It’s hard to believe that I have OCD. I am far from the stereotypical OCD sufferer. I am messy and struggle to stay organised. If you were to take a look at our wardrobes, you’d think that Lionel was the one with OCD and not me. His clothes are folded and perfectly arranged. Mine you’ll find screwed up in a ball somewhere in the dark dusty corners of my cupboard.
So this is pretty much where the problems understanding OCD begin. There are so many misconceptions surrounding this illness, that unless you have the typical germ-fearing obessions and handwashing compulsions, most of us wouldnt recognise OCD if it hit us on the head. And that’s exactly what happened to me.
Sometimes when I talk to people about OCD I often start by saying what it is not. For me, OCD is definitely not alphabetically arranging or sorting in size. It is not being a neat freak or a germophobe. It isn’t collecing, cleaning or colour coding. I don’t wash my hands repeatedly or switch lights on and off 57 times before going to bed. And yet, some people with OCD do do this. But this is not all they do, this I guess you could say is the tip of the iceberg. For underneath the relatively calm, but perhaps strange surface of compulsions and behaviours, lies the true chaotic nature of OCD.
The true face of OCD can’t be seen, for it is buried deeply in the mind of its victim. I have compared it in the past to a monster whose claws dug into my brain and would not let go. I have also used the metaphor of having thoughts infesting my mind in the same way ants infest a house on a hot summer’s day ; completely running wild multiplying at such a rate, I was powerless to stop them. When my OCD was slowing down (at its worst it moves rapidly, morphing from obsession to obsession) I compared it to a nasty weed growing inside me ; unpleasant, unsightly, annoying and pretty hard to get rid of. Now, after 3 years of therapy and medication I see it as a pretty neutral creature, sleeping deeply, but am fully aware of its potential to be woken again.
When I was very unwell, if you had opened a window to my mind, you would have been exposed to a fast moving, reel of pictures ; throw in some dramatic Casualty scenes along with some gruesome Steven King and you’ll come close to what was going on in my head. I had an overwhelming fear that everyone around me, from my little baby to complete strangers, was at risk of getting hurt and in the most terrifying way possible.I spent most of my days avoiding knives and hot drinks and busy roads and anything which could possibly cause harm to Mathew (I have a pretty good imagination so this is pretty much everything and anything). Trips home to Wales were hard as the rivers would always be bulging with water and there were puddles everywhere and I feared Mathew would end up face down in one of them.
This was MY OCD, not alphabetically arranging, but trying to save my baby from the dangerous world he’d been born into. I was trapped in a very dark, frightening place, on my own, with no way out. And the problem with my OCD was that nobody EVER talks about it, so when it did come along and hit me on the head, I put it down to sleep deprivation and new mum nerves.
Another problem with my OCD and other people’s OCD is that it is shameful. Who wants to tell people that they feel they are going crazy? Who wants to say that they have violent images appearing in their head at the most random of times? The stigma is huge. For two years I told nobody, not even my boyfriend. Even in therapy, I lied. It took me a long time to trust my psychiatrist enough to tell him how I really felt. I believed that by telling him my thoughts, I’d be hospitalised or have my baby taken away. But mothers with anxiety or OCD, whatever the nature of their thoughts, do NOT get their babies taken away and this should never be a concern.
My psychiatrist explained the difference between postnatal psychosis (which can often lead to a child getting hurt) and postnatal anxiety/OCD. With psychosis, mothers are so unwell they become deluded, often having strange beliefs which they think are true. With postnatal anxiety, mothers are extremely upset and fearful of their thoughts and do everything to fight them. We are less likely to hurt our babies than a mother who is well because we go to extreme lengths to protect our children.
My therapist also explained to me about ‘sticky’ thoughts. He told me how thoughts should just come and go like a gently flowing river; something I already knew from my years of yoga practice.
He explained how with an OCD sufferer, a thought or thoughts get ‘lodged’ into the brain. The thoughts get stuck because we do not let them go, we label them as bad and analyze them intensly. The lodged thought is often the most abhorent, unacceptable thought that the person can imagine. A priest for example may have unwanted blasphemous thoughts, a teacher may fear they will molest one of their students, a loving parent may begin to fear that they will contaminate or hurt their child somehow. It is often the most precious and important thing in a person’s life which becomes the focus of this disorder.
These sticky thoughts are often referred to as intrusive thoughts.. They are intrusive because they interrupt our daily lives and often upset us. We do not want them and try and push them away. Yet the more we push them away, the more they stay. So how do we deal with such thoughts? How do OCD sufferers and non-OCD sufferers learn how to avoid overthinking and over analyzing? In my next post, am going to talk about the pink elephant experiment or as psychologists call it, the ironic process theory. Hopefully it will help explain how thoughts work and how thoughts are simply thoughts with nothing else attached to them.
Not a Neat Freak 