Witchcraft and the Neurally Complex Mind

Fellow Seekers-

Mental illness has always been manipulated by those in power to maintain control by limiting access to resources, stability, and political voice. Although having a shared language for mental health issues matters, diagnoses have periodically been wielded against the people who threaten the order of things — the grieving, the resistant, the visionary, the ones who would not comply. To be labeled disordered is, often, to be removed from the conversation. Stripped of credibility. Systems of power require compliance — of body, of mind, of spirit — and the mind that cannot be standardized is a problem to be managed, not a person to be heard.

Witchcraft lives in that same territory. It has historically been the practice of the disenfranchised — the ones without access to institutional power who tended to their communities anyway, who read the world sideways, who refused to need permission. (Check out a previous blog on the historical context of the term "witchcraft" here.)

The neurodivergent practitioner whose cosmology falls outside sanctioned religion, the community healer working outside licensed walls — both represent a kind of refusal, even when that refusal is simply the act of existing as you are. When we hold mental health and witchcraft together, we are holding two things that power has consistently tried to silence. Reclaiming your mental health outside of shame, and your spiritual practice outside of ridicule, are both acts of power. Not because they are easy, but because both have been used to keep people small.

For me, it started as whispers. A jolt. A subtle wrongness I couldn't name — something slightly off in my body, in the room, in the moment. No clear threat, no obvious trigger. Just a creeping discomfort that would settle in and begin to hum. And then my mind would do what OCD minds do: it would reach for an explanation. Something bad is coming. Something is wrong. You need to figure out what.

The cruelest part was that I often couldn't tell you what I was distressed about. The fear wasn't attached to something specific — it was atmospheric. A feeling that the world had gone slightly askew and that I was somehow responsible for setting it right, or that my failure to do so would cost me something I couldn't name. This feeling on the periphery would seep into my skin, down through my flesh and into my bones, settling between my lungs, radiating down my gut and up to clenching my throat.

This is called Just Right OCD — a subtype that doesn't always announce itself with the fears people typically associate with OCD. There is no contamination, no intrusive image, no clear catastrophe to identify. Instead there is a persistent, uncomfortable not-quite-rightness — a sensory or felt sense that something is incomplete, unresolved, slightly wrong. The compulsions that follow aren't about preventing a specific outcome. They are an attempt to relieve the discomfort itself, to restore a feeling of okayness that keeps slipping away. A desperate attempt to feel "right" again. It is exhausting in a way that is hard to explain, because from the outside nothing appears to be wrong. From the inside, the wrongness is everything.

What I have found, living at the intersection of a neurally complex mind and a magical practice, is that the tools speak to each other. The clinical language and the craft language are, in many places, pointing at the same thing — just arriving from different directions, wearing different clothes. Here are three that have mattered most to me.

Cognitive Reappraisal / Discernment

In CBT, cognitive reappraisal is the practice of shifting how you interpret a thought or experience — not suppressing it, but learning to meet it differently. For OCD, this means developing the inner resource to feel the distress rise and know, in your body: I can handle this. I have moved through this before and I will again. In witchcraft, we call this discernment — the practiced art of distinguishing true signal from noise, knowing which thread carries meaning and which is just the wind. Both ask you to build a relationship with your own capacity to self-regulate, to find the still point inside the storm. Not the absence of discomfort, but the knowledge that you are larger than it. Know yourself

Behavioral Interventions / Exposure Therapy / The Craft

ERP — Exposure and Response Prevention — is the clinical gold standard for OCD treatment. It asks you to walk toward the discomfort, deliberately, without performing the compulsion that would relieve it. To sit in the wrongness until it passes on its own. This is, in its bones, what the Craft asks too. Ritual is not escape from discomfort — it is intentional engagement with it. To cast, to grieve, to transform, you must be willing to enter the fire rather than flee it. The witch and the therapist are both saying: the only way out is through.

Self Efficacy / Power

Self efficacy is the clinical term for the growing belief that you are capable — that you can tolerate the hard thing, that your actions matter, that you are not at the mercy of your own mind. For someone whose OCD has kept them small, this is not a small thing. It is, in fact, everything. In the craft, we call this power — not power over, but power within. The reclamation of agency. The knowledge that you can affect your own life, tend your own healing, show up in your own becoming. Both the therapist and the witch are pointing toward sovereignty. Toward the self that does not need the wrongness to stop in order to act.

But there is a deeper question underneath the clinical and the magical, one that a witch with OCD must eventually ask themselves: if I am in distress, and I become immobilized by this distress, who benefits?

When I feed my obsessional thoughts — when I follow the spiral, perform the compulsion, shrink into the wrongness — I am not simply suffering privately. I am occupied. I am unavailable. My energy, my attention, my capacity for presence and resistance are consumed by an internal war that keeps me from showing up in the world. Distress is not neutral. A person drowning in their own mind is not marching, not organizing, not tending their community, not practicing their craft. Fear wants company. Systems that benefit from our smallness do not need to do much when our own nervous systems will do the work for them.

And so the witch with OCD learns to ask: if I keep myself small, do I not feed fear? If I do not practice my craft — do not show up in my power, do not trust my own discernment, do not walk through the fire of exposure — am I not, in some quiet way, complying? Recovery is not only personal healing. It is a refusal. It is the radical act of taking up space in a world that has always had reasons to prefer you diminished.

My OCD brain is always scanning, always braced. Patterns rise constantly — some I can clock and release in a breath, barely a ripple. Others are sticky, they catch, they linger. Health doesn't mean the scanning stops. It means I've learned something about which threads to pull and which to let fall.

That same attuned, restless noticing — the one that costs me so much — also means I see things. Not the things my OCD is hunting. Just... things. The clover no one else crouched down for. Three of them, actually, in the same patch.

There's something in that worth sitting with.

In the next article, I'll share how I've learned to tend the restless noticing — and what it has taught me.

Stay wild and true-

Emily