Living with an anxiety disorder or OCD is like living with a cult leader who has set up shop in your own head.

Hello everybody. Welcome back to The Anxious Truth. This is episode 340 of the podcast. We are recording in March of 2026. We are low budget. We are brief today. There is no video for YouTube, no production values. We're just going to get right to the point.

I'm Drew Linsalada, creator, and host of The Anxious Truth.

I'm a therapist that specializes in the treatment of anxiety and anxiety disorders

and also a former sufferer of these very things that we talk about in this podcast.

And this week, I do want to talk about how living with anxiety or OCD is like living with a cult leader who is in your head. No plugs. If you want to know more about the work that I do, just head on over to my website at theanxioustruth.com. Everything is linked over there, so check it out or don't. Hopefully this episode resonates with you in some way and is helpful in some way. So let's get right into it. In the work that I do,

whether you are listening to this podcast or reading my books or whatever, you're always going to

see the principles of third wave therapies. Third wave mindfulness and acceptance based therapies

are what we use to treat anxiety and OCD and things of that nature, than the most effective ways

that we have. And it's what I use in my practice. And as part of the third wave world, we talk about a principle called cognitive fusion all the time. In cognitive fusion, you take your thoughts very, very seriously. You get fused with them and glued to them. You don't even think to question them. They must be valid. They must be correct. they must be followed. But instead of talking about cognitive fusion, like, oh, you're fused with your thoughts,

I like to use the metaphor of a cult leader that lives in your head. You wind up in this sort of

like dysfunctional, abusive, predatory relationship with a cult leader. That is anxiety. That is your

anxiety disorder. That is your anxiety disorder. That is your

OCD. It's not just that you are fused with your thoughts and sort of overvaluing them and

lose the ability to be discerning about your thoughts. You are in a relationship with an anxiety or

OCD that acts like a totalitarian cult leader. And I want to go through a few ways that it sort of shows up that way.

Maybe it helps you to reframe things a little bit and understand why you keep getting tricked

by your thoughts. And if you're listening to this podcast, I mean, if this is your first episode,

welcome, feel free to check out all the other episodes. But if you've been following along with me

for a while, you may be in that situation where like, yeah, well, I know that this isn't right. I understand that I don't have to follow these thoughts, but I just can't help it because they seem so powerful and strong. And you get frustrated. So this may be a way for you to sort of reframe that a little bit. It is not going to fix you. This is not meant to like, oh, it's a cult leader. Cool. I'm cured. Thanks, true. And you go on your merry way. But this framework may help you understand why it is in fact safe to disobey the cult leader. Even though the cult leader in your head, the anxiety disorder in the OCD, will insist very loudly that it is not safe. So let's go through a few highlights of this metaphor that I often bring up.

In the case of an anxiety disorder or OCD, you wind up in that sort of us versus them mentality, right?

Your anxiety disorder, your OCD, the cult leader, will use the typical cult leader tactic of saying that the outside

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