OCD Reflections

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 - ...

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...

I need this.  And by that I mean - time taken for myself.  Time taken doing something soothing and familiar like writing here.  Something to bring me back to a place and state of mind I know.  Life has been so busy lately that writing hasn't been on my mind.  Or, if it has been, I just haven't had the energy and will to do it. This past week I FINALLY began a new part-time job that I have been waiting to start for months now.  For reasons related to OCD, I had to wait a long time from the time I was hired and trained to actually begin working. (Apparently my excessive washing over the last year and a half has wreaked havoc on my fingerprints, making them pretty much impossible read digitally.  Digital fingerprinting was required for my job, and since mine were dreadfully unclear it took FOREVER to jump through all the necessary hoops for approval.  I had been interviewed, hired, trained, and had all the necessary paperwork in line, but for month...

Whew!!  Clearly I am not used to having daily commitments because I feel super busy keeping up with my daily therapy appointments.  OCD is used to having all the time it wants, just about anytime it wants, and that's beginning to change.  Sorry OCD, don't have as much flexibility in scheduling to allow my entire life to revolve around your whims... I've been meaning to recap days #2, 3, and now #4, so here goes: Day #2:  The Protective Shield of Novelty Begins to Wear Off My second day of intense CBT treatment began with me waking up in a state of confusion, which I wrote about here .  The novelty and exhilaration of breaking all the rules had worn off considerably and I was left to face the reality of the consequences of my actions.   But I survived despite the fact that I felt really "off" and like I needed to somehow undo all the exposures that had taken place the day before.  I didn't do any "undoing" and I went on to get up and go about m...

Well, it's that time.  Operation "Destroy My One and Only Pristine Sanctuary of Cleanliness in this Dirty, Dirty World" is well underway (go here for further explanation).  Here's a recap of day one, in my therapist's words: Touched bed with unwashed hands Stripped bed, put bedding on floor, then remade bed Dumped dirty laundry on bed Removed bedding from bay window and placed on bed Confiscated sanitizers and bag of hoarded receipts Sat on floor Briefly touched toilet seat and handle, then returned to bedroom Touched items in "condemned corner" Walked on bed in bare feet Touched clean clothes with unwashed hands, touched clean clothes to dirty clothes, touched clean clothes to floor and put away with other clean clothes Ate dried fruit with unwashed hands Touched flute with unwashed hands (esp difficult) Touched all areas of bedroom in no particular order with unclea...

This guy's fooled many a fruit loop-bearing hiker or cheetoh-offering friend into thinking he's a chipmunk...but we know the truth tiny rodent...someone forgot their face stripes and WE know that he's just another squirrel like the rest of them.  Now get your paws off my shoe!!   And while you're at it, go wash your paws before eating anymore food begged off unwitting strangers!  What an audacious (and filthy) little fraud...I bet he didn't wash after using the restroom either ;). This morning I woke up after a particularly long night of sleep only to be greeted by my good old friend, more commonly known as the "fear of not really having OCD and somehow faking out the world as well as my self..."  Umm, yeah. The exposures for this sort of fear, as I have mentioned before, are the same as my usual exposures - do my homework successfully, because, if I can do my OCD homework successfully, then I must be a "fraud," right?  I mean, if I ca...

Though I have been looking for part-time jobs and have some promising prospects, I am gradually becoming a little bit more nervous about my financial situation.  I have savings - gifts from relatives from over the years given for holidays and birthdays, extra savings here and there from summer jobs.  I was a relatively frugal kid/teen and my parents took care of paying for my food/clothing so I didn't need to spend a lot of money.  But now, well, I am paying for almost all my expenses, BUT I don't have a job! On the one hand I feel like I should consider myself lucky - I don't have student loans to worry about paying back like many of my friends.  Scholarships greatly reduced my college tuition and my parents could afford to pay the difference and were kind enough to do so.   But even though I don't have to worry about loans, it's hard watching my savings gradually disappear - mostly to rent and health insurance and the cost of therapy.  Rent is sort of ...

I have a fear of overcoming my OCD. Like a shadow, OCD will probably always be following me, changing in shape and size over time.  I can choose to fight it, to attempt to chase away the discomfort it causes, but it's not going anywhere.  There will probably always be different OCD fears that come and go throughout my life, and the less I fight those fears, those obsessions, the less likely they are to bother me, including my "fear of overcoming my OCD."  The less time I spend trying to make my shadow go away, the less I will notice its presence.  Or, conversely, the less time I spend making sure it is still there, the less I will fear losing it. Wait what?  No, that's right.  I'm actually afraid of losing my OCD sometimes.  And I feel bad about this because so many people would probably love to be rid of their OCD and would be quite content never to see it again.  What kind of person "chooses" to keep a mental disorder?  "C...

I often have a hard time knowing what to do because I sometimes feel like I am forcing myself, or even choosing, to perpetuate my OCD through the performance of rituals.  I get confused and go around in circles in my head, wondering if, unlike everyone else out there with OCD, I should be held more responsible for my symptoms and am less deserving of help because I might actually be "making myself" have the disorder.  However, trying to figure this question out is next to impossible, and I suspect that needing an answer is really just another compulsion - feeling like I need to know the answer to this before I can engage fully in treatment is just another OCD trap. On the flip side, I often have a hard time with myself because I feel like I should be performing more rituals and doing them better.  Instead of feeling bad for choosing to do compulsions, as described above, I feel bad for not choosing to do them, as well.  After all that I have learned about OCD, ...

There are times I occasionally realize that I have been carrying around a lot of shame and/or guilt about my OCD, but I often come to this realization not when I am actually feeling these feelings, but when I discover they are no longer there in a particular setting or situation. Twice today I had that surprising experience.  The first was at the pharmacy.  I was there getting a new prescription filled (that is another long OCD-filled story) and I was advised to do a "consult" with one of the pharmacists on staff because I haven't taken this particular medication before.  During these kind of consults they usually just give me a quick run down on whatever my new drug is - potential side effects, what to do, what not to do, etc.  Well, today I actually had questions about my new addition, and it was as I was asking these questions that I realized I felt far more at peace than I usually do just being in the pharmacy and in particular when talking to the pharmacist....

Today I'm having one of those moments where I feel incredibly presumptuous - presumptuous to believe that I have had a rough time with OCD and even more presumptuous to believe that I ever had an eating disorder. So this is off topic, since this is supposed to be a blog about OCD, but I was reading about EDs today and began to doubt whether I really had a diagnosable case of an eating disorder when I was younger. I mean, I definitely had disordered eating, but I got over it fairly quickly, and though I always believed that I had anorexia nervosa, I'm not sure if I was ever technically diagnosed. I've been told that people who are anorexic usually have to fight for years to overcome their problem and many never fully recover. I recovered fairly quickly, meaning that I gained the weight back, even if my eating habits didn't really get back to normal for a few years. But I didn't receive extensive treatment. It didn't take endless cajoling to get me to coope...

Normally I like watching the OCD project, not because I like to watch people suffer, but because it is comforting to see people doing such hard exposures and succeeding. It is also nice to see others that I can relate to, people who struggle with things I have struggled with or still do. Today I realized that watching this show is starting to cause me some amount of anxiety. I look at the participants' reactions and think, maybe I don't know what that is like anymore. What if I can no longer sympathize? What if I never really had OCD? I am doing so much better, even in just the last couple days. The ease with which I have transitioned and started to change my ways frightens me. I feel like there should be a giant wave of anxiety that I have to overcome. This seems too easy. What if I forget how it felt to have that much fear of irrational things? What if I never really had it as bad as they did and was just acting like I had really bad OCD, when actually, I could have ...

There are often those moments where I have a choice - to do what's comfortable and reassuring or to do what I know needs to be done to get better. I feel dirty, but then, that's emotional reasoning. I know better than to obey based on that feeling alone. Nevertheless, I can feel myself being drawn towards the wrong decision, the decision to give in and do the thing that will make me feel safe, comfortable, and refreshingly clean. I also feel bad for being so easily lured into the OCD trap, especially when it seems like I don't experience that much anxiety and because I have the ability to sit here and calmly analyze my options. If I am this calm and rational, why am I still leaning towards making the non-therapeutic decision? In fact, this is something I have had difficulty with since my relapse close to a year ago now. I have had different "types" of OCD throughout out my life and a myriad of different compulsions designed to alleviate the d...