When I work with a client with particular issues I think about what they’re going through and set about expanding my understanding of these through extensive reading and research, and I don’t stop, even after the client has moved on. So it is with a particular person who came to see me some time ago where they were obsessed with controlling their breath. I knew that such a somatic (bodily) compulsion was a form of a obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) that arises originally to quell upwellings of anxiety, but, to be honest, I couldn’t get much of shared sense of what that felt like to the person. I’ve never experienced such a thing.
Yes, I’ve experienced anxiety; we all have. It’s part of being human. Anxiety is our body’s natural response to stress. It’s a feeling of fear or apprehension about what’s to come. Things like the first day of school, or giving your first speech, or going to a job interview can stir up feelings of nervousness and fear. There’s nothing wrong with us in these circumstances in feeling this way. It’s only when such feelings last a long time and are interfering with our life that the natural response has become an anxiety disorder. You might have sweaty palms, increased heart rate, rapid breathing, restlessness, feeling spaced out, trouble sleeping, difficulties concentrating most of the time. Medication may help, but the source of the condition still needs to be addressed. But, hang on, let’s not go there yet.
How might a person deal with this sense of anxiety interiorly? You might put your focus on such things as blinking, swallowing, tapping your tongue on the roof of your mouth, cracking your knuckles, or noticing how you’re breathing through taking deep breaths and counting them, or any other repetitive behaviour, and in this way you might temporarily quell your anxiety. We are after all always looking for ways to soothe ourselves.
Unfortunately those ways of self soothing can become a problem in themselves and come to be associated with feelings that unless these actions are done, we will be doomed. Thus a cycle of intrusive, unwanted thoughts (obsessions) and
urgent-feeling behaviours to try to stop the thoughts (compulsions) or prevent feared outcomes from occurring is set up. For someone with OCD, the obsessions can centre on or be triggered by a number of things.
In the case of my former client, her anxiety had to do with fear of dying and she had been told by someone, using a mindfulness meditation as a reference point, that when such feelings arose, to focus on taking deep breaths. Very unfortunately, such words of wisdom became a problem in itself. She became hyperaware of the automatic process of breathing, such that she thought that if she lost that concentration on breathing, she would die, and so she took to counting each breath, to keep track of it.
Bringing awareness to the breath or any other somatic activity may be a good mindfulness technique but is clearly counterproductive for someone already preoccupied with their feelings of anxiety. Preoccupation is already a problem, so to add to it just exacerbates it all. It is much better to take the focus away from the compulsion to breath deeply and count each breath and put the client’s attention to what breathing actually achieves: to release and then to take in the new. Most of my focus in my hypnotherapy sessions with OCD clients is on the letting go and relaxing side of things.
It is interesting that the process of breathing out, and letting go, is when the parasympathetic nervous system is happening. It is a quiet “rest and digest” period and helps the body-mind to literally recuperate its energies. The inbreath, the inspiration, is the responsibility of the sympathetic nervous system, that system that stimulates the heart beat and gathers up the body’s resources for flight or fight. OCD feels to the person all about hypervigilance/hyperawareness, thus the therapy needs to enhance just letting go, letting be, and relaxing.
