Guest author Rosalie Stanton on O.C.D.

Fear Itself

Scarlett asked me to visit her blog and talk about OCD, and it's taken a while before I could decide what exactly I wanted to say on the matter that I haven't said already. Yet in this area, repetition is necessary. OCD is so stigmatized and misunderstood, such to the point I get irrationally angry whenever I hear people classify their “nit-pickiness” as OCD. Sorry, world, but wanting your pens stacked in a certain way or being addicted to hand-sanitizer does not make you OCD. To have the compulsion (stacking, checking, counting, washing), you must first have the OBSESSION. And no, obsession doesn’t mean it annoys you or you think about it more than once. Obsession means it’s in you, in your skin, something you know logically isn’t true somehow feels as real as your right hand. And while you know there is no sense in fearing something your body and mind rejects as false, you can’t get rid of the thought. The thought consumes you, devours you, and leaves you desperate for relief.

If you haven’t experienced something like this, you don’t have OCD.

In an effort to shed some light on my personal experience, I will say that I’ve had OCD for about twenty years. It first manifested after my parents’ divorce when I was seven, though the rituals and checking didn’t grow out of hand until I was nine or ten. I began worrying about the safety of my mother, to the point where I’d call or page her at the office hundreds of times a day to make sure she hadn’t gotten into a car accident, and if I didn’t hear from her immediately, I’d worry myself sick over her welfare. I also went through phases where I’d check the locks on every possible entrance to our home, certain that if I didn’t do it just one more time, I risked putting myself, my mom, and my little brother in danger. Those years are a little murky in my memory, but I believe these rituals were present before I started having textbook contamination fears.

Contamination fears are likely those people typically confuse with germaphobia. Yes, there is some overlap, so it’s clear where the stereotype originates. However, obsessive contamination fears may, at times, have nothing to do with germs. When I was little, my first contamination fear was I would die of lead poisoning. Why lead poisoning? Well, why not? OCD doesn’t have to make sense. I just heard about it one day, and immediately I feared I’d been contaminated. I stopped using pencils. I held my breath upon entering rooms where lead paint might have been used. I scraped my skin and checked my blood for black, blotchy spots. Eventually, my fears transcended into an all-out fear of death, and I went through the typical motions of washing my hands until they bled, covering my mouth, throwing out food I felt had been compromised, and generally making life hell for myself and everyone around me. Yet my fears were not limited to germs—they just happened to include them. Even now, though I haven’t experienced physical compulsions or contamination fears in years, I’ll still find myself obsessing over an ache in my tummy or worrying about cancer. Yet after my first of many meetings with multiple therapists, I realized I wasn’t going to die because I ate a s’more off a stick at a bonfire, and slowly, my symptoms subsided.

This likely sounds pretty open-and-shut. People with OCD are often associated with contamination fears, so this is what you’re used to hearing. However, my personal fears that have been most active in the last sixteen years or so had nothing to do with germs. Rather, a few months after my contamination fears dwindled, I became struck, and subsequently terrified, by the idea that I could kill someone.

I really don’t know how to explain this. It’s just a thought—a thought among many. People without OCD have these thoughts all the time. Maybe in traffic or at the grocery store, someone pisses you off and you think, “I’d like to run them over” or something to that effect. These thoughts are natural…but to the person who experiences violent obsessive thoughts, they mean something else entirely. They mean YOU ARE A BAD PERSON and YOU COULD HURT SOMEONE YOU LOVE and YOU’RE A DANGEROUS KILLER! IT’S ONLY A MATTER OF TIME.

Imagine trying to tell someone you’ve had thoughts about killing them, but you don’t want to and you really don’t mean it. The thoughts eat away at you, keep you up at night. If you’re religious (which I was at the time), you pray routinely that your loved ones will be kept safe, and that you will experience some sort of relief. You push and shove and try to find a way out of the black hole in which you find yourself, only to discover you’ve been digging in the wrong direction. I had to have this conversation with my mother when I was around eleven, and as you might imagine, she did not react well.

You know why people with OCD react to violent thoughts adversely? Because it’s not them. People who fear their thoughts will never act on them, anymore than I, a lifelong sufferer of arachnophobia, would willingly walk into a spider nest. The very existence of the thought causes anxiety you can’t imagine, because you couldn’t live with yourself if any of your fears came to light, and you can’t live with yourself fearing they might. Recently, I started watching the A&E show OBSESSED. There was one episode when a young woman with violent thoughts was asked to place a very sharp blade against her therapist’s throat and hold it. The girl was terrified, but the therapist encouraged her to hold the knife as long as she could, even saying, “Come on, kill me.”

You can guess how this ended. The therapist walked away alive, and the girl realized she would never act on her thoughts. The therapist then said that people with obsessive violent thoughts of this nature—the sort they fear—are people anyone could trust their lives with, as they would never, ever act on their thoughts. This sort of exposure therapy, called CBT, is the most effective in treating OCD, and the sort I’ve employed over the last couple years. It differentiates between homicidal patients (those who enjoy or take pleasure from thoughts of violence) to OCD patients—those who would give anything to have the thoughts go away.

Now, contamination thoughts and obsessive thoughts are not the bulk of my OCD experience. I’ve had paranoid thoughts, homosexual thoughts, relationship-substantiation thoughts, and pretty much thoughts about anything you can imagine. No topic is safe when it comes to the obsessive-compulsive mind, and whatever you hold dear is liable to become a target.

People with OCD are not delusional. They understand their fears aren’t real, and that understanding, in fact, almost always causes more distress. After all, if it’s not real, why fear it? I felt the same way with all my obsessions. I wasn’t afraid of the answer being yes, I was afraid of the reasons why I had the thoughts at all.

So what do you do? I’ve dealt with this in some way or another for most of my life. Do I shut myself in? Do I lock the doors and hide? Of course not. In fact, were any of you to meet me, you’d never guess I was obsessive compulsive. It’s a part of who I am, not who I am. I take medication, I seek help, I own my disease so it doesn’t own me. If I feel myself spiking—that is, having a surge of obsessive thoughts—I calm myself down and embrace it. After all, how else do you beat fear? You make yourself not afraid. Turning around and running in the other direction did nothing but give my thoughts power. The more I tried not to think them, the more I thought them. Now, if ever my day has gone poorly, I let myself be obsessive. After all, I am allowed. I am an obsessive compulsive, and the way I react to stress is the way I conditioned myself to react. So yes, I will have thoughts. I will likely have thoughts, ranging from across the spectrum, for the rest of my life. Does that upset me? Of course not. I can’t control what I think, and it’s foolish to try. What I can control is my response and whether or not I let it control me.

Admittedly, my case is rather mild. I once thought I was completely isolated in my violent fears, but learned violent thoughts are among the most common in OCD. In my search for knowledge, I’ve seen some horrific examples of OCD. In fact, one of the groups I joined harbors more “at risk” obsessive-compulsives than I’ve ever met, and I find myself getting more and more annoyed with them because the same three people post the same three messages and none of them have the strength to fight for their mental freedom. This isn’t easy. It became easy for me because I fought my disorder and sent it crying into a corner. Even if it recuperates and attacks again, it won’t beat me. But this didn’t happen over night. I had some very, very dark days, weeks, and months. I fought myself every way I could, and the only reason I succeeded was because I worked at it. Just like dieting, there is no magical pill you take to wish this or any mental condition away. It takes time and effort, and you have to be an active participant in your recovery.

I know this post has been rambly, and a little redundant if you’re familiar with my blog. At any event, I open the floor for discussion and encourage anyone with questions to come forward. If you’re not comfortable speaking publicly, you can always reach me directly at rosalie.stanton@gmail.com. Other resources include:

http://www.ocfoundation.org/what-is-ocd.html
http://exposingocd.blogspot.com/
http://kinderbrainlives.blogspot.com/

I thank Scarlett for allowing me time on her blog.

Yours in mental health,

Rosalie Stanton

http://rosalie-stanton.com/
http://rosaliestanton.blogspot.com/
https://twitter.com/rosaliestanton

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Rosalie is the author of, among others, Firsts and Possession from Loose Id, Dark Solace from Noble Romance and Moving Target from Lyrical Press.