Matt Bieber describes how adopting Buddhism helped him overcome his obsessive-compulsive disorder:
OCD often feels like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel, except that all the choices suck and all the adventures hurt. However, as I’ve begun to learn through Buddhist study and ritual, those ‘choices’ are illusory, and there’s no one being hurt. In fact, there’s no one there at all. The attempt to attain pleasure or avoid pain, to stay consistent with a storyline, to ensure some kind of outcome, to be somebody — this is what causes so much suffering.
That’s a hard message to hear, in part because our culture places such a heavy emphasis on the construction of an integrated self with a coherent story in life. We believe that deep down, there is some kind of solid, stable bedrock to our identity, some unshakable foundation that provides us with the capacity to control significant portions of our experience: to be who we really are, to be true to ourselves. Much religious ritual is designed to reinforce this view — to convince us that it’s possible to keep ourselves together, and to provide a method that promises to help us do so. And while there are important differences, OCD and its rituals are built on a similar worldview.
But that worldview isn’t true. It isn’t possible to keep ourselves together, because we aren’t one coherent thing. Instead, we are a kind of flux, a series of patterns and surprises, inextricably interwoven into the larger field of phenomena that we call reality.
The Dish 