As we kick off OCD Awareness Week, I’d like to highlight a title that will publish in November.

Michael Alcée, a clinical psychologist diagnosed with OCD, writes, “OCD will give you perfection, but it will take your soul.”

In The Upside of OCD, he digs into that statement to present new, integrated ways of treating this anxiety disorder. I was skeptical about the title, but I was also intrigued by his provocative premise: What if you could learn to embrace the empathy and creative fire of OCD? What if you could harness them as gifts and break the grip of fear, doubt, and self-loathing? What if you could see your OCD not as a problem to be managed but as a possibility to be nurtured?

His theory builds on something I know from personal experience. My loved ones with OCD are hypersensitive to the emotional needs of others. But that empathy comes at a price: it doesn’t leave room for their emotional needs.

How can you own that emotional insecurity rather than have it own you?

Alcée argues that OCD alerts you to a realistic concern, but in such an exaggerated, negative way that it distorts and coopts that concern. It creates a distracting side show when you need to be focused on the main event: how and why OCD latches on to a particular trigger at a particular moment.

OCD doesn’t want a conversation that reveals layers of meaning; it wants an interrogation and definitive answers. It undermines rather that illuminates; it’s a form of self-abuse that pokes at your pain and inflicts more pain in a never-ending cycle of trauma. It’s about trying to escape feelings through action rather than acknowledging and welcoming those feelings.

But if, according to Alcée, you embrace the complexities of those feelings, you can find the muse hiding behind “the critic”. He encourages you to question the either/or conceptions of OCD and examine the nuances, not the negativity, of your anxiety. This, he argues, allows you to decode the OCD riddle and find meaning in the meaningless.

With evidence from the successes of his patients and the work of famous artists, scientists, and activists with OCD—from Darwin to Greta Thunberg—Alcée offers strategies for rethinking your anxiety. Above all else, he encourages you to be alert to all the feelings you’re experiencing—to give them the space that will create healthy boundaries and allow you to embrace the upside of OCD: a generous heart and expansive mind.

I plan to re-read this book and look forward to discussing these ideas with my guys.