Welcome to The Learning Curve! A publication inspired by using my own privilege and allowing others with less of a voice to communicate their stories through me. Each month, readers vote on a theme that they want to be covered and would enjoy learning more about. Then, I set out to find people who are willing to share their personal stories with me and the rest of the Learning Curve community. This October's topic is mental health and mental illness.
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Many people think of obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD, as an intense urge to have things clean and organized. The people who suffer from OCD, though, know that there is so much more to the condition.
Laura Buerckner, 34, lives in Melbourne, Australia, and was diagnosed with OCD at age 31. The diagnoses came somewhat as a shock to Buerckner who, up until that point, had lived a relatively normal life in the terms of mental health, she said.
“I meditate regularly and have for 10 years,” she said. “I had worked with people who were diagnosed with OCD and I just thought ‘no, that can’t be what this is.’”
Laura Buerckner, 34, was diagnosed with OCD at age 31. She used a combination of therapy and reiki healing to help herself recover from her unwanted thoughts.
After reflecting with her therapist and talking to a friend who formerly struggled with OCD, Buerckner was able to recognize that she truly was suffering from the condition, she said. An OCD diagnosis usually takes years to determine, she said, because it often gets pawned off as anxiety by the wrong therapists. Luckily, she was diagnosed six months in.
“Things started to get really bad,” she said. “My brain was looping on these thoughts I was having and I was scared to shut my eyes. I used to love alone time, but I found myself always wanting a distraction.”
Buerckner was having scary, intrusive thoughts about harm, violence and sexual abuse, she said. The thoughts would turn to fear, guilt and shame because they would morph themselves into different haunting scenarios. She often thought something was going to happen to her or to someone else, she said.
She even developed something called sensorimotor OCD, a subtype of OCD focused on bodily feeling and personal actions. For example, she said, she became fixated and panicked over how frequently she was blinking, thinking that she would never be able to stop.
Buerckner contacted a psychologist who specializes in OCD who explained to her the process of what was happening in her mind, the process of recovery and, together, they set a few goals.
During this time, however, Buerckner also enrolled in a seven month reiki mastership program, something she had been wanting to do for a while.
Reiki is a healing technique based on the principle that the therapist can channel energy into the patient by means of touch, to activate the natural healing processes of the patient's body and restore physical and emotional well-being.
Thus started her recovery process.
The combination of the therapy with the reiki training often allowed Buerckner to utilize the coping mechanisms she was learning in therapy, and apply them to her personal at-home meditations, she said.
“I did an hierarchy of fear with my therapist where the first step was simply writing down the things I was scared of in order from least to greatest,” she said. “I didn’t write anything down for six months because just writing the words triggered me.”
“”According to the International OCD Foundation, obsessions are typically accompanied by intense and uncomfortable feelings such as fear, disgust, doubt, or a feeling that things have to be done in a way that is “just right.” In the context of OCD, obsessions are time consuming and get in the way of important activities the person values.
Buerckner’s therapist diagnosed her with “pure O” OCD, or “purely obsessional OCD.” What this means is that she was experiencing distressing and intrusive thoughts, but showed no external, or physical, signs of compulsions.
When she finally gathered the strength to write down her hierarchy of fears is when she started to see actual results in recovery, she said.
“I would start by first just writing the word down, then I was told to work with the thought—whether by reading an article about a murderer or pedophile, or watching a documentary about a fear,” she said. “In those instances I would work really hard to just sit with the fear, allowing it to consume me, without judging it or changing it. Just letting it be as it is, and practicing acceptance."
Buerckner posing with a wall mural in Melbourne, Australia. "I do not know if 'cured,' is the right word," she said. "But how my life is right now feels like my own form of a cure."
A major fear of hers was that she would unintentionally harm a child, she said, therefore, she avoided children and everything else to do with them. At one point in her recovery, she forced herself to buy baby clothes as an exposure and sit in her room with them; a way to neutralize the anxiety brought on by OCD.
This type of therapy where one is told to sit with their fears is called exposure response prevention. Buerckner paired this healing with her reiki practice which helped her to accept the parts of her she was ashamed of because of the OCD, she said.
“In meditation you are trying to practice a nonjudgmental attitude,” she said. “Reiki helped in a different way [than therapy] because it helped me to connect to a deeper part of me that was always whole and unconditionally loved, no matter what.”
Buerckner spent four months with her psychologist and seven months in reiki training.
“I kept wanting to go back to who I used to be,” she said. “I hated myself and these thoughts that haunted me.”
What kept coming from her own intuition through therapy and reiki, was that she needed to accept herself for who she was, she said.
“I think it comes down to just accepting the moment. A lot of people get caught up in accepting themselves, but it is much easier to break it down into just accepting the moment,” she said. “It is much easier to get through.”
Today, Buerckner is her own definition of “cured,” she says. She is able to go about her days and not be triggered by ruminating thoughts 24/7. She works in the community development sector in Melbourne, educating young people on further education and employment pathways. She also has her own reiki practice where she offers meditation guidance and in-person and virtual healing.
Recently, Buerckner went to a park and cried tears of joy because her first thought was, “oh, how cute,” when she saw children playing together, she said. Before therapy and reiki, she would have feared being around them.
Buerckner with her niece. For a long time she feared being around children or anything related to them, she said.
The OCD stigmas are still something Buerckner deals with today, she said. Noting that she cringes when people make subtle comments about their “OCD” acting up when a space is disorganized.
“It is not this cute, perfectionist quirk,” she said. “It is debilitating and I have had to do my best to respectfully education people on the subject.”
Advice from Laura Buerckner to you:
1. Feel your emotions without judging them as "good" or "bad." It is okay, and good, to feel them. Become curious about the sensations you feel in your body without going into a story about what it all means.
2. Exposure response prevention is the way through OCD, she said. If you can find a therapist who does this practice, exposures will be your new best friend. You will hate them at first, but they will help.
3. Shadow work and inner child healing helps to integrate all the parts of yourself—your inner child is the part of you that you keep sheltered from the rest of the world. Learning to know that side of you and accept it is a key role in OCD recovery.
4. Unconditional self-acceptance starts with the moment and feeling the raw emotions. Being able to accept ourselves and what we do is important, she said. We do not have to like it, but we do have to accept it, which means not pushing it away.
5. Find role models you can relate to who have recovered because then you will be able to see what is possible for yourself.
6. Practice Self-Compassion. The way we speak to ourselves matters. When we are kind and caring towards ourselves pulls us out of self-judgement and connects us back with our hearts.
*Two sources that greatly helped Buerckner are attached. An article by Rose Cartwright and another by Altheia Luna.
