📺 Watch on YouTube and Spotify

“You resist persists. If you want to shrink something, let it expand. If you want to get rid of something, allow it to flourish. As soon as you make one thing good, another thing becomes bad,” says Greg Schmaus, holistic health practitioner and founder of Healing 4D, who joins Mental Health in a Modern World to share his deeply personal and professional journey healing obsessive compulsive disorder.

In this episode, Greg Schmaus unpacks why OCD is skyrocketing today and how conventional approaches may miss its true roots. Drawing from his experience healing his own severe OCD after a Division 1 collegiate athletic career, he explains how trauma fragments the psyche, why unaddressed gut infections and inflammation can inflame the mind, and how true healing requires a blend of somatic work, Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, mindfulness, and paradoxical spiritual practice.

He busts common myths, shares paradoxes drawn from Zen and Taoist teachings, and outlines his integrated, holistic approach—rooted in his Four Doctors philosophy and real-world case experience—to address the entire mind-body-spirit landscape.

Tune in to Mental Health in a Modern World to discover why, for Greg Schmaus, OCD became not just something to overcome, but his greatest spiritual teacher, guiding him and his clients back to unity consciousness and genuine self-healing.

5 Key Takeaways

Healing OCD requires a comprehensive and compassionate approach—explore these five actionable steps to begin your transformation today:

1. Address unresolved trauma using Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy by working with protector and exile parts of your psyche.
2. Shift focus from obsessive thoughts to bodily sensations—practice somatic awareness to feel and process stored emotions.
3. Embrace mindfulness and non-judgmental awareness, allowing thoughts and feelings to arise and pass without resistance or attachment.
4. Build a strong healing foundation by prioritizing lifestyle essentials: a nourishing diet, restorative sleep, regular movement, and time for happiness.
5. Contemplate and practice spiritual paradoxes: let go of resisting thoughts, allow them to expand, and observe how this creates inner quiet.

Start with one of these steps today—your path to wholeness and relief begins with a single, intentional action.

Memorable Quotes

"You resist, persists. If you want to shrink something, let it expand. If you want to get rid of something, allow it to flourish. As soon as you make one thing good, another thing becomes bad."

"You cannot heal OCD in the mind; you heal it in the body. The language of the mind is thinking. The language of the body is feeling."

"OCD was the greatest spiritual teacher I've ever had because it taught me how the mind works, how reality works, how energy works, and how to eventually find my way back to that place of witnessing, that place of observing, and that mindfulness space of non-attachment and non-aversion."

Resources Mentioned

Internal Family Systems (Richard Schwartz, IFS Model) – https://ifs-institute.com/

Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu - https://amzn.to/4nijMpF

Connect with Greg

Website - https://www.healing4d.com/

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/4d_healing/

YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@gregschmaus

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-schmaus-22929589/

🎙️🎙️🎙️

Podcast Production & Marketing by FullCast: https://fullcast.co

Discover the best podcast services in the world at The Podosphere: https://www.thepodosphere.com/

Mentioned in this episode:

Embark on The HTM Journey

MHMW - HTM

Embark on The HTM Journey

MHMW - HTM

You resist persists. If you want to shrink something, let it expand. If you want

to get rid of something, allow it to flourish. As soon as you make one

thing good, another thing becomes bad. So working with some of these

deep spiritual truths and practicing them and contemplating

them and working with the different meditation practices

that can allow you to get into those states is really, really helpful. In a

world moving faster than our minds were designed to handle, mental health is becoming

one of the defining challenges of our time. Welcome to Mental Health in a

Modern World with holistic health practitioner Greg Schmauss.

After overcoming severe anxiety and OCD in his own life,

Greg dedicated the past decade to helping others heal through a fully

integrated approach to mental health, combining lifestyle coaching, psycho

emotional healing, mindfulness, and archetypal work. Over

the years, he's facilitated thousands of sessions guiding people back to

peace, clarity, and a deeper connection with themselves.

Each week, Greg shares powerful solo insights, conversations with

leading voices in holistic healing, and immersive live coaching sessions that

take you inside the healing process itself. New episodes every

Friday follow the show and start reclaiming sovereignty over your mind

in a modern world. Here's Greg. Welcome to this

week's episode on Mental Health in a modern World. So this

week we're diving into healing obsessive compulsive

disorder, healing ocd, which is a topic that is

near and dear to my heart because this is something that I struggled

with for many years, going back to when I was an

athlete playing Division 1 golf at the University of Houston. When I was 19 years

old, I began struggling with severe OCD.

And so a lot of my healing journey was initiated

from, you know, the challenges that I struggled with OCD. And I've

spent the last 10 to 15 years coaching many, many

clients and students and, you know, overcoming

this challenge. And so it's pretty widespread, especially with

a lot of the current mental health challenges that, you know,

rates are really increasing. Anxiety, depression, adhd,

ocd, they're kind of skyrocketing at the moment for many

reasons. So I just wanted to do an episode specifically

on OCD because I have so many people reach out to me as

students, as clients, as people tuning into the show on how

to heal ocd. So today we're going to take a deep dive into it.

So we're going to start with what is ocd? So a basic definition is

OCD is a chronic mental health condition characterized

by uncontrollable, reoccurring thoughts, which we would call

obsessions and repetitive behaviors which we would call

compulsions that a person feels driven to perform.

So the obsessive, compulsive nature, the obsessions,

are usually the thought patterns, and then the compulsions are

usually the behavior patterns that follow that

sometimes feel uncontrollable and that someone

needs to constantly perform and loop on. Now,

most conventional treatments are either the use of medications

like SSRIs or therapies, including

exposure and response prevention, or. Or cognitive

behavioral therapy, or a combination of medication and

therapies. And I just want to say that there is a time and place for

medications. There's a time and place for these therapies. So,

you know, I take a holistic approach. And holistic means not just

natural, holistic means, whole holistic means, all

inclusive. And sometimes that includes medication, sometimes

that includes some of these conventional therapies. So I just want people

to understand that when I talk about a holistic approach, it is all

inclusive. Now, the root causes of

ocd, from my experience, are

two. Two of the most common root causes that I've seen. Number one is

trauma. I would say that would be number one. Top of the list is

unhealed or unresolved trauma that creates

OCD as an adaptive strategy. And number two is

actually chronic infections. So actually going into the

body and biologically looking at chronic infections, chronic

inflammation, and certain autoimmune patterns that end up

creating a lot of neural inflammation. A lot of people that

have OCD very often have gut

dysbiosis or chronic strep infections,

parasite infections, things like that. So whenever we cause

inflammation or permeability in the gut, a lot of times it ends

up in creating permeability and inflammation in the brain as

well. So today we'll focus on trauma,

chronic infections, and we're going to address it, we could say, from

different vantage points. We're going to look at it from different angles. We're

going to peel it back one layer at a time, and we'll go

through the different approaches that we can take. Getting to the root

cause. Now, if we start with trauma, trauma, I

would say, is the root cause of most mental health conditions,

especially ocd. And so if we define

trauma, you know, trauma is an experience that we have

that obviously creates a stress response. But what happens

when we experience trauma is there's some part of us,

some part of the psyche that fragments off and almost gets

frozen in time. So when we experience trauma, we're

experiencing some events that some part of us actually

gets stuck in. Some part of us gets frozen in time,

and some part of us almost fragments off from the whole of us

and stays trapped in that experience. And what

happens when some part of us fragments during trauma

and get stuck in time or stuck in an experience

is we end up creating or recruiting protectors

to keep that traumatized part locked away

or deactivated. Right? So the psyche recruits

a protective system to keep that

traumatized part locked away, to keep it safe

and to keep it from getting triggered or activated.

And also, remember, trauma is stored in the body. Memory is

stored in the mind. Memory can be stored in the brain, but

trauma is really stored in the tissues. It's stored in

our fascia, it's stored in our organs. It's stored really in the

body. And so when we're approaching

the healing of trauma, we really want to approach it from a

somatic standpoint. But we will talk about how the psyches

involved, but in reality, things like ocd, they're really

healed through the body. Now, one of my favorite approaches to

working with OCD and working with the psyche in general

is an approach called ifs, which stands for

internal family systems. So this system developed by

Richard Schwartz, who's an amazing family therapist, who

developed this system about 30 years ago,

it's a way of working with the psyche using what's called

parts work. And essentially, parts work

takes the psyche and it breaks it down into this

multiplicity of parts where there's not just one self, there's almost

like many different parts involved in this one

self. Right. So a lot of people might call that multiple

personality disorder, where there's multiple voices

speaking all the time. But the truth is, we all have parts. Like,

you've had this time or this experience in your life where you've said, well, a

part of me feels this way, but another part of me feels this way. Or

a part of me wants to do this, but another part of me wants to

do that. Right? So we have, in our language, this idea of

parts. And so IFS is a way of working with

the psyche through that lens of parts.

And just to break this down through an

IFS lens, we have the core self, which we could say

is our higher self, our essential self. Then we have what's called

protector parts and protectors parts. Their job

is to protect the wounds, the traumas, the exiles

that experienced trauma once upon a time. Now,

when it comes to protector parts, we have two categories of

protectors. We have what's called managers, and we

have firefighters. So managers are the

proactive parts that try and manage the system

to make sure that exiles or traumas don't get

activated. Firefighters are

reactive Parts that once the traumas do

get activated, the firefighters are there to put out the

fire, right? So managers are proactive and

prevention oriented. Firefighters are

reactive and go to extreme measures to put out the

fire when a, when an exile or a wound or

a trauma gets activated. Now, when it

comes to ocd, we have the obsessive and

compulsive peace. So if we break that down, the obsessive

piece are very often the managers. The intrusive

thoughts, the looping thoughts, the obsessions, the micromanaging, the

controlling, the perfectionism, the worrying,

the avoidance, the planning. A lot of the obsessive

nature of ocd, the obsessive parts are

the managers and the compulsive parts are

the firefighters, right? So you can see how OCD is

actually a perfect representation of

managers and firefighters. Obsessions being

managers, compulsions being firefighters. So the

firefighters compulsively react to put out

the fire once the trauma is triggered. This could be

cleaning, reassurance seeking, checking,

ordering, micromanaging. But, but the

micromanaging would be more the managers. But the cleaning, the

reassurance, the checking, the ordering, these are ways that once

something gets triggered, the compulsion the firefighter is

there to, to soothe, to put out the fire, to make sure

that whatever gets activated, you know, gets put out

immediately. Right? So you can see all protectors

are assigned to these traumatized parts, what

we call exiles, as a result of the trauma they

experienced, right? So to try and get rid of

or treat OCD without addressing the trauma

or the exile, a lot of times does more harm than

good because you're trying to eliminate an

exiled parts protective system which you're going to create

what's called backlash. So a lot of times the

conventional therapies that try and eradicate the OCD

symptoms, or try and manage the OCD symptoms, or

try and lessen the OCD symptoms without

addressing the original trauma can often do more

harm than good because you're trying to get rid of the

protective system before the exile or the core

trauma has been addressed, right? So we have to work from,

with the protectors first until we can get down

to the exiles and the trauma. And once we heal the

trauma, a lot of times the protectors aren't as needed anymore and

they can take on different roles. So working with

OCD on a psychological level,

ifs, from my experience, is the best

modality for working with the protector parts.

The managers, which are the obsessions, the

firefighters, which are the compulsions, working with the

protectors, then getting to the exiles, healing the

trauma, and then the protectors can take on new

roles. And it almost has to be like that order of

operations. If you try and get to the exiles too

quickly, or if you try and get rid of the protectors,

you're going to create even more stress in the system.

Right. So it's a beautiful approach to working with the

psyche in a very compassionate way, a very gentle way,

and it's very nuanced, very surgical, and

really goes a long way. So I've had a lot of great success with that.

Now, healing ocd, like we said, happens in the body.

So there's a somatic approach that we need to take when it comes to

healing ocd. Healing OCD is. OCD is a lot of

mental activity, a lot of looping, a lot of obsessing, a lot

of intrusive thinking. And so, you know, there's an old saying, you

can't heal a problem at the same level that created it. So

the mind is what generates ocd. So we can't heal a

problem in the mind with more mind. We have to go

one level deeper, which is into the body. You cannot

heal OCD in the mind, you heal it in the body. And

a framework that I want to share with you that's really important to

understand is that the language of the mind

is thinking. The language of the mind is thought.

The language of the body is feeling.

The language of the mind is thinking. The language of the body

is feeling. Now, thinking and feeling are

complementary opposites. If you imagine a

seesaw, when one side goes up, the other side goes down,

and vice versa. If thinking is on one side of

the seesaw and feeling is on the other side of the

seesaw, the more we think, the less we feel.

The more we feel, the less we need to think.

And so whenever there is OCD in the mind, there's a lot of mental

activity. And a lot of times those are the protectors that are

trying to downregulate feeling. Because feeling in

the body, the body is where the trauma is. So a lot of times we

upregulate thought as a way of trying to down

regulate feeling, upregulate activity in

the mind, to down regulate awareness and

activity in the body, because the body is where the trauma is stored.

The unprocessed emotions are stored in the body.

So the more you are able to access and feel the

emotions in the body, the less activity there is in

the mind. Right? So one of the big questions I always ask,

whether it's myself, when I was healing from it, clients that I work with

Is what is the mind trying to keep me

away from feeling in my body? It's an

incredible question. What is my mind through all the mental activity?

And you can apply this to things other than ocd. You can apply this to

anxiety, you can apply this to adhd, you can apply

this to just racing thoughts. What is my mind

trying to keep me away from feeling in my body? Is

it grief and sadness? Is it

anger? Is it fear? Right. So what

is my mind, through thought, trying to keep me away

from feeling in the body? So a somatic approach

to healing OCD is very important. And once we're able

to access the feelings and emotions in the

body, the quieter the mind gets. The mind

gets quieter and quieter, the more we're able to

feel, but the less we're able to feel, the more

the mind has to upregulate thought as a way of

keeping us away from the unprocessed emotions

or traumas in the body. Right. And I always use a

blend of ifs and

somatic work. We can call it somatic ifs work,

you know, which is parts work in the psyche, but orienting

to the body. So working with the mind and the

psyche from the lens or perspective of parts and

then bringing the awareness and the healing work into the body,

it's a great combination, and it works really, really well.

Next, we're going to address it from a spiritual perspective.

So OCD is something we heal in the psyche, it's

something we heal in the body. But there's also a

spiritual crisis that we want to explore, and

there's a spiritual process that we want to address

and acknowledge when it comes to healing ocd.

So as a basic framework, the mind

is like an ocean. So imagine the mind like an ocean,

and each thought is a wave or a

ripple on the surface of the ocean. You

could say the waves are your conscious thoughts. What's

under the surface of the ocean is the unconscious.

But just in general, the ocean would be the mind,

and each wave would be a thought. Right

now, OCD is

kind of like swimming against the tide. Someone

who has OCD is not really able to go with the flow,

because OCD comes with a lot of rigidity. So OCD is kind of like

the opposite of flow. When we're going with the flow, it's very

different than the obsessive compulsive nature of ocd.

So OCD is kind of like the rigidity, which is the

opposite of flow. So OCD is very much

swimming against the tide or swimming against the

flow, or the Natural current of the ocean.

Now, mindfulness is learning how to

surf the waves, right? Awareness, Mindfulness

is learning how to surf the waves of the ocean

rather than swimming against the tide of all the time, which

first of all creates exhaustion, it creates suffering,

and eventually we drown in it. And a lot of people feel like they're

drowning in the ocd, they're drowning in their own minds. And

it's really when we're trying to swim against the tide, which

once again is always a result of unhealed trauma.

So mindfulness, the practice of mindfulness,

which I would define mindfulness as a

non judgmental awareness of your moment to

moment experience. So mindfulness, just my

definition. A non judgmental awareness

of your moment to moment experience. So a

non judgmental awareness of a moment to moment experience

allows you to ride the wave of each thought,

each emotion, each body sensation, and

each experience. Moment to moment.

And so mindfulness allows us to surf the waves

rather than ocd, swimming against the tide. So just wanted to

open it up with that analogy. And also

when I was healing ocd, I started to read a lot of

Eastern philosophy, a lot of Eastern scripture,

like Taoism and Zen Buddhism and a lot

of these beautiful ancient traditions of the Far East.

And when you would read these scriptures and these

proverbs and these, these teachings and offerings,

what I found was the deepest truths. I would always find it

would be a paradox. Like, we know the, the paradox what you

resist persists. There's a paradox.

I would read something that would say, if you want to shrink something, let it

expand. I would read another proverb that would say, if you want to get

rid of something, let it flourish, right? And

at first you're like, that doesn't make sense. But what I did was I

took those, you know, scriptures, those teachings, and I

applied it to my own mind. I applied it to my own psyche.

And what I found was if I

went the opposite direction versus trying to get rid of

the ocd, if I said, okay, I'm going to allow these

obsessive thoughts to expand, just going to tell my

mind, all right, whatever you want to think about, just go do it. You know,

I'm just going to sit back here, go do it. And all of a sudden

the mind would go calm, the mind would go silent.

Or if my mind was looping on something, I would just say to, okay, you

know, go, flourish. Do whatever it is that you want to do. I'll

give you space. And all of a sudden it would go quiet.

And I noticed that the mind works on A paradox.

The more space I gave my mind, the less it would take,

the more I would would allow it to roam free, the more it would stay

by my side. And so healing the mind

became this paradox where if I would try and get

rid of it, it would make it worse. If I would try and push it

away, it would push back. If I would resist, it would

persist. But if I allowed it to expand and

flourish, it would quiet down and go silent pretty immediately,

right? The other teaching that I found in Scripture was in the

Dao Te Ching, as soon as you make one thing good,

another thing becomes bad. Very simple teaching on

duality. And so I said, okay, well, if mindfulness is

a non judgmental awareness, that means

I can't judge one thought as good and another thought is bad.

I can't judge one thought or one feeling as good and

another feeling as bad as I need to be equally willing

to be present with the negative thoughts just as much

as the positive thoughts, be present with the uncomfortable feelings

just as much as the comfortable feelings, and actually enter

this state of what we would call non attachment and non

aversion. So non attachment and non aversion is a Buddhist

term where we're not attaching to all the positive

things and we're not in aversion to all the negative things.

Attachment and aversion creates a polarized experience in

the mind and body. A lot of times we spend our life

attaching to all the positive thoughts and living in

aversion to all the negative ones, attaching to all the

positive and pleasurable feelings and experiences, and

living in aversion to all the uncomfortable or negative

ones. And so to heal OCD and to enter

a state of mindfulness, I needed to move into a

state of non attachment and non aversion. So a

positive thought comes up or a positive feeling comes up. I don't

attach to it. A negative thought or a negative feeling comes

up. I'm not in aversion to it. And that starts to open

this spaciousness, this space of awareness, this space

of the witness or the observer that is beyond polarity,

right? And that's a spiritual experience. That's a spiritual process. That's

real spiritual healing. And so that's why OCD

is really this constant state of attachment and aversion. It's this

constant state of swimming against the tide. So healing

OCD is about surrendering attachment and

aversion and surrendering to the flow or

the way, what we would call the dao, right?

So healing OCD is surrendering to the Flow of the dao

and the practice of mindfulness through non attachment and non

aversion. And so this is why I wanted to bring this spiritual

piece. And because on a very deep level, you know, I've said this many times

on podcasts, OCD was the greatest spiritual teacher I've ever had

because it taught me how the mind works, it taught me how reality works, it

taught me how energy works, and it taught me how to

eventually find my way back to that

place of witnessing, that place of observing,

and that mindfulness space of non attachment and non

aversion. And we might call that unity consciousness,

right? And so OCD brought me back to that space

of unity consciousness that is beyond polarity, that is

beyond duality, and it's what we would call a non dual awareness.

I want to also, you know, lastly address the

lifestyle piece. You know, when I'm working with clients, we

always need to address diet and lifestyle. And

now I'm trained by Paul Check at the Czech Institute. So I always

look at it from what we call a four doctor perspective, which is Dr. Diet,

Dr. Quiet, Dr. Movement, and Dr. Happiness.

So Dr. Diet is how you're feeding your body. Dr. Quiet

is how you're resting your body. Dr. Movement is how you're moving your

body. And Dr. Happiness is how you engage your mind,

your emotions, and how you create happiness for yourself.

Now, it's very hard to heal the mind or heal OCD if you're

staying up till 3am every morning or every night. It's very hard to

heal OCD if you're eating processed foods and you're

inflaming your body all the time. It's very hard to heal OCD if

you're sedentary all the time and you're not moving your body. Right? So

the mind can only be as healthy as the body that it's living in.

And so getting the body healthy, reducing

chronic inflammation, clearing chronic infections, these

are the absolute essential building blocks to healing

the mind or healing ocd. It's very much the foundation. So

when I'm working with clients, I always make sure that the diet

and lifestyle piece is not overlooked and then that we're not

always just doing deep inner trauma healing work. If we're

eating Rice Krispies and Cheerios all

day, it's never going to work. And the reason for that is

the more unhealthy the body is, the more the nervous

system's in a chronic stress response, and the more the

nervous system's in a chronic stress response, the more the mind

is Living in a state of fear and survival. And we always

revert back to our old programs. So you can't really

heal deep trauma if the body and nervous system

is in a constant fight or flight state. So by healing the

body and reducing inflammation and clearing infections,

getting the diet cleaned up, getting to bed on time, exercising

regularly, drinking quality water, getting out in nature

and grounding, getting your feet on the earth, getting a good amount of

sunshine each day on your body, these are really the building blocks

that allow healing to take place. So it's really important that we

address what Paul Check calls the four doctors prior

to doing any deeper trauma work. Now sometimes

you need to do a little trauma healing work before someone has the

capacity to make lifestyle changes because there's a strong

saboteur or patterns of self sabotage. So sometimes

you need to work backwards. But most of the time it's

really, really helpful to address, you know,

the foundational principles of diet and lifestyle prior to

doing some of the deeper healing work. So just in

summary, trauma, chronic infections

and inflammation, these are usually the root causes of ocd.

Trauma being number one. We talked about addressing it

from a psychological standpoint and, and working with

the psyche through the lens of ifs or parts work. Working

with the psyche as a collection of parts where we have protector

parts managers which are proactive and

prevention oriented, firefighters that are reactive,

the obsessive parts being the managers, the compulsive parts being the

firefighters, working with the protective system so we can

then get to the exiles, heal the trauma, so then the

protectors can release their roles, take on new roles

rather than being what we would call ocd. So working

with the psyche from a parts perspective and then working with

the body somatically, we talked about the complimentary

opposites of thinking and feeling. And the more we think, the

less we feel, the more we feel, the quieter the mind can get. And

so really orienting into the body, working with

unprocessed feelings and emotions in the body. And once that energy

gets freed up, then the mind can begin to quiet down.

The mind is almost like a release valve or a pressure valve

for where there's energetic or emotional blocks in the body.

So working somatically and then working

spiritually, working with some of these concepts of non

duality, of moving beyond polarity, of moving

into a non judgmental awareness, which is what we would call

mindfulness. And working with the paradoxes of

healing the mind right, what you resist, persists. If you want to

shrink something, let it expand. If you want to get rid of something, allow it

to flourish. As soon as you make one thing good, another thing

becomes bad. So working with some of these deep spiritual

truths and practicing them and contemplating them and

working with the different meditation practices that can

allow you to get into those states is really, really helpful. And

then finally we have lifestyle approach, which is really

addressing diet, quiet, movement,

happiness for doctors, and making sure that we're setting the

foundation of holistic healing rather than just trying

to do targeted specific work. We have to address the

whole organism because like I've said in previous podcasts, we are

biopsychosocial spiritual beings. Bio is your

biology, psycho is your psyche, social is your environment,

and spiritual is your energetic or soul nature.

And so we have to address all four levels in order to

really have a complete system. And if you enjoyed this

podcast and you would like to take a deeper dive, I have my

Healing the Mind a Journey to Wholeness online program. It's my

21 day flagship program that takes a fully holistic and integrative

approach to mental health. I built this program out of my own

healing journey. Healing from ocd, healing from anxiety,

healing from a lot of the mental health challenges that we're focusing on

in this podcast and addressing in our world today. So to

dive into that you can go to

healing40.comhtm

and if you use the code podcast at checkout you can save 20%

off. And then you can always reach out to me for one on one coaching

by going to my website at healing4d.com so I hope

you enjoyed this journey today exploring the

nuances of O C D. I hope this podcast really supports you

in your own healing journey or anyone that you know that might struggle

with O C D. I invite you to share it with them. It's important that

we spread and share the love as much as possible because the

world really needs a lot of healing right now and I look forward to sharing

more with you in next week's podcast. Have a beautiful rest of your

day. Bye bye.