Chain mail of the mind
- Adrianne Cekan
- 20 Jan 2020
Germaphobia, excessive tidiness, and perfectionism — are these the traits you think of when you hear the acronym “OCD”?
For many who are unfamiliar with the realities of obsessive compulsive disorder, they likely make up the totality of it. Maybe you’ve found yourself saying, “that makes my OCD go crazy” when you find it irritating that a picture is crooked as it hangs on the wall, despite not having suffered from OCD at all. I can’t completely fault the general public for misunderstanding OCD or misusing the disorder’s name — after all, how is one supposed to take the illness seriously when mass retailers like Target and TK Maxx are among those who have been feeding us holiday-themed pillows and sweaters reading “OCD: Obsessive Christmas Disorder” for years?
For some sufferers of OCD, the characteristics I mentioned above are the reality of their experience with the mental illness, but not the entire picture. One of my favourite on-screen portrayals of OCD is a simple 5 second clip from a 1998 Friends episode where Ross’s coworkers are confessing secrets in the lunchroom and one man announces, “I have to turn a light switch on and off 17 times before I leave the room or else my family will die”. I had never heard one sentence encapsulate OCD so well, all while being comical.
In OCD terminology, this character engages in the compulsion (or ritual) of flicking the light switch to calm the obsession (stemming from an intrusive thought) that his family will die if he doesn’t. I imagine that for most fans of the show, Friends’ connection to OCD would be through Monica and her excessive tidiness, though I never really viewed her as having OCD at all.
For years, I tried to find a simple way to describe OCD to friends that would easily break through the misconceptions. Then I realized it’s just like one annoyance we’ve all experienced — chain mail. No, not medieval armour. Rather, those terrifying e-mails that haunted any internet-savvy tween’s inbox during the early 2000s. These often contained bogus threats like the summoning of some kind of demon that would suck the life out of you while you slept if you didn’t forward the note to 10 of your friends. Most of us had the common sense to know these threats were empty. How on earth would forwarding an email to 10 people save you from doom? Despite this, we forwarded them just in case. Taking a minute to forward an email seemed like a small price to pay to avoid a lifetime of bad luck, a parent dying, or whatever the threat happened to be.
OCD turns you into the inbox and sends you a never-ending flow of terrifying threats that demand small tasks be done in exchange for them to not come true. For the majority of OCD sufferers, the physical compulsions are tied to an obsession (a.k.a. an intrusive thought that holds some kind of weight to the sufferer). For example, OCD sufferers don’t usually organize excessively out of a simple desire to be tidy — there is almost always an ‘or’. I have to keep my notebooks in this particular order, or I’ll fail this class. I have to read every licence plate I see, or my house will be broken into. I have to rewrite this sentence until the letters look perfect, or my mother will develop cancer. Those are a tiny selection of the thoughts OCD plagued me with during my tween and teenage years.
If you’re thinking to yourself, “I’ve had thoughts like that before”, it’s because you probably have. In fact, my last therapist told me that 90% of people have intrusive thoughts. The difference with someone who suffers from OCD is they can’t move past these thoughts like your average person. Someone without OCD can say, “that was a weird thought” and go on with their day. OCD sufferers toil with and punish themselves for the same thoughts, fixating on them and giving them power — a constant “what if” that they can’t let go of.
In my experience, these intrusive thoughts asked seemingly small rituals be completed to make them go away. Rewrite a word, flick the light switch on and off, or express the thoughts to someone and have them tell you everything is okay. Just like chain emails, none of it realistically makes sense or is connected. OCD sufferers know it doesn’t make sense. That’s part of what makes the illness so fascinating. Despite knowing better, the obsessions and compulsions still hold power over us.
If I happened to think about a classmate whose father recently passed away as I walked through a doorway, my OCD would fill me with the need to go back and walk through it again to somehow “undo” the thought and ensure my father wouldn’t also pass away suddenly. It seemed harmless and a small price to pay to keep the things I cared most about safe. But over time, these intrusive thoughts asked for more. Suddenly I was spending entire weekends writing a one-page assignment by hand because of my need to erase and rewrite every word at least 3 times. I’d hand my assignments in with holes in them regularly.
My life became a living nightmare at only 11 years old. I had constant fears that the worst possible thing was going to happen, and it would be my fault due to not having completed my compulsions correctly or at all. On the rare occasion I was unable to complete a compulsion, the anxiety became crippling.
I also developed germ and contamination-related fears that would cause me to wash my hands until they would crack and bleed. These compulsions were what I consider to be more “related” to the obsessions, as they were fears of illness and disease. But compulsions don’t always make sense in relation to an obsession, as I mentioned earlier. Often, the fear is seemingly completely disconnected from the compulsion. Yes, I would wash my hands because I was afraid of contamination, but I would also wash my hands if I saw something frightening on the Internet.
When I think back to how I overcame my most difficult years with OCD, I don’t have a simple answer. It was the combination of a few things. Hitting rock bottom helped, surprisingly. At my worst, I was unable to do anything but lay in bed and cry, my mind seemingly purposely coming up with as many horrific threats and scenarios as possible, each worse than the last, challenging me to reach new levels of self-loathing and doubt. When I tried to stop them, more would come. One of my first therapists told me, “if I tell you not to think about a pink elephant, you’re going to think about a pink elephant”. I hated my brain, but it was only human.
Eventually, it wasn’t humanly possible to carry out all the compulsions my OCD asked of me. One of my most common compulsions was reassurance seeking — my poor mother would have to hear about all my intrusive thoughts and tell me it was going to be okay, otherwise they’d come true. I could see the mental toll it was taking on her, and her being so overwhelmed pushed me to ease off my oversharing. When I forced myself to lessen this compulsion for the sake of my mother’s sanity, I saw firsthand that bad things were no more likely to happen if I didn’t seek reassurance from her.
Cognitive behavioural therapy also helped significantly. Seeing my worries be proven wrong again and again through exposure therapy helped me start to break the cycle. It’s exhausting and extremely unsettling to just “not do anything” and ride the wave of anxiety when in distress. OCD is like a temptress in your ear, reminding you that the anxiety would go away so much faster by giving into the compulsions. But when you don’t, you notice the world doesn’t end, and the anxiety eventually passes. The sense of control that comes from that is invigorating.
Though I no longer suffer from “typical” compulsions, I still suffer from some obsessions, or “pure O”. There are not many physical compulsions that can settle my intrusive thoughts, so it becomes a matter of these thoughts swirling around in my head until I somehow come to an internal resolve. Pure O can be just as bad as typical OCD, clinging onto intrusive thoughts that make you doubt the core essence of yourself. To cope, my therapists and I have worked on helping me accept living with uncertainty, but that’s an article for another time.
I still occasionally get the odd chain email from OCD in my mental inbox. When packing for a trip, my OCD will often kick in and tell me that my plane will crash if I don’t refold something so that it’s just right. Usually, I’m able to fight the urge to do the seemingly harmless action of refolding just in case. I know that one action could turn into thousands more, so I push myself to refrain, no matter the discomfort.
OCD will be a lifelong journey for me, fighting to be in control of how I let the endless thoughts I have as an individual affect me. I constantly remind myself that I determine the power I give to my thoughts. And I acknowledge that some thoughts require no power whatsoever — they’re just spam, after all.
Comments 0
There are no comments
Add comment