The Short Version
- Let OCD call you a wanker. Let OCD yell without giving it the compulsions it wants.
- Make yourself big like Rebecca. Bring an empowering attitude to ERP, even when you feel anxious.
- Be kind to yourself. Self-criticism makes an already difficult recovery process harder.
- Trust the process. ERP takes practice, and repeatedly checking whether it’s working can keep your attention focused on OCD.
- BELIEVE. You can learn to tolerate uncertainty, resist compulsions, and build a meaningful life even when OCD comes along for the ride.
Estimating reading time: 9 minutes
If you’ve watched Ted Lasso, you know Ted walks into a pretty hostile environment when he arrives in England to coach AFC Richmond. He knows almost nothing about British football. The fans don’t want him there. In fact, entire stadiums chant “wanker” at him. He’s got a team with plenty of problems, people around him who aren’t always telling him the truth, and a giant challenge in front of him.
And yet Ted keeps going.
What I love about Ted Lasso, especially when I think about OCD recovery, is that his success isn’t just about what he does. It’s about how he does it. He brings an attitude to difficult situations that’s curious, persistent, forgiving, and grounded in belief. And as someone who both has and treats OCD, I think we can learn a lot from him about how to approach the gold standard therapy for OCD, exposure and response prevention therapy, or ERP.
Because how you do ERP matters just as much as what you do.
1. Let OCD call you a wanker
When Ted first arrives in England, people make it very clear they don’t want him there. Fans yell “wanker” at him over and over. Ted doesn’t spend all his time trying to make them stop, and he doesn’t decide he can only coach effectively once everyone approves of him. He lets them yell, and he keeps doing his job.
OCD can be a lot like those fans. It can yell things like, “What if you hurt someone?” “What if you made the wrong decision?” “What if this thought means something terrible about you?” “You’d better figure this out.” Or one of my favorites: “You’re doing ERP wrong.”
Our instinct is often to try to make OCD stop talking. We analyze the thought, check our feelings, Google something, ask someone for reassurance, review what happened, or perform another compulsion hoping we’ll finally feel better. But ERP asks us to practice something very different: letting OCD yell without giving it the response it wants. That might mean:
- not doing the physical compulsion or avoidance OCD wants you to do.
- and/or doing some ERP scripting with “may or may not” statements as a competing response to mental rituals.
- and/or throwing your shoulders back and moving on with your day.
- and/or welcoming OCD as a chance to practice doing ERP: “There you are, OCD. Thank you for bringing that up. I really wanted a chance to beat you today.”
Then keep living your life. You don’t have to pretend OCD isn’t there, and you don’t have to get rid of the anxiety before moving forward. Let OCD heckle you from the stands while you keep playing the game.
2. Make yourself big like Rebecca
We can learn so much from the characters on Ted Lasso, especially Rebecca, the owner of AFC Richmond. In this video you see her demonstrating to Nate and Keeley how she builds herself up before meetings.
What she’s doing, feeling her own power, is the essence of the technique I call Shoulders Back. In this excerpt from my memoir, Is Fred in the Refrigerator?: Taming OCD and Reclaiming My Life, I demonstrate how I use it (in this instance, in combination with may or may not statements):
Deciding to try out my theory when OCD started to bellyache about my potentially having left the stove on at home after I arrived at my office one day, I stood up, threw my shoulders back, put my hands on my hips, and adopted the same haughty, arrogant tone that OCD used with me.
“I may or may not have left the stove on when I left the house this morning,” I said. “My house may be burning down right now. I may kill all my pets. But I want this anxiety and uncertainty because I want to get better.”
Huh, I thought. It was sort of funny, standing here like Wonder Woman while speaking imperiously at the wall. I said my script again, as forcefully and powerfully as I could. “I may or may not have left the stove on. I may or may not be burning down the house and killing all my pets. But bring it on, OCD, BRING IT ON!”
I continued saying variations on my script for two minutes, throwing my shoulders back as far as I could. It was incredible. Standing tall and speaking powerfully did seem to make me feel more powerful.
I started doing power poses every time I talked back to my OCD, to give myself that little boost of confidence, to make myself feel bigger and more powerful than my still somewhat ornery disorder. (p. 220)
Next time you’re about to practice ERP, get big like Rebecca and/or use Shoulders Back. Because not only will you feel your own power, OCD will feel it, too.
3. Be kind to yourself
To me, Ted Lasso is a show about learning to be better people amidst all the ups and downs of being human. Not in the OCD “am I a good person?” way, but in the “Am I supporting others and myself the way I could be?” kind of way. It’s The Ted Lasso Way.
Most people I’ve met with OCD are exceptionally kind to others, sometimes even to the point of people pleasing. (And people pleasing’s not something we want to do, by the way). But they are hard on themselves. Brutally. They take that stadium full of people yelling “wanker!” at Ted Lasso and turn it towards themselves.
And that just makes OCD stronger.
Be nice to yourself. It’s hard at first because it will feel so freaking foreign, especially if you participate in self-punishment as a ritual. But do it enough, and it starts to feel good. You start to realize that you’re on your own team, that you have the potential to be your own biggest supporter and fan.
This often isn’t easy because we’re working against old, ingrained self-critical habits that feel helpful. But they just aren’t. Yelling at yourself when things don’t go as planned only makes you less likely to try things, less motivated, and less likely to believe you can succeed.
There are many resources to learn about self-compassion, including all the blogs I’ve written about it, Kristin Neff’s website, and Kimberley Quinlan’s marvelous book. You won’t do it perfectly, you’ll slip up sometimes, but take a little bit of time to learn how to be nice to yourself.
Trust me, you will thank yourself for it.
4. Trust the process
While Ted arrives at Richmond knowing very little about British football, what he does know is how to coach people. He has a process centered on practice, relationships, attitude, curiosity, and helping people become better versions of themselves, and he doesn’t abandon that process every time something goes badly.
ERP is also a process. It can be difficult at times because OCD doesn’t want you to do ERP and (confusingly) desperately wants to know whether you’re doing it right. You might find yourself micro-monitoring your symptoms, wondering whether you’re less anxious yet, whether you did the exposure correctly, why you’re still having intrusive thoughts, or whether you should be farther along by now.
The problem is that repeatedly checking whether ERP is working can become another way of keeping your attention locked on OCD. Instead, you can practice trusting the process: intentionally facing uncertainty, resisting compulsions, and learning through experience that you don’t have to organize your life around OCD’s demands.
That learning takes time.
Ted gets three whole seasons, after all. Let’s give ourselves the time we need while trusting the process.
5. BELIEVE
If there’s one image most people associate with Ted Lasso, it’s probably that handmade BELIEVE sign hanging in the Richmond locker room. When I saw this last scene of the show, when all the players pulled out the little pieces of the torn-up Believe sign they had been keeping and put them back together, it sealed the deal that I was going to write this blog post:
(You’ll have to watch the show to see what number four that Ted is referring to is!)
I wanted to write this post because OCD takes belief away from you. OCD makes you question your thoughts, your actions, your intentions so much that you can completely lose belief in yourself, and in doing so, it makes fighting back against OCD that much harder.
This loss of belief in yourself is one of the most damaging parts of untreated OCD. It can keep us from seeking help or from doing ERP homework because we think we “can’t” and that we “won’t be successful.” And if we don’t try, then it seems the OCD was right all along, just further reinforcing our lack of belief in ourselves.
But that’s just OCD being a wanker. (OCD’s not the only one who gets to name call here!)
This lack of belief that all of us with OCD face now and then is why I’ve been so passionate about sharing my story over the past decade+. I wanted to show that even with a story as messy and long and drawn out as mine has been, you can do this. OCD will throw up roadblock after roadblock and make you feel like you can’t, but you can.
And if OCD’s just been too loud and you don’t believe in you, borrow some of my belief. Because I believe in you.
I believe that you can feel uncertain without solving the uncertainty. That you can hear OCD yelling without obeying it. That one difficult day doesn’t erase everything you’ve learned. I believe that you can keep practicing ERP even when practice feels hard, and that you can build a meaningful, joyful life while having OCD.
You don’t need to feel confident before you start, and you don’t need proof that everything will work out the way you want.
Whatever OCD decides to yell from the stands today, you can keep playing.
You’ve got a life to play.
