Happy New Year! Wow, I haven't updated for quite some time. I am doing pretty well right now, which is mostly the reason for the lack of blogging. Either that or I have just managed to live better with the issues my OCD presents, thus it doesn't seem to impact my life as much as it used to. I just wanted to talk about a couple of situations that have popped up recently and how the OCD mind can spin things and catastrophize these situations. What the OCD mind sees, if you will. The worst case scenario in each situation.
First of all, I want to just be happy and soak in the fact that I am doing amazingly well compared to where I was 3-4 years ago. Life changing difference. It is truly amazing to me. I want you to know that if you are out there struggling with OCD and have lost hope--please don't! I was a in a place 3-4 years ago where I was turning off toilets in my house each time I did the laundry, throwing out entire loads of clothes in the wash (even if they were brand new) because somehow I thought toilet water was contaminating the washing machine. My clothes were basically all disposable and I was replacing things constantly. Spending hundred, if not thousands, of dollars on items to be replaced. I don't even want to know the grand total! I had trouble taking out trash outside because I felt like the moment the trash bag hit the bottom of the can, that contamination would just spew upward at me from the base of the can. When I could hardly walk outside around my neighborhood without feeling contaminated from the wind/debris blowing around. When I stopped wearing make up or getting my hair done for a solid year. When sitting in any public place caused me to feel contaminated beyond belief. When my hands were so raw and horridly destroyed from constant handwashing that my hands became covered in warts and looked like bubble wrap. When my hands became contaminated by gasoline one day (because it dripped on my hand while filling up my car) and for about 8 months after that time I could no longer wash my hair normally. My hands were contaminated and I put shampoo on my hair and combed it through each time I washed, the shampoo couldn't even rinse out properly and I developed a gross orange film on my scalp because of that. I could go on and on with examples, but if you haven't read my blog before you'll just have to read the previous posts to see where I've come from and where I am now. I think the first steps toward me making big progress were in the summer of 2015--so for 2 1/2 years now I have been chipping away at things and I am really doing quite well. Yes there are some things that cause me problems--my husband still being a big one. I still admittedly have a ways to go with the clothing contamination and lots of things I could work on there--but I'm still doing a lot better in that respect! My laundry is not a big issue at all for me anymore. Most of the things that I struggled with for a few years at my lowest point are a non-issue anymore. And for that I am truly grateful.
Part of having OCD is, as I described above, your mind anticipating the worst. I think this something those of us with OCD always have to be particularly mindful of. And just learn to fight back against it. To not give into the worried feeling, but just go with it. Try it, and learn that the situation probably won't be as bad as our OCD imagines it to be. I think it is important to keep yourself in the game and keep yourself in situations that make yourself uncomfortable. You have to keep fighting back against this disorder to get out. For example, I always have a problem going to family gatherings. I have a fear of germs/illness and my OCD tells me that someone there will always be sick. My OCD imagines everyone there coughing with their mouths open, it imagines the kids sick with drippy runny noses. It imagines my family being exposed to viruses and becoming ill days after the event. For this reason I spent a good 1-2 years avoiding family functions, because I just couldn't handle the stress of worrying about it. I knew it was 100% certain that if we didn't go the family function, we couldn't pick up any germs/illness there. If we did go, there was a chance. OCD doesn't like to take chances. So it doesn't. We start avoiding, because it is easier. And the avoidance and not staying in engaged in life, is our downfall. This year I was determined to not ask for reassurance from my family, specifically my mom, "is anyone sick? Do you know if any of the kids are sick?" Remember, my family (including my parents) doesn't even know I have OCD. I have more of a germaphobia in their mind, thus my questions. We went to both sides, my husband and my family, Christmas celebrations this year. To my surprise, no one at all at either gathering seemed sick at all. Everyone was fine!!!! And even in the midst of cold/flu season. The strange thing is within the next few days several of my family members were sick, apparently one of my uncles had been sick with a cough that day--I just hadn't noticed. But...my dad, my cousin and my grandpa all became sick within a few days after Christmas. None of my family (myself, my husband or my daughter) got anything. A second example is that my husband had a colonoscopy the week before Christmas. As soon as I heard he was getting this (just a screening, he wasn't having any concerning symptoms), my OCD started to panic. I knew that when I had my own colonoscopy a couple of years ago it was an absolute mess. Of course it didn't help that I couldn't even sit on my own toilet seat--and eventually I just had to--because let me be honest here, it just doesn't work to squat over the toilet seat for 2-3 hours doing a prep). My OCD told me his bathroom was going to be a disaster. My OCD imagined poop all over the toilet seat, the wall, the floor. It imagined him pooping in his bed and ruining the mattress. It imagined him pooping in my car on the way to the actual procedure. It imagined all sorts of awful/disgusting stuff. But...here is what actually happened: He did his prep the night before and the morning of and nothing bad happened. I went in to clean his bathroom the next morning and it looked the same as usual. No poop anywhere. I put a mattress protector on his bed "just in case" and his bed was totally fine in the morning. I took him to his procedure and he didn't poop on my carseat. There were no problems. But yet for weeks my mind was filled was worry/anxiety on everything bad that "could happen", when in truth nothing bad did happen. And thankfully his colonoscopy ended up being normal.
The OCD mind. It's a scary thing, it really is. Usually what the OCD tells you is going to happen, comes nothing close to what actually happens in reality. I don't think there is a way to get out of this quickly unfortunately. You just have to keep exposing yourself to situations, and I can assure you that it does get easier each time. I have a lot more I want to talk about, and I plan to start updating a bit more frequently here in the near future. I want to talk in details about the problems I'm still having with my husband, and my plans for this year as far as "what is next in treating my OCD?" I also might start taking the Lexapro that my doctor has been suggesting for almost a year now. I was completely against it for awhile, then on the fence for awhile, now I'm leaning toward giving it a shot. Lots of stuff to talk about! Hope you all are doing well.
