OCD and ME

How many people with OCD have experienced something like this? I reconnected with a childhood friend recently on Facebook -- haven't spoken with her in decades. Turns out she travels to near where I live on a regular basis and she told me she'd let me know when she's in town next. Of course, OCD told me "she'll forget" ... but she didn't. And we're planning to meet up in a couple of weeks. As soon as I confirmed we'd be having dinner, OCD leaped into action. Instead of me just being excited about seeing a friend from my elementary school days, OCD made sure I had other things to worry about. "What if you have nothing to talk about? It's not like you talked much before." "Who's going to pay for dinner? What if she doesn't like the same food you do?" "Where will you park? It's a crowded area." "What time will you need to leave work to get to dinner on time?" "What about tr...

In OCD terms, I catastrophize. My brain takes situations to the extreme, often resulting in horrific outcomes -- in my mind. So I'm pleased with the battle I won last night with OCD. I fell asleep on the couch and woke about 12:30 in the morning. I got up and reached down for my computer bag to bring it over to the dining room table. It was about a 20-foot walk from couch to table, but in that short distance I felt a searing pain up my left arm, across my back and down through my right arm. I was losing the grip on the bag and barely made it to the table before dropping it. Then I felt a sharp pain in my chest. Typically, OCD would have taken over about this time and told me I was having a heart attack, something my brain has been expecting for years. Or it would have tried the degenerative spine scare -- telling me I've put off surgery for too long and now I'm going to be paralyzed. But to my surprise, neither of those health threats came to mind. I was able ...

A therapist once told me I remembered "one-liners" from the past. Turns out what she meant was I fixated on one-liners -- like when an 8th-grade classmate called me "the laziest bum" he'd ever seen, questioning why our teacher named me editor of the middle school newspaper. There was also the time in 10th-grade geometry, when a friend described me to the class as "short and stubby." OCD has played those lines over and over and over again, for decades, shouting them when I'm most vulnerable. In a previous post I mentioned the humor of OCD . While I find absolutely no humor in being made fun of in public, particularly as a child with shaky self-esteem to begin with, I do find it a little funny that my OCD brain clings to these few words from people whose opinions I never actually sought out. The guy in 8th grade? I don't remember anything else he ever said to me. And my friend in 10th? We've reconnected a bit on Facebook and I...

My father used to collect soap. I don't think he meant to, but I remember as a child, walking into my parents' bathroom and seeing a pile, a heap, of used bars of soap on his side of the counter. It didn't strike me as strange, so much, as it did unique. I never asked why there was so much soap -- why he didn't just finish off one bar before starting another -- but I probably wondered. In recent years there have been studies on whether OCD has a genetic component. I've been involved in a couple. But to me, there's no question, now, looking back with more knowledge, that my father's pile of soap was a sign of obsessive-compulsive disorder. My belief is that once he used a bar of soap for what his OCD brain told him was the "right" amount of time, it was time to move on to the next. Maybe OCD told him the old bar was no longer clean. Or maybe it just felt "wrong." My father was interesting in that he would shower just once a wee...

OCD is not funny. But in a way, it is. I'm never laughing when I'm caught up in an OCD cycle, but sometimes when I look back from a great distance at some of my thoughts and actions they seem so nonsensical I can see the humor in them. For sure, there are some OCD cycles -- religious thoughts, for instance -- that are never humorous to me. But there are other things -- like a number being "bad" or "good" -- that can appear ridiculous in retrospect. What I find odd, though, is that it can seem ridiculous one second and literally the next second be so critical to my well-being -- at least in my OCD mind. For instance, as I wrote this I noticed when I reached the 9th and 10th lines. In my head, 9 and 10 are wonderful numbers -- they make me feel calm and safe. But after 10, the numbers become perilous in my OCD brain. Now does that cause me anguish and anxiety? Or is that kind of funny? Yes to both. And I believe that somehow, maintaining at least...

One of my OCD issues is thinking, expecting, the worst to happen. It's the catastrophizing OCD. I've discovered it's why often when I'm having a good time, my mind goes to how that good time could turn devastating any minute. OCD says: Sure, things are going great, now, but when has that ever lasted? People have died, they've left you, tragedy has struck.... why would this be any different? My theory is I was predisposed to this kind of thinking (more later on the hereditary nature of my OCD) -- and all my OCD brain needed was a little bit of reality to activate it. There are many instances in my life that I recall a nice time turning bad in an instant. It's happened to everyone, probably, but OCD likes to cling to the bad and replay it over and over to give it more power. Two of those good-to-bad instances, in particular, stand out. I was about 3 and my mother, grandmother and I were hiding from my grandfather who was coming down the stairs outside my...

As mentioned before, OCD tells me there are "good" numbers and there are "bad" numbers. And in most cases, it doesn't make a whole of sense. I can see why 13 would feel like a bad number -- its supposed link to bad luck is well documented. But why 4? 18 is a good number and that makes sense -- in the Jewish faith it symbolizes life. But why would the reverse of that number, 81, feel bad to me? The real issue is how I react when I encounter "bad" numbers. If I have 4 cookies, for instance, my OCD tells me I have to have a 5th (5 being "good"). It's hard to describe the feeling of eating 4 cookies. There's an anxiety that is palpable -- a need to run and hide. It's a horrible feeling of uncertainty, as if I've failed not only myself but others. Yes, my brain tells me by eating 4 cookies I've let people down. Had I eaten just 3, we'd all be fine, but 4 and I'm putting people at risk. I'm not saying that ma...

In my search for OCD treatment I’ve worked with a couple of therapists who emphasized ERP – a technique, from my understanding, intended to desensitize you to a “trigger.” The idea is to intentionally expose yourself to a situation that would trigger your OCD and then resist the compulsion that you would do to calm the anxiety. I’ve had some success with it. But the most success I had was actually an inadvertent ERP I performed on myself before I even knew there was such a technique. I used to have this OCD thing where I’d be driving along and out of nowhere think I hit someone. In my mind I was convinced I’d hit someone, never mind that I didn’t actually feel the car hit anything. At most, I went over a bump in the road. That was enough to convince me I’d killed someone. So one day I was driving home from work on the 101 Freeway between Ventura and Santa Barbara in Southern California. The route goes by a large cross on top of the hill above the San Buenaventura...

1 = good 2 = good (but 2 x 2 bad) 3 = good (but 3 x 2 bad) 4 = fair 5 = good 6 = bad (but 6 x 2 fair) 7 = good (but 7 x 2 bad) 8 = bad 9 = good 10 = good One of my primary compulsions is “good” numbers and “bad” numbers. I can eat 2 M&Ms for instance, but if I eat 4, I need to eat a 5th. If not, I feel uncomfortable – like something will go terribly wrong. I’m not sure what, but it’ll be something and it’ll be bad. It’s like an unscratchable itch that doesn’t go away until I eat that 5th M&M. It sounds crazy – and maybe it is. But that’s true for a lot of OCD obsessions and compulsions.

It wasn’t until I was in my 20s that I even had a hint I had OCD – or what OCD even was. But then, just by chance, I came across Judith L. Rapoport’s groundbreaking OCD book “The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing.” Even the title resonated with me. It sounded like my story. Up until then I just thought I was quirky, maybe weird. But looking back, the signs were there at least dating back to my early teens. My first memory of an OCD compulsion was when I used to line up my shoes on the floor. To my OCD brain, they couldn’t be crooked, one couldn’t point right and the other left. They had to be parallel or it just didn’t feel right, something would be off. Truth is, that compulsion stuck with me until I was probably well into my 30s, when I forced myself to just toss my shoes into my closet and whatever happened, happened. I guess I’ve drifted back toward keeping them parallel, now that I think of it. Next, I recall picking up clumps of dust in the hallway leading ...

I talk a big game when it comes to mental health – firmly stating that the more we talk about mental illness, the greater the chance of lessening the stigma and the more likely people who need help will seek it. But then what do I do? I keep quiet about my own mental health issues. No more. I have OCD and with this first post, I’m going to start talking about it. My hope is that even one person who also has OCD will read it and know that he or she is not alone, that there’s a support network out there, and that we have shared experiences. My OCD comes in many forms – compulsive counting, touching, thinking “bad” thoughts. I have religiousity OCD. I have “magical” thinking OCD. I have a tendency toward “catastrophic” thinking and “black and white.” I think I even have body dysmorphic disorder but then I doubt that – which, itself, is a form of OCD, the “doubting disease.” And that’s just the beginning. Assuming there’s an interest in hearing this stuff about me,...