Hi Reneta and Metaph,
I've worked with OCD and the impact ideas of LOA can cause for them. With a couple of my clients, the problem is that folks read about LOA and then got rather fearful and obsessive with their own thoughts. In other words, LOA started to become part of the OCD problem, since OCD is highly tied to anxiety and feeling unsafe in the world. It's like the ideas of LOA caused these folks to start policing their thoughts so much they could not really think of anything other than their own negative thoughts...because it was the only way to try to regain some sort of control in life. I do not find exploring LOA to be very helpful for folks with OCD because of this tendency to latch on to it to create more OCD-like habits. It's hard to explain but I hope that makes sense...
Don't worry, this can be healed. I've seen pretty serious OCD cases turn around. It really heped when people could first stop obsessing on the whole LOA thing. Not an easy thing to do, when folks have started clinging to it for control. But it was making the obsessive thought-policing impulse even worse for them...
I suggest it is much better to first focus on regaining a feeling of safety, of finding ways to reduce the terrible anxiety. There are several ways this can be done. People who do not know OCD may have trouble understanding OCD, as there might be the idea that you just put out an LOA intention to calm down, coupled with a lot of positive affirmations and visualizations, and voila! But it is not always so easy, yes? Indeed, I wish it were.
In some cases, with OCD folks caught up with LOA, I had to get real with these folks, to show them that obsessing on LOA was only making the OCD worse. LOA just sort of became another way to justify the OCD, if that makes any sense. It became a justification to police their own repetitive thoughts.
To me, the first steps in healing this kind of anxiety need to be done outside the whole LOA model. The mind cannot heal itself when it is so anxious. If you could have, you would have already, right? So, no matter how well-intentioned the ideas of LOA are, it is not where I would start with healing OCD. OCD healing requires drawing on a different bucket of resources than the mind. You have several other buckets of resources available...
Hope this helps. There is help available, and there's not one approach that magically fits everyone dealing with OCD. But it is do-able.
I wish you the best, and good luck on your journey!
Sincerely,
Orca
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