonate with. I would also say, the words of John O'Donohue come to mind, try to be excessively gentle with yourself.
There can be so much self-judgment, especially when modalities we've tried haven't worked. There's either implicit or explicit messaging, whether it's from the therapist or being generated internally, that we must be doing something wrong. That's not the case. You're not doing something wrong.
As much as you can, try to remember to not fight your symptoms–they're communicating something important. They're not communicating that you're broken. Your mind and body aren't the enemy.
Alison Cook: I love that. Shame never helps. What would you say to that younger 17, 18, 19 year old? What would you say to him now? What would you want him to know?
Ryan: I would say to him, you don't have to hide this. You don't have to hide this. You don't have to be alone and suffer in silence and the pain isn't your fault. Everything you feel, all the symptoms at some level make sense. You're not broken, you're not crazy. What you're experiencing makes sense and you don't have to navigate it on your own.
Alison Cook: Yeah, I love that. Ryan, what is bringing out the best of you right now?
Ryan: Some really basic things like returning to the fundamentals of self care and trying to prioritize that and rest and even exercise. It's easy to get out of exercise rhythms, but understanding that is something that is really helpful for my mind and body. I think that's true of so many, but yeah, some of these really basic things.
Attuning to the needs of my body and trying to honor my limits and honor my capacity and the capacity of my nervous system. I spent many years, as a lot of us have, pushing too hard and going beyond that
Alison Cook: I love that. Is there anything else, Ryan, that you want to add, as we wind down?
Ryan: I want to say thank you for reaching out and setting this up and being able to have this time together to connect and connect with your listeners. Over the years, even before I became a therapist, I thought that maybe there's redemption here. Maybe this gospel idea of the redemption of wounds can be concretized in my life.
It can be real, and doing things, obviously sitting with clients every day in therapy is one thing, but doing things like this really bring that sense too. I can marinate in that sense of oh, that thing I used to wonder, can that happen? Here it is right now, having this conversation with you. Yeah. Thank you.
Alison Cook: Yeah. I love that. We had a conversation with David Kessler, who's a grief expert, and he talks about meaning. What I love about what he says, and it's what you're saying, it's, this is hard, we all have our challenges, but this is something I have to work through. And there's an opportunity for meaning.
It doesn't mean we're saying it's not hard that I had to go through this. What we're saying is, now how can I make meaning out of this part of my journey and out of this part of my story? You've done that today. I can hear all the light bulbs going off. I know it's going to be so helpful to so many people.
Ryan: I'm hopeful. Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity.
Alison Cook: Thank you, Ryan. Thanks for being here.