Episode 10: External Validation: The Silent Mask We Wear

I am excited to share this episode, it is a personal account of the different masks I have worn for decades trying to gain external validation. After my experience with OCD and my childhood experiences, I began looking to society and the world to build my worth - externally. This is impossible, but I did not know that. Not having the ability or skills to see any sort of worth in myself, I tried countless ways that the world, other people, and how I could impress everything and everyone as a means of finding internal worth. This is a bottomless cup that needs more and more but will never provide fulfillment, contentedness, or value. 

Today I talk about what that looked like for me, how our experience with OCD can encourage this, and what it took for me to finally see that - me - just myself - can actually be enough. 

I hope this episode helps you feel less alone if you are on the quest to feel whole, and wanting to experience the elusive feelings of self-love! It is attainable...but, it is a journey. 

Community was so helpful for me on this path, and if you are in need of a community fo people who can help you feel more accepted, less alone, and more connected to people who understand, please check out my online community for weekly support, monthly classes and events at https://the-ocd-support-community.co.mn

If this podcast inspires, supports, and gives you hope and you'd like to support us monthly or sponsor us, please visit our patreon page and become a member. Your contribution will help us continue the podcast and help us provide even more resources for our community! www.patreon.com/intrusivethoughtsunmasked

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Welcome to Intrusive Thoughts Unmasked, the podcast where we explore what it's really like to live with intrusions, the emotional landscape that comes with them, and the common experiences so many of us share. I'm Chrissy Hodges, and I created this podcast to bring lived experience into the light for those navigating intrusions and mental rituals with OCD. My hope that it's here, you can finally take off the mask we so often wear to hide this disorder. I want you to feel seen, understood, and accepted exactly as you are. That we don't know is a mask. And I'm going to use my personal experience to help shed some light. If this is something that you have experienced, or even in hindsight, you may be able to recognize is going on because it's really common for those of us with OCD, and I'll explain why this is coming up for me lately. And one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you about it today is because I have recently started a graduate program. And I am in grad school going back to get my clinical master's in counseling. And in the first semester, they ask a lot of questions about why you're getting your grad school degree and what inspired you to do this, yada, yada, yada. And I've had to reflect on how I'm 49 years old going back to get my graduate degree and why I didn't do that earlier. And it's brought up a time in my life that I like to call the terrible 20s, where I was going to go back to grad school for counseling in my twenties, but I didn't believe that I deserved it. I didn't believe I was good enough. And it actually was a decision that I made against external validation that I feel like was the best decision. Now to be able to see I am going back for the right reasons. I'm going back because it is part of my values and my authentic self. 20 years later has been interesting to reflect on. And for those of us with OCD, this can be something that we chase for years and years and years because OCD tears us down. It destroys our self-worth. It diminishes any feelings that we have that we deserve anything good. It makes us believe that we're damaged goods. And so sometimes the easiest thing to do is to seek that validation externally. What does the world see as worthy? What does the world see as deserving? Well then how can I get that and how can I get that quickly? And in hopes that it will fill me up, that it will make me feel worthy, that it will make me feel whole because I don't feel like I can do that on my own. I have very much struggled with this for a majority of my life and didn't know it until hindsight. So if you're listening to this episode and you're thinking, I don't think that this has anything to do with me. Because 20 years ago, I would hear an episode like this and be like, this has nothing to do with me. And now here I am saying it had everything to do with my life after OCD and after my childhood, in order to try to find some way in the world that I felt like I belonged, that I felt like I was worthy and deserving of anything. So I just reached and clawed at anything externally that would help me feel full and whole, but it was just filling a bottomless cup. Now, this may feel a little stream of consciousness. Uh, I did not script this at all. And I think that's why I like this podcast and I've been really enjoying it, is that nobody really is scripting. They're just talking about what these things mean to them. And today I really wanted to share this with you, especially with what I've been going through lately. So I'm gonna walk you through a couple decades of my life, how external validation was something that I kept seeking out, but we could never feel fulfilled on. So after a suicide attempt and hospitalization, I went through successful treatment with Dr. Phillipson and then also graduated from Georgia Southern University. I was way more proud of graduating from ERP, by the way. But nobody else seemed to be more proud of that. My family was just like, thank goodness she's she's better, and we're done with this. And now she's graduated from college, and her life is going to be amazing, and we never have to think about this OCD again. I thought that too, to be honest. But that's just not how things go. Dr. Phillipson in no means said this, but it was very much, you know how to manage OCD, you've done great in therapy, this has been effective, so go out and live your life. He wasn't saying to me, go live your life, you'll never live with OCD again. But I took it that way because most of us take it that way. I'm feeling relief. OCD will never come back the way that it did. I never have to live with this. But there was so much for me. There were so many layers. It wasn't just the OCD, it was the trauma from what I'd experienced. It was the shame of hiding all that from people for so long and still feeling like I was hiding things. It was the anger of, are you kidding me? I just wasted how many years of my life? I'm I'm in my early 20s, I'm graduating from college, everybody else knows what the hell they want to do. I have no clue. None. I feel like I had to catch up. In fact, everything about what I believed felt destroyed because of religious scrupulosity. So I'm I was starting from scratch in my 20s where other people had been able to experience so many things growing up, knowing where they're gonna go. I experienced jealousy. Oh, I hated everybody that that that had their shit figured out, right? Everybody knew what they were gonna do, they had a plan. I didn't know anything. I changed my major to psychology, just probably trying to figure out what was going on with me. But with psychology, you can't get a job unless it's an entry-level job. And I refused to work an eight to five job that I didn't want to do because I had been trapped for so long in my brain. The last thing I needed was to be externally trapped. I was in my 20s and I was supposed to go live life, and it was supposed to be great, but I felt broken and empty and worthless. The world thought I was disgusting. And so I thought to myself, what do I do? What does society love? Because if society loves me, maybe I could love me, and that's where the quest for external validation started. I started that quest with trying to get cool jobs. Maybe I could distinguish myself from other people. I felt so inferior. How could I overcompensate with things that made it look like, oh my gosh, Chrissy has all her shit together? Chrissy has such a cool life. Chrissy is so cool because I did not feel cool. I had a terrible story. I had a stigmatizing story. I didn't want anyone to know. I was hiding everything from everybody. And so I just thought to myself, if I can just cover this all up with something cool, people will see that about me and they'll accept me and they'll love me, and maybe they'll love me enough that I'll love me. So my first cool job was to become a flight attendant. I was based out of Atlanta, right out of college. It was the worst job I've ever had. I was on reserve, I didn't have a permanent schedule, I got the shit trips, I stayed in horrible hotels. It is not glamorous. Now, if you stay in flight attending for a long time, you'll get uh you'll get a good schedule, you get seniority. I wasn't willing to do that. It was so lonely. I would see hundreds, I would see thousands of people per day in the airports and on the planes and everything else, and I've never felt so lonely. I'd never felt so jealous of people coming onto the planes, having places to go, things to do. I remember seeing people and being like, they have a purpose. I don't. I hated the job. I realized I was a homebody, but what was I gonna be home for? I couldn't stand to be with myself. I was so lost. I quit after nine months, which of course was a disappointment to my family. I'd gotten this job and quit. I'd just gone through OCD, so everything felt like a disappointment. I was also a disappointment to myself. I didn't want a nine to five job. I don't want to climb a ladder, I don't want this, I don't want that, I don't know who I am. So I thought to myself, okay, I'm gonna escape. What's another cool job I can get? I'm gonna go to Colorado. There's something about the Rocky Mountains. This was a moment of authenticity, kind of that internal validation. I do want to be in the mountains, and that's where I went. I got into my car and I drove out to the Rocky Mountains, and I got a job as at a dude ranch. And I worked at the dude ranches for the next year and a half. And I will tell you, it was a phenomenal experience. It was a time where I was so engrossed in what was going on at the time. I was I was discovering so many new things. At one dude ranch, it was a hunting ranch, so I was learning about all that stuff, riding ATVs, driving in the snow. I was going into ditches in my Honda Civic in Colorado. And then in the winter, I worked at a dude ranch that did like cross-country skiing and stuff. So I learned about so it was amazing. After a couple years, I moved out to Steamboat Springs, and this is where things kind of went back into that in external validation piece. And this is especially where it went to the graduate degree stuff. I come from a family where graduate degrees are respected. And if you're not going to get a graduate degree, you better have a job where you're climbing the ladder. And I wasn't at that point yet. But I also desperately wanted approval and love from my family, which I thought I had destroyed based on what I'd been through with OCD. Turns out I probably really didn't have the that unconditional love anyway from them. But I thought to myself, okay, I'll just go back and get my masters in my 20s. I didn't want to get my masters. But I'm applying, thinking to myself, if I do, I will get the validation, I will get the love, I will get whatever. So I moved back to Steamboat Springs and started the process of doing all this. While also thinking to myself, how can I get validation from the rest of the world? I live in a cool place, still feeling shame, still feeling jealousy of everybody else because everybody has everything figured out and I know nothing. I'm a lost soul walking this planet with a brain disorder that is continuing, by the way, to assault me. And I didn't know it because it wasn't showing up with sexual intrusive thoughts. It was showing up in different ways that I didn't see. And so I was anxious and didn't recognize it as OCD because I thought I was cured, but I also don't have meaning and purpose. And this is something that I hear a lot of times with people in their 20s, in the terrible 20s with OCD. I'm rapidly approaching my 30s. I have no purpose. I don't know who I am. I should be doing more. And that's exactly how I felt. So I started looking in different areas for external validation. Okay, I need to get in a relationship and I need to get married, having the unconditional love of my life, which by the way, I have been continuing to seek almost through my whole life. If I just find one person, they'll love me enough that I can love myself through them. That has been a huge source of external validation. And that was that was one of the first times of like, okay, this person, I'll marry them. They will love me enough to love us both. I was also heavily thinking to myself, I'm just gonna be this Uber athlete. I was already an athlete anyway, but I was like, let's take it to the extreme, and now I'm unique. And I am people will look in and be like, oh my god, look how cool it is that she does this. Again, validation because I couldn't see any worth of myself. So I was doing like marathons and half marathons, and I was doing like I was like racing mountain bikes and doing 24-hour solo races. It was in it was insane. And nothing brought me any sort of internal love, internal acceptance, which is really what I was seeking. But I thought society and my family and everything else could do it for me and you know my potential husband. So the grad school died on the table when we decided let's just get married instead of you going to grad school. That's always a good decision. Honestly, it let me off the hook because I didn't want to go. I wasn't ready, I didn't feel like I deserved it. I certainly would not have been a good therapist, so thank goodness I didn't go. It was one of those times that I think something internally was saying no. Obviously, it said yes to getting married. My first husband was not a bad guy, it just was not the right fit, it was external validation. And so we got married. It did not last. I was married for less than a year. I thought, okay, so marriage doesn't work, grad school's not working, what can I do now? So in my early, early 30s, I became an entrepreneur. Now I'm an entrepreneur, and now I have worth and I have societal approval. And so in my mind, I'd made up this grandiose plan about how I was gonna do all this stuff and it was gonna be so great. And I'm an entrepreneur, I had no business sense at that point. I was terrible. But I owned a clothing store in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. I will be honest with you, it's kind of like the Dude Ranch. I had such a good time. It was an authentic adventure for a while. I really did find a lot of myself in creative expression through clothing. I know that sounds weird, but it's true. I was able to create a business based on my tastes and uh how I looked at the world. It was so fun until it wasn't. Because to me, in my mind, it couldn't just be this is what I'm doing. It had to be some grandiose plan to overcompensate for my inferiority. I felt so shitty about myself. I was still carrying around all these heavy emotions about OCD and that I wasn't worthy. And I was feeling that way from my family, from them needing to be the external validation I needed that I was never going to get, by the way. And so to not get that and not to feel that way in society, I was hoping that that's what being an entrepreneur would bring me and finally fill me up. And it did not. I owned a clothing store starting in 2005 for seven years. If many of you remember, that was during the big recession. And at Steamboat Springs, we were a ski town. So we did not experience the recession until a year after everybody else. It was a delayed response. So I thought I was immune for a while until 2009 hit. And then all of a sudden, this part of me that was upholding some sort of worth and approval from society and from the world was starting to get stripped away because of the economy. This is why it's so dangerous to put your worth into external things. This is beyond my control. So the store started to fall apart. What do I do? How can I correct this? I'm gonna move to Denver. I'm gonna move my store down to Denver, open it there, because I know I can be successful. The big towns are gonna recover before the small towns. So this is a great idea in hindsight because I had no business experience. This was not a good idea. It was not a good idea for my mental health either. I went to a brand new town under duress financially and trying to build a business in a recession. It was terrible. But I kept going because I was holding on to this very slim string of hope off the cliff that oh my gosh, I can make this work and I will finally feel worthy. People will finally see that I have some sort of worth if my store could make it. Now, what I did not count on was that kind of stress causing an OCD flare-up, so big that I could not ignore it. And that is what happened. I had the store for a year and a half before the flare-up hit, and I relapsed with a harm OCD with all the circumstances. I mean, everything, the stress, the new environment, the move, the change. So I relapsed and it was really bad. But it also was this moment that was oh my gosh, I don't think retail is for me. Thank goodness I realized that. I think I want to give back. Now, this was the first moment for me of internal validation that I have something to give that's true and authentic to me. That isn't for selfish reasons, that isn't for approval or acceptance. This is just, I want to do this. I sometimes look back on this time with extreme nostalgia. I loved that time of my life. I had no idea what was coming, and I also was able to connect very authentically to the core. I almost sometimes say, like to my soul. I knew this is what I wanted. I knew this is what I was gonna do. It was the first time I unknowingly followed my internal validation. I closed my store down, I did everything that I could at that point, uh, just odd jobs here and there. I did like marketing and stuff like that for other businesses to figure out how to make this work. Now then I found peer support was which also was a very huge internal validation for me because it was authentically something that I thought, oh my goodness, this is what I want to do. So I worked for several years in uh different areas of peer support and I loved it and it was great. And then I started doing advocacy. I met so many cool people doing so many fun things. It was the first with the peer support and all of that. It was the first time really I was I felt like I am on track. I'm experiencing internal validation. I'm at Stuart Ralph of the OCD Stories, Aaron Hart. Harvey made of millions, who used to have intrusive thoughts.org, Stephen Smith, Allison Dots, and Margaret Sissant. Like these people that were just huge inspirations to me. Uh, we were all doing things for the same reasons, uh, just this authentic piece. And I just thought, oh my gosh, I found it. And then COVID hit. And COVID was a beast. I was in a relationship at that point. This was my second marriage, and I was in a relationship, still in very many areas of my life, I was still chasing external validation through relationships, through athleticism, through things that I just couldn't find within myself. I was still trying to chase those things. And when COVID came along, all a lot of those things got shut down for a lot of us. My relationship did not last through COVID. We were a COVID casualty. I developed OCD around physical stuff, so I was having intrusions around like pain in my feet, so that took away the athleticism. I'm also getting older at that point. So then you're looking at yourself on Zoom all the time. You're looking at yourself because you're not interacting, you're isolating, like things were tough. I felt like 2029 to 2023 was a really horrible time of life. And a really horrible time in evaluating that external validation, which I still just hadn't identified, that I wasn't needing because I just couldn't find the worth within myself. I continued to feel inferior, um, regardless of doing advocacy and peer support and stuff like that. Advocacy during COVID, very much in so many industries, became how do I make money from home? So how do I go from I want to help one person to how many followers I can get? Which took advocacy from actual altruism to advocacy to I need to be an influencer. I knew instinctually that wasn't what I wanted to do, and but I felt out of place because that's where everybody was going. And I didn't know how to fit into that world. So then here we go. External validation. How do I do that? So I tried for a while, but it just felt miserable. And when I feel miserable and trapped, A, that's when OCD comes up, and B, that's when my cup, the internal cup that is just bottomless, that's all I'm trying to fill. When I entered my 40s, this was when I first realized through a lot of circumstances, and I won't go into it, maybe things that have happened to me are the reason why I feel these ways. So I started to get trauma therapy. I realized a lot of the stuff that was happening with OCD was also a result of core fears and things of that nature that had to do with my childhood. And I needed to sort that out. So I started to get trauma therapy, and I started to just realize I had no idea who I was. I had no idea how to self-love, I had no idea how to have self-compassion, and I need to figure out how to do that. Right around that time, my marriage fell apart. And this was my second marriage that failed. And I thought to myself, I have got to figure out what my authentic self is, who I am. And so I started following some of those cues, and I ended up buying a little cabin in this little town in the mountains, which is of course what I love and what I wanted. Now, in this time of grief, I had a relationship with someone very short. It wasn't that meaningful, it wasn't that big, but it had a big impact. This person was an avoidant attachment, and I am an anxious attachment, or was at that time. I'm not anymore, actually. This person in that relationship represented the ability for me to experience grief. I was rejected in this relationship, and the rejection put me in a position to have to face a lot of the grief from years I'd experienced. And I think a lot of that grief was chasing after societal expectations, people, I mean, I'm just gonna be blunt, family that could never accept me, that would never approve of me. They're incapable. Having to actually face grief felt like facing OCD. I was scared because I was afraid that it would never go away, that I would be trapped forever, that I would be forced to feel this horrible for the rest of my life. But I think at this point, I was ready. I was tired of hating myself. I was tired of feeling like everybody else was responsible for how I felt about myself, that the world was responsible for how I felt about myself. I was desperate to find myself authentically. I was desperate to learn about myself and to want to feel content in my own skin. And I dove into that grief. At some point, I thought this has got to end. And I I tried, I was trying everything to make the feelings go away, but you know how it is with OCD. The more you try, the worse it gets. At one point, I went to Europe. I thought, I've got to get out of my house. I got to get out of the country. Maybe, maybe going to Europe will help. So I went uh overseas to see some of my good friends. I saw Stuart Ralph of the OCD stories. I met him at a restaurant. It was at a hotel that I was staying at, and we had lunch, and we were talking, and I was just trying to explain to him what was going on and how I was feeling. And Stuart said, It sounds like you really need to practice and dig into self-compassion. I looked at him with this blank stare, and I said, Stu, I don't know what that means. I don't know how to find self-compassion. And in my mind, I didn't say to him, I don't deserve self-compassion. And I really don't remember what he said after that. I was then, I was then trapped in my internal dialogue. But I took that, I took that with me. Okay, how do I practice self-compassion? If Stu says this is the remedy, then that must be the remedy. Anyway, I went, I came back home and probably pushed through about another three or four weeks of allowing myself to experience this emotion that I'd never allowed myself to before. And it passed. A few months later, in reflecting on those those months, wow, that felt so much like OCD. And I have survived OCD at the lowest point, and now I have survived grief when I didn't think I could in the middle of it. And there was something in there that clicked for me. I am resilient, I am capable, I can do these things on my own. I have the internal strength over the next year. What Stu had said, learning self-compassion presented itself many times. One time especially, I struggle with alcohol. At some point, I'll do a uh podcast on that with my good friend Margaret Sisson. I struggle with it as a means of escape, as a means of engaging with it so I don't have to see myself, so I didn't didn't have to feel these big emotions. I had an experience over the next year where I had a trauma response, something that had happened with a family member. And I went to reach for a bottle of wine at 2 p.m. on a Sunday. Because I was having this, these feelings in my body. These, I felt like I couldn't breathe. I felt like my chest was caving in, my jaw was clenching. I didn't realize that it was a trauma response. I didn't realize I was having this to something that had happened earlier. And I thought, why are you reaching for a bottle of wine at 2 p.m., Chrissy? And then it hit me. You're having a reaction and you're looking to escape. And I started crying because I realized that behavior was a survival mechanism for me. And the compassion flooded in. The compassion for what I have endured in my childhood, what I had endured with OCD, and almost putting the pieces together of what I had to do, the external validation. I saw for two decades because I was so incapable of loving myself. I was so filled with disgust about who I was. These were the signals I had gotten as a young child, and I believed them. And now this happened to you. This happened to you. You are not bad. You are not a monster. You are not someone that's not worthy of love. And I knew right then I didn't have to seek it anymore. I'd finally learned how to have self-compassion. And how I did that was seeing that what I had been through was something that happened to me. Childhood stuff and OCD. I didn't cause it. It was not my fault. And everything changed. I want you to know that self-compassion does not come easy for me. It's not like I had this moment and every day I'm like, oh, self-compassion for Chrissy. It was the first indication that I was deserving. It was the first time I was able to see what I had been through as something that had happened not because of me, but something that happened that I had to survive by whatever means I could. Through these experiences in that one year, that's when I really began to reflect and see just how many things I was looking to in my life to try to fill myself up that never were going to. They were never going to give me the sort of worth, peace, contentment that I could actually just give myself. It didn't feel like there was this big aha moment with fireworks or a celebration. It just was moments of of peace. It was these little things. It's the little mundane things in the world that I've created that actually give me the validation. It's nothing big. It's nothing grandiose. It's not someone else giving me enough love. So now I know I deserve it. It's not getting this wonderful job and and now the world sees that I'm worthy and I'm someone. It's not being beautiful and young forever. It's not any of that. But those are things sometimes that we chase because we can't face our own selves. Those are things that we look to to build ourselves back up because we've been torn down by OCD. We've been torn down by our childhoods, by trauma. And when we're doing those things, we are wearing a mask. We're wearing a mask to hide from ourselves. And it's a painful one. The grief is that was a lot of time wasted. There's regret and there's time lost that I could have learned more about myself, but I have compassion for that because again, that wasn't my fault. I was doing the best that I could to survive. So are you. People with OCD are incredibly resilient, incredibly strong, incredibly empathetic and compassionate, but not to ourselves. If you have been wearing an external validation mask, I just want you to know you're doing it because you want to feel whole and worthy. And that's absolutely okay because you do deserve that. You can start today to learn how to take that mask off from yourself and find out who you are authentically. The cup inside of you that is not bottomless, but can be filled up with who you are, with what you have been through, what you have survived. Look at your experience and say, look what I have survived. Our quest for external validation is probably something that we as human beings will always fall into. Having approval, being accepted, being loved is is a is a human desire. But at what expense? The more that we chase that, the farther we're running from ourselves. Internal validation is hard and it is difficult after going through what we have gone through with OCD. I want you to see that what you've been through and what you have survived has worth. And if that experience has worth, then so do you. And I believe that about you.com slash Intrusive Thoughts Unmasked. And remember, when you're here, you do not have to wear the mask. You're seen, you're understood, and you're accepted exactly as you are. See you next week.