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 an eventful few weeks.  I can hardly believe it, but I have been in my intensive treatment for almost a full month now and am about 2/3 of the way through the program.  Four hours a day, five days a week, I've been in treatment for OCD.  And I think I'm finally getting what I needed to propel me forward - a more aggressive, thorough, and persistent attack on my disorder, a sort of fight that I struggled to make with just one hour a week of therapy. Perhaps I'll write more in depth on the actual experience of being in the program later, but right now I have another topic on my mind:  what will I do when I am out?  My number one fear:  slipping, losing not only the gains I've made but the forward momentum I've collected.  What I hope to take away with me is not necessarily the ability to face any one specific fear, but rather the willingness and readiness to do what it takes to get better.  It's so much easier to do what needs to be done...

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...

A fierce wave of apathy and a new level of busyness in my life have led me away from blogging recently.  This lessening of interest creates additional anxiety on top of everything else:  why am I not so interested in writing anymore?  Am I losing my fascination with OCD?  Am I losing my identity as someone who has suffered and continues to suffer from OCD?  Is finding out that I have OCD no longer an intriguing life revelation and now just one thing more thing to deal with?  I hope not.  Of course, that's exactly why I start obsessing about it. As I mentioned in a previous post, so much has changed in my life recently.  I have a new apartment and a new roommate.  I also have a new job.  However, with the initial training period for that job now complete, I have drastically fewer hours, and the limited number of hours and my somewhat unpredictable schedule have me feeling less useful than I'd like to feel.  Lack of purpose breeds a...

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...

So, I haven't written in a while.  I started a few posts and then either fell asleep or gave up, lacking the energy and drive to continue.  Lately the urge to "perfectly" capture the chaos in my head and my feelings about it has been strong.  Strong enough to drive me away from writing.  But I'm going to try to finish a post for once, whether or not it is the most perfectly accurate depiction of the inner workings of my mind. Lately I have been feverishly applying to jobs, sending out resumes left and right, and scouring the internet for more possibilities.  I've been going through a similar process in trying to find a new place to live.  My lease is up at the end of May (though I may be able to stay for June, as well), so the question of where I will live (and where I can afford to live) has been weighing heavily on my mind.  Meanwhile, I have drastically less work because my job is somewhat seasonal, and the combination of trying to find a new plac...

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...

Life has been a bit crazy-making lately.  A few weeks ago I started to titrate down from my uber high dose of Zoloft (sertraline) so that I could try out Prozac.  And as I much as I feel like the Zoloft never really noticeably affected my thought patterns or my ability to fight my OCD, I have been hesitant to proceed in going down in dosage.  Meanwhile, my psychiatrist is out on leave, and I have been further hesitant to call the psychiatrist covering for her in her absence.  But I haven't proceeded with the schedule for decreasing medication dosage, and I should probably talk to someone about it. Part of my hesitation to going down in dose is rooted in OCD, I believe.  OCD is probably also the reason I stayed on the Zoloft (and my super high dose) for so long.  It didn't seem to be harming me.  I WAS getting better, albeit ever so slowly, as I continued to move forward in CBT.  And if my ability to progress was, in fact, facilitated by the meds...

Sometimes I think I have a hard time seeing just how much OCD I have and have always had.  Today I was reading an article from my Winter 2011 IOCDF newsletter.  There was a personal account from a parent whose son had suddenly starting exhibiting OCD symptoms after apparently acquiring a strep infection (I still find the whole concept of PANDAS intriguing - in college, I did a fairly in depth project on a related neurological issue also caused by strep, Sydenham's chorea).  Anyways, when she mentions the things her son suddenly "convinced" himself he had to do, like twirl past his sister's room to prevent something bad from happening, the degree to which OCD has been part of my life for YEARS, since I was also a kid, becomes more apparent. I'm caught off guard by accounts like this one, thinking, "Wait!  But doesn't everyone do that?"  My day is probably filled with all sorts of these little compulsions that hardly even register anymore because I ...

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...

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...

my favorite dysfunctional brain... I've been avoiding writing lately because I'm beginning to notice that it brings a sense of anxiety.  There's the idea that sparks the urge to write, followed by the desire to "perfectly" explain it all so that it feels "right" when I'm done, so that I feel "whole" and "complete" once I've finished spitting out all my thoughts.  Attempting to write a post with that goal in mind is starting to become more daunting than the idea of just holding all those thoughts in.  As often happens as my compulsions grow and take on a life of their own, I make myself perform them until the idea of DOING them finally becomes more onerous than the idea of NOT DOING them, at which point I just start avoiding whatever it is that I feel must be done in that compulsive way.  And I think that's what's begun to happen here.  I'm slowly starting to avoiding writing, even when I would like to, because I...