The reason I didn't go into detail with my OCD diagnosis before is, really, because it's a mess of it's own with a lot to be said. And while I rather not go into the details of how it's playing out in my brain in this particular situation, due to the specific circumstances of the situation, I think it might be appropriate to post the text I had previously mentioned regarding my experience with it,
I was intending to post this at a calmer time, more as an insight into this type of issues than anything, but I think it can have a dual purpose.
It's a long post (not unlike most of my posts here I suppose), but there's a lot to say, some of this stuff I kept to myself for a long time (notably the most extreme thoughts), as it's not quite easy to explain to people what goes inside my brain.
I've divided the post into sections to make it a bit easier to follow.
Initial Thoughts:
I never really felt bad about the idea of having OCD, nor do I ever stop and lament the fact that I suffer from it. My reaction when I found out about it was essentially "uh, well that makes a lot of sense", learning about it and then being diagnosed with it was just something of an interesting curiosity to me, it didn't change really anything, it didn't change what I experienced, how it affected my life or how I reacted to it.
People are usually accustomed to hear about the compulsions that people with OCD have, from washing hands, to have things perfectly counted or in order. What people don't usually talk about is the reason of those compulsions, which are usually (and definitely in my case) found in intrusive thoughts and feelings, and those obsession, feelings and intrusive thoughts are, to me, the harder part of the issue to deal with.
I'm unsure if it's something that everyone with this issue has or not, but it's something people in general don't usually associate with the disease, and it's something that affects me greatly (I'll discuss it more in detail later into the post).
My "past" compulsions:
While I was only formally diagnosed only a few years ago, I've suffered from it for nearly as long as I can recall. The earliest compulsion I recall having was moving and closing my eyes in specific manners until I felt things were "right", at the time my parents simply thought it was tics and never looked too much into it, looking back, and knowing myself that i did such movements consciously, it's seems incredibly obvious that those actions were some of the first signs of OCD that I recall having.
During middle school I would often try to "negate" my intrusive thoughts by repeating to myself the complete opposite of them outloud, this even during classes, I would try to keep it as down as possible, but it was impossible for people not to notice that I was "talking to myself", I was mocked quite a bit for "talking to myself" and "praying" by other kids at the time. That was probably around the time I started wondering if I had some sort of issue (notably I was wondering if it was normal for people to talk to themselves since I hadn't connected the dots at the time).
My "main" compulsions continued to change through the years, the compulsions never really go away but I would usually get new compulsions that would become the one I focused the most.
By high school rather than talking with myself, I would do things such as rubbing my foot in the ground while thinking the opposite until "it felt right", or go back to where I originally had the thought and repeat my path over and over again until I felt I had purged the thought of my mind.
There was always the feeling that if I didn't do the compulsions that my thoughts would come true.
My "current" compulsions:
I have a very difficult time making decisions, thoughts and feelings that make it hard to make even the simplest of decisions.
Sometime something as simple as playing football (real one, not your american football!) can be debilitated by it, I didn't realize it before that it was all related, but sometimes I would be unable to do anything as simple as deciding if to pass or not and instead get lost in thought about what was the "right thing" to do, eventually ending up doing nothing, I was always able to play better without thinking, unfortunately those times were few and in between. I know this might come across as simple indecision, but there's something more to it, a "feeling" and a worry that I'm just not quite sure how to explain.
Another example of something relatively simple, buying games, I often spend extended periods of time on a store deciding what copy of the (same) game to buy, not just inspecting the copy to see if it's perfect, but also trying to understand which one "feels" right and which one is the "right" one for me to buy. And it doesn't need to be games, drinks, food, it's a process I do with anything.
Now a days I have "my space", areas where no one but me can enter, or objects that no one but me can touch, mostly my room and my PC desktop area, when I get home I change clothes and wash myself, anything that went outside I don't touch, if I touch anything that's not "clean" by my rules (basically anything that's not mine, was in contact with someone else or was outside), I need to disinfect myself, this has been extremely limiting as I can't just go outside for a few minutes, and anything that involves going outside that I don't deem worth of the 30-60 minute I take to properly disinfect myself (between bathing, drying and changing clothes), is something I usually don't do.
It also means I don't spend time with my family to watch a movie (at theaters or living room), or to eat with them, outside of special meals (christmas) in which event I disinfect myself afterwards.
I used to have an area for my friends to be in my room (certain chairs, certain gamepads that would be there just for them), but lately I got to a point where no one can enter my room, as such my interaction with my own friends have been extremely debilitated in the past two years (more so than it already was before that point due to my lifestyle I described in previous posts) and I hardly see them (especially since I don't go out that much either).
I use my feet to turn on lights and open doors in my house, when I eat I have to take the silverware directly out of the washmachine, otherwise i'll have to disinfect the silverware before eating as well as disinfecting myself after eating (which involves washing at least my hands, my arms and lips if I think something "disinfected" touched those) . Often times I wait for the washmachine to be done, for hours even, before eating even if I'm hungry.
Obviously I don't touch the washmachine to open it, I can't serve drinks to myself and, depending on the food, I can't even serve myself without having to disinfect myself, so I usually get my youngest sister to do those things for me, which she tends to do but not always (depending on her mood).
Thanks to her help I've been able to cut down the amount of times that I wash my hands, so the damage to my skin is less severe than it was a few years ago, but it's still extremely debilitating to be depending on someone else such as this.
(It should be noted that this only applies to when I'm in my house, outside of my house it's a non-issue since I'll have to take a bath and disinfect myself as soon as I get home anyway.)
I tell myself that with my own house and place, I'd be able to impose "rules" in my area with more ease (as opposed to sharing a house with my family as I do now) and that I wouldn't have as many issues as I do now, but reality is that's probably not true, even if it was my issues would just start changing and showing themselves in different ways (as it happened in the past).
In that particular sense, my compulsions have been a lot more damaging to my life in this pasts few years than before and just got progressively worse (the fact that I was without my psychologist for a long stretch of time didn't help at all in that sense).
And yet, while the compulsions might seem like what most debilitates me for someone in the outside, all of this is a result of thoughts and feelings that I can't control and that torment me regularly, sometimes during extremely long periods of time.
My Thoughts:
With age I found that the worst thoughts don't tend to be the odd ones about yourself, those are the "easiest" ones to dismiss, things like being afraid of kissing/being kissed by a random person, wanting to hurt someone, they're annoying but as long as I'm in a good state of mind, they're by far the easiest to dismiss, I might feel guilty about having them, but they don't usually incapacitate me.
In my lowest mental state (usually a situation that I am personally involved) though there are some rather extreme thoughts, and those can affect me to the point of incapacity, a specific example of a pretty crazy intrusive thought I had (and this should give some idea of how illogical some of my thoughts can get) was during a period of time where I was extremely anxious due to some presonal issues, so there were times I refused to open my mouth in fear that someone would do something like stop time and violate my mouth.
Another more extreme situation happened a few years ago, when someone, that I wasn't particularly close to but respected, from a community I went online, accepted an arranged marriage after avoiding getting into one for a long time. People going against their own beliefs is something that confuses me a lot, especially when you feel they aren't doing so for their own good or even some sort of great good. So this situation hit me pretty hard.
Here's something I recently wrote to someone (with some modifications) about that particular situation:
"One can't quite put it into words. It's not simply thinking about that situation at all times, it's more than just how you go to go to bed and suddenly your brain is thinking about the possibility of her being raped and abused by her husband, it's not just thinking, it's imagining it, it's feeling, it's putting yourself in her position, trying to feel what she could feel if that would happen, it's being obsessed with the idea and feelings rushing through your brain.
Starting to think that anything you do might affect what happens to her, thinking that if I don't do some abrupt movements she won't be able to defend herself from abuse, that changing my clothes might signify she's being forced to take hers, thinking that if you open your mouth she'll be orally rapped, and then avoiding to open your mouth for how long necessary, and if I happen to open my mouth I think something might have happened to her. And if that happens my mind starts making me feel as if it was happening to her and starts trying to make me feel what she would be feeling."
All types of awful and worst case scenarios just keep going through my brain in situations where I'm worried about others.
A thing to add to that, is that just trying to deviate my mind from those thoughts gives me a great amount of anxiety and a feeling of pain in my heart alongside the fear that not thinking about it will make the situations come true.
Despite being someone I wasn't close to I was extremely concerned and anxious about her well being every single day, and it took me many many months to get over that particular situation.
And yes those sounds absolutely out there, and I rationally knew that at the time just as much as I do now, but the thoughts get too strong, that I just can't avoid not doing the compulsion just in fear something would happen and/or that your paranoias would get stronger, as crazy as stopping myself from doing something because of a thought so "out there" as those ones, I find in those times that not doing so ends up being much worse.
There are a few crazy ones that always scares me even when I'm in a good mental state, in particular I have a recurrent urge/feeling of jumping into the tracks when a train is approaching the station, I never have any intentions of killing myself before, after or during those moments, nor am I suicidal, it has nothing to do with my mood either, the thought just randomly appears at times.
It's for that reason that I usually tend to keep as far away from the tracks as I can, in fear that someday I might lose control of my body.
And yet, the ones that go against what you believe, but aren't so crazy that they make you doubt yourself, those are really the worst "Do I really love person X?" "Am I less capable of doing this than others?", just simple thoughts, but realistic enough that it makes you stop and doubt yourself, undermine yourself and your relations with others, those are the thoughts that really tend to linger and incapacitate me. They distort my view of reality and make me have to fight myself for what is real and what isn't.
I found not even compulsions tend to be able to alleviate those thoughts much.
People tend to think of me as overprotective and stubborn, but when it comes down to it, I tend to be those things due to those thoughts, many of the roots of my actions through out the years can be found in thoughts and feelings that I can't control.
My family & Therapist:
My parents and sisters are aware of the issue (it eventually became too obvious despite my attempts at keeping it for myself), but their comments tend either to be "you need to stop doing that" at best (they think it's just some compulsion that I could simply not do without any kind of consequence, which while technically true physically, isn't true inside myself), or in the worst case, comments that end up making me worse, such as my sister going "you know I touch those right?" in regards to the washed silverware in the drawer (which I obviously knew but tried to keep at bay to not be further debilitated myself, of course her comment just resulted in me being unable to keep the thought away and on me stopping to use the silverware that didn't come directly of the washing machine without anyone else touching it, as I mentioned above).
They even expressed the thought of changing me of therapist because I wasn't having any clear improvements regarding OCD, when the reason they put me there in the first place was due to my social issues and not my OCD.
My therapist was a very important piece in my life that helped me be able to go through my bachelors in College, as well as regularly helping me better handle my (at the time) girlfriend who suffers from depression. I always put the particular issues described in this post in the backburner, focusing instead on those situations which I deemed more urgent and important.
Plus there's the important fact that, at a point, I specifically told my therapist I wasn't particularly interested on "fixing" my OCD (specifically my compulsions since that's what my parents were mentioning, though they weren't as bad as they are now), at which point she noted there was not much she could do if I wasn't interested in doing so. I wasn't particularly concerned about it at the time, and as I mentioned, I thought the other situations (in particularly my relationship) were far more important.
My dad's (and my own) doctor (which according to my dad was a psychologist before taking a general medicine course) stated similar thoughts when I approached him (at my dad request) about the subject.
I can't complain too much about my parents, as many issues that I have with them for not understanding my issues, they did go to lengths to try and help me (and one of my sisters who has her own set of mental health issues) and assure that I had the resources needed to get help. And I'm definitely thankful for that, it's a privilege that not everyone can say they have.
Final Thoughts:
There are people I know with other sort of disorders that I can sometimes get a glimpse of the true person under the disease, but I honestly have no idea where the disease ends and where I start, it's something that's so intric on my every thought and behavior for every single action and though I have for as long as I can recall, that I can't really seperate who I am from it, to the point where I feel that treating it would involve fundamentally changing who I am. Potentially in areas where I am proud of myself even.
It might sound surprising, but there are actually several ways in which I consider that this issues made me a better person, and in that sense I consider myself lucky, this thoughts and feelings, as well as the way I attempt to deal with them mentally, they made me better. Sometimes people complement attitudes I have, or characteristics they consider I have, and I can't help but stop and think that I wouldn't have those attitudes (or gained those characteristics) if things didn't process inside of me as they do.
(Note: This was written a bit ago, after this situation I'm going to approach my therapist about this subject, the fear of losing some parts of myself is still there of course, but right now I feel I'll need to deal with some of these issues one way or another)
This is something that affects me everyday and often times in new and different ways.
Yet, this is what was normal for me through my life, it's something I always accepted as being my own reality.
Typing all of this down was a bit surreal, but hopefully this was interesting enough to read all the way through.
I was intending to post this at a calmer time, more as an insight into this type of issues than anything, but I think it can have a dual purpose.
It's a long post (not unlike most of my posts here I suppose), but there's a lot to say, some of this stuff I kept to myself for a long time (notably the most extreme thoughts), as it's not quite easy to explain to people what goes inside my brain.
I've divided the post into sections to make it a bit easier to follow.
Initial Thoughts:
I never really felt bad about the idea of having OCD, nor do I ever stop and lament the fact that I suffer from it. My reaction when I found out about it was essentially "uh, well that makes a lot of sense", learning about it and then being diagnosed with it was just something of an interesting curiosity to me, it didn't change really anything, it didn't change what I experienced, how it affected my life or how I reacted to it.
People are usually accustomed to hear about the compulsions that people with OCD have, from washing hands, to have things perfectly counted or in order. What people don't usually talk about is the reason of those compulsions, which are usually (and definitely in my case) found in intrusive thoughts and feelings, and those obsession, feelings and intrusive thoughts are, to me, the harder part of the issue to deal with.
I'm unsure if it's something that everyone with this issue has or not, but it's something people in general don't usually associate with the disease, and it's something that affects me greatly (I'll discuss it more in detail later into the post).
My "past" compulsions:
While I was only formally diagnosed only a few years ago, I've suffered from it for nearly as long as I can recall. The earliest compulsion I recall having was moving and closing my eyes in specific manners until I felt things were "right", at the time my parents simply thought it was tics and never looked too much into it, looking back, and knowing myself that i did such movements consciously, it's seems incredibly obvious that those actions were some of the first signs of OCD that I recall having.
During middle school I would often try to "negate" my intrusive thoughts by repeating to myself the complete opposite of them outloud, this even during classes, I would try to keep it as down as possible, but it was impossible for people not to notice that I was "talking to myself", I was mocked quite a bit for "talking to myself" and "praying" by other kids at the time. That was probably around the time I started wondering if I had some sort of issue (notably I was wondering if it was normal for people to talk to themselves since I hadn't connected the dots at the time).
My "main" compulsions continued to change through the years, the compulsions never really go away but I would usually get new compulsions that would become the one I focused the most.
By high school rather than talking with myself, I would do things such as rubbing my foot in the ground while thinking the opposite until "it felt right", or go back to where I originally had the thought and repeat my path over and over again until I felt I had purged the thought of my mind.
There was always the feeling that if I didn't do the compulsions that my thoughts would come true.
My "current" compulsions:
I have a very difficult time making decisions, thoughts and feelings that make it hard to make even the simplest of decisions.
Sometime something as simple as playing football (real one, not your american football!) can be debilitated by it, I didn't realize it before that it was all related, but sometimes I would be unable to do anything as simple as deciding if to pass or not and instead get lost in thought about what was the "right thing" to do, eventually ending up doing nothing, I was always able to play better without thinking, unfortunately those times were few and in between. I know this might come across as simple indecision, but there's something more to it, a "feeling" and a worry that I'm just not quite sure how to explain.
Another example of something relatively simple, buying games, I often spend extended periods of time on a store deciding what copy of the (same) game to buy, not just inspecting the copy to see if it's perfect, but also trying to understand which one "feels" right and which one is the "right" one for me to buy. And it doesn't need to be games, drinks, food, it's a process I do with anything.
Now a days I have "my space", areas where no one but me can enter, or objects that no one but me can touch, mostly my room and my PC desktop area, when I get home I change clothes and wash myself, anything that went outside I don't touch, if I touch anything that's not "clean" by my rules (basically anything that's not mine, was in contact with someone else or was outside), I need to disinfect myself, this has been extremely limiting as I can't just go outside for a few minutes, and anything that involves going outside that I don't deem worth of the 30-60 minute I take to properly disinfect myself (between bathing, drying and changing clothes), is something I usually don't do.
It also means I don't spend time with my family to watch a movie (at theaters or living room), or to eat with them, outside of special meals (christmas) in which event I disinfect myself afterwards.
I used to have an area for my friends to be in my room (certain chairs, certain gamepads that would be there just for them), but lately I got to a point where no one can enter my room, as such my interaction with my own friends have been extremely debilitated in the past two years (more so than it already was before that point due to my lifestyle I described in previous posts) and I hardly see them (especially since I don't go out that much either).
I use my feet to turn on lights and open doors in my house, when I eat I have to take the silverware directly out of the washmachine, otherwise i'll have to disinfect the silverware before eating as well as disinfecting myself after eating (which involves washing at least my hands, my arms and lips if I think something "disinfected" touched those) . Often times I wait for the washmachine to be done, for hours even, before eating even if I'm hungry.
Obviously I don't touch the washmachine to open it, I can't serve drinks to myself and, depending on the food, I can't even serve myself without having to disinfect myself, so I usually get my youngest sister to do those things for me, which she tends to do but not always (depending on her mood).
Thanks to her help I've been able to cut down the amount of times that I wash my hands, so the damage to my skin is less severe than it was a few years ago, but it's still extremely debilitating to be depending on someone else such as this.
(It should be noted that this only applies to when I'm in my house, outside of my house it's a non-issue since I'll have to take a bath and disinfect myself as soon as I get home anyway.)
I tell myself that with my own house and place, I'd be able to impose "rules" in my area with more ease (as opposed to sharing a house with my family as I do now) and that I wouldn't have as many issues as I do now, but reality is that's probably not true, even if it was my issues would just start changing and showing themselves in different ways (as it happened in the past).
In that particular sense, my compulsions have been a lot more damaging to my life in this pasts few years than before and just got progressively worse (the fact that I was without my psychologist for a long stretch of time didn't help at all in that sense).
And yet, while the compulsions might seem like what most debilitates me for someone in the outside, all of this is a result of thoughts and feelings that I can't control and that torment me regularly, sometimes during extremely long periods of time.
My Thoughts:
With age I found that the worst thoughts don't tend to be the odd ones about yourself, those are the "easiest" ones to dismiss, things like being afraid of kissing/being kissed by a random person, wanting to hurt someone, they're annoying but as long as I'm in a good state of mind, they're by far the easiest to dismiss, I might feel guilty about having them, but they don't usually incapacitate me.
In my lowest mental state (usually a situation that I am personally involved) though there are some rather extreme thoughts, and those can affect me to the point of incapacity, a specific example of a pretty crazy intrusive thought I had (and this should give some idea of how illogical some of my thoughts can get) was during a period of time where I was extremely anxious due to some presonal issues, so there were times I refused to open my mouth in fear that someone would do something like stop time and violate my mouth.
Another more extreme situation happened a few years ago, when someone, that I wasn't particularly close to but respected, from a community I went online, accepted an arranged marriage after avoiding getting into one for a long time. People going against their own beliefs is something that confuses me a lot, especially when you feel they aren't doing so for their own good or even some sort of great good. So this situation hit me pretty hard.
Here's something I recently wrote to someone (with some modifications) about that particular situation:
"One can't quite put it into words. It's not simply thinking about that situation at all times, it's more than just how you go to go to bed and suddenly your brain is thinking about the possibility of her being raped and abused by her husband, it's not just thinking, it's imagining it, it's feeling, it's putting yourself in her position, trying to feel what she could feel if that would happen, it's being obsessed with the idea and feelings rushing through your brain.
Starting to think that anything you do might affect what happens to her, thinking that if I don't do some abrupt movements she won't be able to defend herself from abuse, that changing my clothes might signify she's being forced to take hers, thinking that if you open your mouth she'll be orally rapped, and then avoiding to open your mouth for how long necessary, and if I happen to open my mouth I think something might have happened to her. And if that happens my mind starts making me feel as if it was happening to her and starts trying to make me feel what she would be feeling."
All types of awful and worst case scenarios just keep going through my brain in situations where I'm worried about others.
A thing to add to that, is that just trying to deviate my mind from those thoughts gives me a great amount of anxiety and a feeling of pain in my heart alongside the fear that not thinking about it will make the situations come true.
Despite being someone I wasn't close to I was extremely concerned and anxious about her well being every single day, and it took me many many months to get over that particular situation.
And yes those sounds absolutely out there, and I rationally knew that at the time just as much as I do now, but the thoughts get too strong, that I just can't avoid not doing the compulsion just in fear something would happen and/or that your paranoias would get stronger, as crazy as stopping myself from doing something because of a thought so "out there" as those ones, I find in those times that not doing so ends up being much worse.
There are a few crazy ones that always scares me even when I'm in a good mental state, in particular I have a recurrent urge/feeling of jumping into the tracks when a train is approaching the station, I never have any intentions of killing myself before, after or during those moments, nor am I suicidal, it has nothing to do with my mood either, the thought just randomly appears at times.
It's for that reason that I usually tend to keep as far away from the tracks as I can, in fear that someday I might lose control of my body.
And yet, the ones that go against what you believe, but aren't so crazy that they make you doubt yourself, those are really the worst "Do I really love person X?" "Am I less capable of doing this than others?", just simple thoughts, but realistic enough that it makes you stop and doubt yourself, undermine yourself and your relations with others, those are the thoughts that really tend to linger and incapacitate me. They distort my view of reality and make me have to fight myself for what is real and what isn't.
I found not even compulsions tend to be able to alleviate those thoughts much.
People tend to think of me as overprotective and stubborn, but when it comes down to it, I tend to be those things due to those thoughts, many of the roots of my actions through out the years can be found in thoughts and feelings that I can't control.
My family & Therapist:
My parents and sisters are aware of the issue (it eventually became too obvious despite my attempts at keeping it for myself), but their comments tend either to be "you need to stop doing that" at best (they think it's just some compulsion that I could simply not do without any kind of consequence, which while technically true physically, isn't true inside myself), or in the worst case, comments that end up making me worse, such as my sister going "you know I touch those right?" in regards to the washed silverware in the drawer (which I obviously knew but tried to keep at bay to not be further debilitated myself, of course her comment just resulted in me being unable to keep the thought away and on me stopping to use the silverware that didn't come directly of the washing machine without anyone else touching it, as I mentioned above).
They even expressed the thought of changing me of therapist because I wasn't having any clear improvements regarding OCD, when the reason they put me there in the first place was due to my social issues and not my OCD.
My therapist was a very important piece in my life that helped me be able to go through my bachelors in College, as well as regularly helping me better handle my (at the time) girlfriend who suffers from depression. I always put the particular issues described in this post in the backburner, focusing instead on those situations which I deemed more urgent and important.
Plus there's the important fact that, at a point, I specifically told my therapist I wasn't particularly interested on "fixing" my OCD (specifically my compulsions since that's what my parents were mentioning, though they weren't as bad as they are now), at which point she noted there was not much she could do if I wasn't interested in doing so. I wasn't particularly concerned about it at the time, and as I mentioned, I thought the other situations (in particularly my relationship) were far more important.
My dad's (and my own) doctor (which according to my dad was a psychologist before taking a general medicine course) stated similar thoughts when I approached him (at my dad request) about the subject.
I can't complain too much about my parents, as many issues that I have with them for not understanding my issues, they did go to lengths to try and help me (and one of my sisters who has her own set of mental health issues) and assure that I had the resources needed to get help. And I'm definitely thankful for that, it's a privilege that not everyone can say they have.
Final Thoughts:
There are people I know with other sort of disorders that I can sometimes get a glimpse of the true person under the disease, but I honestly have no idea where the disease ends and where I start, it's something that's so intric on my every thought and behavior for every single action and though I have for as long as I can recall, that I can't really seperate who I am from it, to the point where I feel that treating it would involve fundamentally changing who I am. Potentially in areas where I am proud of myself even.
It might sound surprising, but there are actually several ways in which I consider that this issues made me a better person, and in that sense I consider myself lucky, this thoughts and feelings, as well as the way I attempt to deal with them mentally, they made me better. Sometimes people complement attitudes I have, or characteristics they consider I have, and I can't help but stop and think that I wouldn't have those attitudes (or gained those characteristics) if things didn't process inside of me as they do.
(Note: This was written a bit ago, after this situation I'm going to approach my therapist about this subject, the fear of losing some parts of myself is still there of course, but right now I feel I'll need to deal with some of these issues one way or another)
This is something that affects me everyday and often times in new and different ways.
Yet, this is what was normal for me through my life, it's something I always accepted as being my own reality.
Typing all of this down was a bit surreal, but hopefully this was interesting enough to read all the way through.
. We'll see.
