OCD Reflections

I'm tired and a little down this evening as I relax after a full day of intensive treatment and then work.  I want to go to bed but I also want to get my exposure work done.  I'm dreading doing the dishes in a way that I haven't normally lately - it probably has something to do with the fact that I have been putting them off several days and have started doing some new exposures that make me feel a bit dirty to be doing them.  Other than that I need to shower - 10 minutes is the current goal.  I took a 12 minute shower the other day and a 13 minute shower this morning.  Those are the obstacles (or opportunities, I suppose) that await me before going to bed.  Last night I put off showering for so long that I ended up not sleeping in my bed and not taking my meds (which make me sleep much better than I would otherwise).  And the night before that I only got about 5 hours of sleep, so I'm a bit run-down and tired.  Mostly I just feel like there's an ...

It's been a long time since I posted and even longer since I've made posts regularly.  But, tonight, well I'm feeling in the mood to write, and goodness, there's plenty to write about. A couple weeks ago now I began an intensive treatment program.  I'm basically in treatment about 20 hours a week.  And in the time since I started that program, well, I have done things that I am not even sure I would have done BEFORE my contamination OCD flared out of control.  As I write, I feel dirty, but I am also determined to keep going, to resist the urges to avoid and perform other compulsions that would be so easy to give in to.  I feel as though I'm finally making a solid effort to wholeheartedly commit to doing ERP as I know it needs to be done.  I'm finally breaking the rules that, for so long, I felt couldn't be broken, even while I was doing active exposure work in the past.  I am rebelling against my OCD and doing what I know, deep down, I want to do - ...

So life has been a bit all over the place as of late, and I haven't been writing as much.  I think it's partly because I feel pressure to write the "right" kind of post - you know the kind where I come to some new level of self-awareness in the process of writing or where I finally put into just the "right" words the thoughts I've wanted to share about OCD.  I haven't been feeling super "inspired" by my OCD or by the process of fighting it as of late, (perhaps because I am gradually getting better and spend less of my time cloistered in a room with my laptop writing posts :), or perhaps because I've been a bit down lately).  But in reading one of Pure O Canuck 's posts this evening,  Here we go Again - More OCD ERP experiences. , I was struck by how nice it was just to hear about how she was doing and what specific ERP homework assignments she is now courageously tackling.  So perhaps I will do the same, so I feel a bit less out of...

Sometimes I feel like I should just come with a disclaimer taped to my forehead for any potential roommate, apartment-mate, house-mate, or whatever: WARNING:  Proceed with caution.   This individual may exhibit odd behaviors and may spend an excessive amount of time washing/showering/doing laundry/avoiding dirty things.  Will do best to limit strange behaviors around you and to avoid inconveniencing you.   Roommate will initially seem normal and will go out of her way to be a polite and considerate roommate, but odd behaviors will begin to become apparent over time. I'm in the midst of packing and there's a lot to do, but I thought pausing to write about some of my worries would be a bit stress-reducing.  In fact, I suspect the immense pressure I feel to act "normal" during this stressful time will be leading me here frequently over the next few days and weeks.  So much is changing, and it's exciting.  But it's also overwhelming - especially f...

I have a home!!  Okay, well, a NEW home.  It's not like I was homeless or anything before, but I was starting to wonder if I was going to end up that way... My lease is up at the end of the month, and while I had the option to stay through June, I really didn't want to since all of my roommates will be moved out by then.  So over the last month or so I have been madly scouring the area I want to move to for an affordable place to live.  And it was difficult, to say the least.  I was looking for a studio/single just for myself, but living alone, especially in my city, is not cheap!  But it didn't seem like I had much of a choice. Then a friend of mine suggested that I look online for someone who was trying to find a roommate.  My therapist suggested the same.  I hadn't even really considered it.  I mean, I thought, "I don't want to bother someone else with my rituals, and I don't know if I can handle the pressure of having to keep them und...

I'm not even sure what to say.  Other than the fact that I'm definitely in new territory.  I'm finally committing to a more extreme method to ERP (at least what seems extreme to me), and I'm not sure what to do or how to feel about it.  Let's just say it's not as bad as keeping myself out of contact with water for days on end, but it feels that way to me.  I still get to shower and wash my hands, but not in a way that really provides any sense of cleanliness.  It seems all wrong, and it's only been a few hours since I started this new regimen. How did this all get started?  Well, after I ended my outpatient intensive treatment program back toward the end of February, I went back to the standard once a week therapy regimen.  I improved a lot during the few months that I did the intensive treatment, but little by little, things have begun to slip again  over the last month and a half.  So yesterday I scheduled a last minute session with my th...

This is my life.  I live with OCD day in and day out and suspect that I always have.  And because I have lived with it for quite some time, I have a hard time seeing it and just how much it affects my life.  I forget the cost, the toll, of giving into OCD's wishes, because, frankly, I have grown used to the sacrifices.  Indeed, I'm not even sure I know what it's like to not make SOME sort of sacrifice to keep this disorder appeased.  The more I learn about myself and how OCD has wriggled its way into the nooks and crannies of my life, I begin to wonder - how many of my decisions, in the past and in the present, have been based on my attempts to quell OCD's insatiable need for certainty, for feeling "right"? I have been a bit more reflective on these things this past week as I decided to take some time off from therapy.  I'm not giving up.  I'm certainly not done with treatment by any means, but I have been feeling, well, complacent, lately, and I fel...

Bad advice is everywhere when it comes to dealing with OCD.  Today I ran across one of those yahoo question/answer deals where someone described taking extra long showers with a great big helping of compulsive avoidance.  This person asked:  how can I make my showers more pleasant?  What can I do?  I never answer those sort of things, but as I read the answers that had been provided so far, I quickly changed my mind. The answers angered me.  And it's not the fault of those answering - they just don't know better.  Answers like "try listening to music to relax yourself," "dance in the shower," or "maybe take a bath instead so even if you don't want to touch certain parts of your body to wash them, they are at least getting a little bit clean."  These are the kind of answers that I got from the first therapist I saw when this all began.  Answers like, "Why don't you try to do some deep breathing exercises to reduce your stress?" o...

As much as I believed there would come a point in time when I would feel ready to climb the hierarchy of exposure to minimize my OCD, a time when it would feel "right" and "easy," that time has yet to come.  It seems that I can't reach the top without first having to commit to exposure whether or not I'm sure it's "okay" or "right."  I had hoped I would find another way, but it appears the only way to go is, in fact, up.  Sometimes no matter how many times you read things, they don't start to make since until you've gone through them yourself.  I am admittedly a huge nerd when it comes to OCD and OCD treatment.  I love reading about this disorder - in books, through articles, on others' blogs :), you name it!  And yet, despite all I have learned from all the reading I have done, despite all my time spent in therapy, and despite the fact that I BELIEVED in what I had read and what my therapists recommended, some thin...

So I haven't seen a therapist in the last two days.  That makes this officially the longest I have gone without a session since the beginning of November when I began intensive treatment.  It's weird and it's not.  I am at home visiting my family.  I am in a completely different (less definitively trigger-laden) environment, and there are a lot of distractions.  It kind of scares me how at ease I am sometimes.  But at the same time, I haven't been doing much exposure either...and that certainly makes things easier.  So the decrease in therapy comes with an increase of other things to do and things to hold my attention.  But at the same time, like I said, haven't been doing much exposure :/. One thing that has been on my mind a lot (and a bit more than usual) is my weight.  Here at home with my family I can weigh myself (I have resisted buying a scale over the years because I know it would probably only lead to bad things, but here at my par...

My trip has only just begun and already exposures are presenting themselves.  I used a public bathroom at the airport because I DO NOT want to have to use the bathroom on the plane.  A public restroom v. plane bathroom.  It’s like choosing the lesser of two evils.  Neither is preferable at all, but this is what I “trained” for.  And I’m glad I did – using a public restroom was less of a hassle because I practiced being less compulsive when using public restrooms earlier this week with my therapist.  Pair this with the fact that I have done other restroom exposures without actually using the restrooms, and even though I may not be super duper excited about using them, I can at least get by.  I don’t have to sit for hours on end worrying that I will have to pee before I get to my destination. But my mind is still reeling from this exposure all the same.  At least my version of reeling.  As usual, I’m terrible at identifying and labeling my an...

Today I did a field session with my therapist at the mall where we proceeded to hit up just about every restroom in the place.  Correction, I hit up just about every restroom.  There was no therapist there to hover over my shoulder as I washed my hands.  No one to turn the water off.  No one to wipe the soap off my hands when I used too much.  No one to tell me stop.  No one to make me touch things.  But I did.  I washed my hands in, and even actually used , a public restroom. Some background:  half the battle for me in using public restrooms is the hand-washing part.  I never know what the conditions will be like:  Will there be enough soap?  Will I have to touch sink handles to turn on the water?  Will I have to touch the paper towel dispenser to get a paper towel?  Will there even be a paper towel dispenser or just those hand dryer things I don’t like to use (partly because you often have to touch them!)?  ...

Sometimes it seems as though everywhere I go, whatever I do, I come across things that remind me of OCD.  Then again, I think there is a lot of selective abstraction going on - I mean, I do pretty much have OCD and its treatment on my mind 24/7.  Literally.  I frequently dream about OCD predicaments, and it used to be all I would dream about!!  Every night it was another OCD nightmare, a dream that only I (and others with similar OCD fears) would find terrifying.  I recognize the absurdity of it, how silly it seems that such inconsequential things could be the central subject of a nightmare, but that's how it goes!  And I'm glad I can step back and appreciate the comedy in it after the fact. It's funny how when you are focusing on your OCD, the universe seems to leap out and offer you exposure wherever you go.  I was talking to a friend who has contamination fears, particularly with blood, and as she told me stories of the challenges she faced, it se...

Reality:  there's really only one way to find my way back, and it's not by constantly retracing where I've been... It's that time again.  I'm stuck in that post-home session funk where I try to decide what to do next - whether to dig myself out or to give up for the day.  I'm going to try to sort my thoughts out about it here so I can do what I need to do to get better! Today I did a lot of good exposure work with one of my therapists.  The big exposure of the day was...showering!!  Woo.  My showers are now under 30 minutes but still heavily ritualized, meaning that I do everything in a very specific order, in a specific way, a specific number of times.  Deviation from this routine or lack of focus while completing it can lead to repetition until I'm sure I got it "right."  Well, today we took a nice big wrecking ball to my shower regimen.  And this is how we did it:  my therapist timed me as usual, but instead of just calling out h...

Just thought I'd share my discomfort with the OCD blogging community, just in case anyone out there wasn't experiencing enough of their own... So I just finished a home visit and was permitted a quick hand wash supervised by my therapist at the end of my session.  Yet, of course, that hand wash didn't seem like nearly enough to me to rid my hands of all the gross-ness collected on them from the things we did.  Maybe this isn't that gross. Maybe it's just me.  But we used rags and 409 to clean off a kitchen counter and stove top that have not been cleaned in oh, like forever.  My hands felt as if they were soaked in solution of 409, kitchen counter top debris, burned grease, and the collected film created by the gas that's burned by the stove.  We rinsed the rags out at the end, and thus, my hands were rinsed a little at that time.  But after that I was only allowed that one 30 second or so hand wash that I mentioned before.  With only two pumps of s...

So I realize that I haven't really kept up with summarizing my journey on through my intensive treatment program.   I am now at the close of week 3 and much of weeks 2 and 3 were like week 1.  Each week has had its ups and downs but the overall product is certainly progress, progress which at times feels like frighteningly much and at other times like far too little.  Hopefully presenting a brief snapshot of the experience and pulling out some of the highlights will help me focus on the areas where I have succeeded as well as those that still need a lot of work. I have three home visits each week.  During these sessions, we have sort of been going room by room through my house doing exposures.  Of course, we started with my bedroom which is where I spend most of my time.  I now have an established "circuit" of exposures that I am supposed to do each day in my bedroom.  Mostly it involves touching a lot of things I consider dirty and then indiscr...