Skip to main content

A small victory in the OCD fight

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 to swipe away the OCD and figure that the pain, though severe, was most likely the result of my new -- and poorly designed  -- upper-body workout routine.

Victory! I went to bed and fell asleep.

Somewhere during the night, OCD must have gotten it's strength back, because when I woke OCD was babbling away:

"Maybe that was a heart attack -- doesn't your left arm feel funny. Isn't that a sign of a heart attack?"

"Maybe your spine is about to give out -- that's what you get for canceling the doctor appointment. If you get into an accident on the way to work you might not be able to walk again."

So OCD won this morning.

But I won last night.

I'll take the split decision and call it a win.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Could I be clinging to OCD?: Part 2

In a recent post, I suggested that, as much as I fight the idea, I could be holding on to OCD rather than letting it go. That it's a safety net. I made the argument that having OCD around gives me something to blame if things go wrong. But I think I missed the point. The more I consider it, the more I feel that if I am clinging to OCD it's because the compulsive rituals give my brain a sense that I have control over things. Oh sure, in my clear mind I know touching something a certain number of times or counting to a number that feels "good" isn't going to keep every driver I see on the road from getting into an accident, but my OCD brain doesn't acknowledge that. So the OCD repetitions give me a sense that I can have a say in how things turn out in a world that, in reality, is extremely random. As psychologically painful as OCD is, the concept that I can control things just by doing some rituals offsets that -- at least in my OCD mind. Letting g...
Post a Comment
Read more

Could there really be benefits to having OCD?

It's not often, but sometimes to get a slight advantage on the bully that is OCD, I throw it a curve and think about the benefits of having OCD. Yeah, I know, there aren't many. And maybe it's stretching it to say there are any at all. But I came up with a few to throw in the bully's face. First, I believe having OCD has made me a compassionate person. There's no way to truly understand mental illness without experiencing it, in my opinion. I have empathy for others that I might not have if I didn't experience OCD first hand. I try hard to be non-judgmental. OK, I judge myself 90 percent of my waking hours -- but I do try hard to be non-judgmental of others. I give a lot of credit to my mother, who lived her life that way. But I also credit OCD. I have a better sense of what people may be going through because I know what I'm often going through. Speaking of my mother, she was excellent in a crisis. She was a nurse and a caretaker for her ill and a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Good letters, bad letters

I wrote previously about my OCD brain convincing me there are "good" numbers (9, 10, 17, 18, for instance) and "bad" numbers (4, 6, 8, 13, 14 and more). Similarly, OCD tells me there are good and bad letters. In the case of letters, it makes a little more sense. G and Y are good (G is the first letter in God, Y the first letter in Yahweh -- the Hebrew name for God -- so there's some logic to that). T is good (lowercase t is like the Christian cross, so again, it makes some sense). But OCD doesn't stop there: D is bad (devil starts with d, though it's sometimes good because God ends with d). H is bad (it's the first letter in hell, but then, it's also good, because it's the first letter in heaven). How I feel about these letters at any given moment, I suppose depends on how I'm doing in general. I don't really know why my perception changes. When I hand write "good" letters, OCD tells me they need to slant up and to the...
Post a Comment
Read more