In the Sansone family’s Frontenac backyard, four St. Bernards lived in a little log cabin. Gregg, the fifth of eight kids, was in charge of feeding them, and as he put down each bowl of kibble, he’d say, “Good girl, Lady Rose,” or “Good boy, Murt.”
“And then I wouldn’t want one of them to feel bad for coming last, so I’d say good night four times, each time saying a different dog’s name first,” he says. “In hindsight, that was an OCD tendency.” As was the worry about pleasing his mom, leaving him tidying before she came home. The devastating loneliness when his parents went out and a babysitter stayed. The need to read every road sign in order: Exit 20 M-period-P-period-H period Spoede Road arrow pointing right.
“God, I’m just realizing this, all that ordering of things,” he exclaims. Also the soft-hearted sensitivity—“that’s a common denominator,” he says, “as is above-average intelligence.” Plodding minds can’t keep up with the fast-layering worries.
But as a kid, Gregg paid no notice, because even though he was “kind of intense at times,” he felt pretty happy inside. Until the start of his second semester at Mizzou. An empty, sad, homesick feeling slid over him, and strange thoughts pushed into his mind: What if something fell out of the sky and hit me? He’d taken comfort from Catholicism in the past, but now the thought of God as all-knowing sent him into a tailspin: Maybe God doesn’t want me to pick up that piece of trash because he knew it was going to be there, and who am I to touch it?
This was obsession. Not the physical sort, washing hands 10 times or locking and relocking a door, but the cognitive sort: “Unwanted, intrusive thoughts, images, or impulses that are disruptive, painful, scary, depressing—and play over and over.” It freaked him out. Years later he would realize that these thoughts took on more power precisely because they scared him. Somebody else might have the same thought and dismiss it as nonsense, but for him it set off alarms and spiraled out of control.
“What in the hell is wrong with me?” he asked himself, too afraid to confide in anybody and too obsessed to think about anything else. To find relief, he had to puzzle away the worry. God is all-knowing because he loves us, so… But with each attempt to rationalize and feel safe again, a new worry popped up: God has counted every hair on my head. But I just pulled one out, so…?
Finally he told a priest friend what he was experiencing. “ God love him, he was worthless,” Sansone says. “As was everybody back then; nobody knew much about OCD. He told me, ‘All that stuff you said? Just throw it out the window.’ I thought, ‘I don’t know how to throw it out the window, and that means there’s something very wrong with me.’”
Desperate for emotional security, Sansone married at 21, over his parents’ objections. Screw that, he muttered to himself. You don’t know anything about me and the shit I’m going through!
He hadn’t told them. After the priest, he didn’t tell anyone—except his young wife—for eight years. He figured his macho brothers would think he was a sissy. “I couldn’t even sleep—everybody knows how to sleep. Our family is like, ‘Let’s get it together, move forward, make something of our lives.’ It’s very admirable. But when you feel like you’re losing your mind, it’s of no benefit at all.”
And so, instead of entering the family real estate business, he struck out on his own, sealing driveways, then offering snow removal and firewood to those families. He’d cold-call every night, not stopping until he had eight yeses. Soon he was buying commercial real estate himself.
Help came in stages. At 26, a marriage counselor helped him accept the thoughts rather than try to beat them into submission. At 36, after his divorce, a therapist diagnosed cognitive OCD and suggested combining meds with therapy. Sansone resisted the idea of drugs for a while, but when he humbled himself enough to fill a prescription, he felt what he describes as “a sense of well-being and calm. A grounded comfort.”
Then the improvement leveled off. So at 42, he found an approach called ERP (exposure, response, prevention). The idea was to stop being afraid of his own thoughts: stop resisting them and instead write them down, speak them into a loop tape, and play it over and over again. Deliberately expose yourself to what you fear, in other words, and stop trying to figure it out and make it go away. Because it’s your resistance, not the thought itself, that feeds the disorder.
Now Sansone does motivational coaching and runs a weekly support group at a Ballas Road satellite of CenterPointe Hospital. He has remarried, and his wife used to bake brownies and bring them to the support group. But the sessions weren’t always sweet. “Everything may be horrible,” he might tell a participant. “Go feel that feeling until it stops bothering you. Burn it out. Feel it to death. It’s like a match: If you light it, it’ll burn out on its own, but if you try to blow it out, it’s like those magic candles—it just keeps coming back.” He’d look up and see his wife glaring at him. “You’re too tough,” she told him. “I have to stop coming. Make your own damn brownies.”
That’s why he titled his recent book Commit Emotional Suicide—because that’s what it takes. “On purpose, you put yourself through hell. It’s counterintuitive—why do it if it hurts? No reason. Other than to get your life back.”
