F*ck Intuition: Haley Jakobson on OCD and the Perils of “Trusting Your Gut”

“Do you have a lot of gut feelings?” my OCD therapist asked me. “Constantly,” I replied, as if it was the most obvious thing about me.

That’s because, in part, it was. Until that day, that particular conversation, I had always considered myself to be highly intuitive. I felt that there was a guiding force leading me through my life. The universe was being channeled through me and directing my intuitive compass on where to go. I believed I had significant power, that my choices and decisions were hefty — they didn’t just affect me but everyone around me. In many ways my gut-feelings were identity defining, even though they rarely made me feel good. I’d spent decades of my life sliced open, intestines hanging out, a mess of unrelenting organ-churning emotion disguised as a human girl in a puffy North Face jacket. I was all gut.

“People with OCD often mistake their obsessions with their intuition,” my OCD therapist said.

It was that sentence alone that changed my life forever.

Intuition was as close to a religion I ever had. I saw it as a vital roadmap to life, the ultimate decider of my choices. I took it extremely seriously. So seriously that I listened when it told me every relationship I entered was destined to fail. So seriously that I listened when it told me it was up to me to save my grandmother from dying from stage four pancreatic cancer. So seriously that I listened when it told me to renounce all my worldly possessions and go live in a cave like the Buddha.

My intuition always wanted to take from me, never give. It told me my pain was meant for me, that this was my journey, my burden to bear. The universe had picked me and I had no choice but to listen.

My intuition was not kind to me. It wasn’t gentle. It was urgent, unrelenting, forceful. It made me replay the same thoughts and fears on a constant loop, begging me to look at the problem and fix the problem, to take immediate action even if it required blowing up my life.

My intuition took over my dreams and filled me with panic so overwhelming I'd cry for hours, begging the universe to purge it out of me.

Yeah, so, turns out that’s not what intuition is supposed to feel like. It also turns out the voice in my head has never been a direct line to God (surprise!). It was, and always has been, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

OCD is very black and white. Good or bad. OCD likes things to be simple, straightforward, and devastatingly upsetting. Folks with OCD can get particularly attached to platitudes with no nuance, superstitions, and reductive advice. I don’t doubt that some people really do have an internal compass that leads them – but for me the lore of the almighty intuition has been harmful, and one of the reasons I didn’t seek a diagnosis sooner.

I realize now how I explained away my obsessions for years by insisting my intuition was telling me what was important. I’d been taught, as many women are, that my body knew all the answers and to listen to it if it was telling me something.

I sincerely believed the only way to know if something was right for me or not was by listening to my gut. But because I have a disorder that is ruled by fear and obsession, my gut would always point to the worst-case, most destructive, most unbearable version of life. That’s what I thought gut-feelings were.

What I didn’t know is that for people without OCD, intuition does not feel like a punishing, damning force.

When my therapist explained why my gut-feelings had such a chokehold on me, I felt two things: relief, and entirely lost. I’d made my obsessive feelings part of my identity, despite how agonizing they were to experience. This is common for folks post diagnosis — when you live your life so solely focused on solving the thing that incessantly terrifies you, it can feel like it defines you.

Every person with OCD has a theme, or a few themes, that are especially sticky for them. The most popular girls and their senior superlatives are: contamination (most likely to fear having germs kill you), health (most likely to fear being struck by fatal illness), sexuality (most likely to fear that you’re lying about your sexual orientation), scrupulosity (most likely to fear going to hell or fear being damned by the universe), relationship (most likely to fear not actually loving your partner or fear your partner not actually loving you), harm (most likely to fear being a serial killer), pedophilia (most likely to fear hurting children), and magical thinking (most likely to fear your thoughts having terrible repercussions). It’s important to know that OCD can touch anything — and it’s usually the things we care most about. The disorder is ego-dystonic, meaning it latches onto our deepest values.

And there it is. The magic word.

On the day my OCD therapist explained to me how misleading my “intuition” had been, she also offered a way to shift the focus from my obsessions and the intolerable feelings that came with them to something much more stable and trustworthy: my values.

In Exposure and Response Prevention therapy (ERP), you expose yourself to your deepest fears from most tolerable to least tolerable with the intention of teaching your brain it can tolerate discomfort. Over time, the obsessions and the intensity of the fear lessens. In ERP therapy I finally began to diffuse from over-identifying with my “gut feelings” and the stories I made out of them. It was like my entire world opened up. I had choices, and agency, and the capacity to consider what actually mattered to me — what my values really were.

ERP therapy has made me an unbelievably resilient person and allowed me to live out my values while tolerating the noise of my obsessions and subsequent intense feelings that come with them.

These days, I’m intuition-abstinent. If my body keeps a score, I wouldn’t know — I'm not watching the game. I often tell people “I have OCD, I don’t get to have gut feelings.” I can’t tell you how much relief that gives me.

I don’t live a feelings-based lifestyle, I live a values-based one. I have my therapist, my wonderful therapist, to thank for that.