A Slave To My Mind

When I was eight years old there was a voice constantly nagging in the back of my mind, but it wasn’t my voice. It controlled the strangest aspects of my life: where I could set my clothes down, and what and how I would eat . The voice told me what cup to choose from from the cupboard, because all the other cups had poison laced around the rim of the cup as if they were lurking, ready to end my life. The voice demanded me to wash my hands a million times throughout the day. The voice put unrealistic thoughts of my family dying in my head as a result of certain insignificant actions I would perform. For the readers of this paper, you might be frowning in confusion at the possibility that I might have been the weirdest kid to possibly roam this earth; in my brain however, all the thoughts from the voice in the back of my mind seemed perfectly logical. Although my mind convinces me these thoughts are “normal,” when I say it out loud, or even while I’m writing these words on paper, I am able to sort out the logical thoughts from the illogical ones (like what cup to choose from the cupboard). You see, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), is not a logical disorder. As quoted from my wise therapist John, “OCD does not speak logic-keys,” or in other words, a mental disorder riding fully on emotions and anxiety is truly not a good mix for the creativity of the mind.

OCD in my opinion, preys on ultra creative minds and antagonizes the victim with wild, “seemingly logical” worries. The worries then create major anxieties that drive the brain mad. Obsessive thoughts such as, “if you hold your little sister you will kill her” is one I vividly remember having at eight years of age. I was so terrified of killing my little sister, that no matter how much my mom coerced me, I refused to touch her. Irrational beliefs constantly plagued me such as this one: “If you touch that ball and don’t wash your hands afterwards you will get a deadly infectious disease that will kill your whole family.” I washed my hands so much that they cracked and bled and I was prescribed special lotion to heal them. Oh, and then there’s my personal favorite: OCD convinced me that there was going to be a horrific earthquake that could strike at any moment, so I carried around a 72-hour kit bag with me wherever I went. At this time, my parents started questioning the crazy notions that were going on in my head, and upon doing a “google search” of my strange symptoms, diagnosed me with OCD and matched me with a child psychologist that specialized in the mental disorder. I remember walking out of therapy and being able to think clearly for the first time in years, describing it as “the cloudiness has been lifted off my mind.” Soon after each appointment however, the OCD obsessions would return.

The intrusive thoughts were still relentless: “If you step on that floorboard or go over to that side of the room, you will be cursed.” Threats upon threats were constantly churning in my eight year-old mind which inevitably led me into a very dark place for many years. I was scared and thought my world was ending. I was either going to die from germs, or a rare disease. I believed I was a threat to everyone. I could swear that my mom was going to die and obsessively said “I love you” at the end of every sentence, in fear that every day with her would be my last. OCD was the conniving voice in my head that continually told me lies and forced me to believe them.

It is impossible to illustrate just how dark and devious this mental disorder is. “Uncertainty” was the plague of my existence and I became a slave to my mental disorder. Aging only made the OCD grow stronger and take on another uncharted course. Around the teenage years the outward compulsions lessened, but inward, obsessive, and intrusive thoughts increased. My main unrelenting, internal obsession was how I interacted with people and how they interacted with me. Concepts of people not liking me because I was “different”, or trying to please everyone at all times dictated my every move. My parents started noticing my unexplainable behaviors again, and this time decided to take me to a different therapist that could prescribe medication. In their frantic efforts to help me, they spoke with many medical professionals who told them that medication has a high success rate of lessening the symptoms of OCD. It was as if I could control my own thoughts again, the prescribed medication cut my OCD symptoms in half! The proper medication had cut back the severity of the disorder, and many of the extreme fears and imagined threats that had controlled my line of thinking for so long had decreased.

My family had believed I had been cured of OCD, and honestly I thought I did too. Not that I didn’t have questionable OCD- related thoughts, but most of the time I honestly thought they were my own insecurities that were normal of a teenager going through puberty. These less threatening thoughts nagged me about friends saying: “Your friend hates you because you looked at her wrong, better go and ask her why she hates you so much,” and “if everyone in the room doesn’t see you smiling they will think you hate them.” Kids would tell me that it looked like my smile was plastered to my face, but oh, if they only knew. Then there was the dreaded “silence.” Silence was not good at all, so OCD would tell me: “If I’m not constantly talking to the person they will think I hate them,” but did they? It truly didn ’t matter because OCD didn’t want me to sit with “uncertainty” ever, so it was my job to always fill the silence.

When I was eight, the therapist suggested identifying OCD as a different voice than my own, giving it a name and identifying it as a nuisance. I named the OCD voice “fart face” (a suggested negative connotation) to distinguish it from my own thoughts and be able to tell it to “STOP!” I would often tell the therapist how hard it was to think, and that my brain felt cloudy. Simply put, it was hard to think straight. It was hard to concentrate. So many compulsions and intrusive thoughts spiraling around in my brain made me struggle in school for many years. Telling “fart face” to “STOP” was the only tool from cognitive therapy that I could use to order the intrusive thoughts away, but it was never enough.

There are so many characteristics of OCD , it is such a complex mental disorder. Society tends to downplay it in a movie scene or the like where someone is “SO OCD” because they color coordinate all the clothes in their closet, or line up all their shoes perfectly. When people find out I suffer from OCD they assume that my room is really organized, clean, and everything's in its proper place. I believe that society has some big misconceptions about the severity of the illness, so I would like to break it down for the readers of this paper.

There are three roots of OCD: Contamination, Catastrophe, and Scrupulosity (a type of perfection). OCD will attach itself to a specific root, but it can grab on to other roots and take traits from those also. All forms of OCD can be debilitating to a person’s well-being and life-style , and if not properly treated, can result in depression, loneliness, and suicidal tendencies.

The first root of OCD is Contamination. “Contamination OCD is a common OCD subtype in which a person obsesses over contracting an illness or spreading germs. These intrusive thoughts cause the person serious anxiety and distress, which they try to relieve with compulsive behavior, like excessive washing or avoiding crowded spaces.” (Kaplan, 2021) Contamination OCD manifested in the early stages when I was battling the illness. Feeling like I was going to die constantly of germs, or possibly contaminating my family and friends plagued me, as did the excessive hand washing and needing to “feel clean.” Not eating the ends of my food where my fingers had touched because I believed the ends were poisoned, was all consuming whenever I ate meals, there were always half-eaten carrots left on my plate. Having to skip every other square of toilet paper because it was poisoned, made my parents question why there was so much unused toilet paper in the trash can. My response was “ I had to” every time they asked why I did something unusual. My mom would cry out of worry and desperation, and my dad would try to make jokes about it to make her feel better. It weighed heavily on my poor parents.

The second root of OCD is Catastrophe. “Catastrophizing is a way of thinking called ‘cognitive distortion.’ A person who catastrophizes usually sees an unfavorable outcome to an event and then decides that if this outcome does happen, the results will be a disaster.” (Nall, 2018) The roots my OCD had specifically grabbed onto at such an early age of eight was a definite mix between catastrophe and contamination, hence the 72-hour kit at the ready and the constant hand washing. My whole family could visibly see that something was wrong with my brain, but did not quite understand it. You can imagine the confusion my family had when I started becoming obsessed with religious matters too, a form of OCD labeled as scrupulosity, in addition to all the other fears I had been experiencing. Growing up in a very religious Christian family was wonderful, until “fart face” started feeding me ideas that I wasn’t good enough, or that GOD was disappointed in me. The obsessive thoughts were so overwhelming that when my church leaders spoke sermons at church, I became depressed while others felt uplifted. It was as if I could never be “good enough.”

The definition of scrupulosity means: “A form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) involving religious or moral obsessions. Scrupulous individuals are overly concerned that something they thought or did might be a sin or other violation of religious or moral doctrine.” (IOCDF, 2010)

Scrupulosity manifested itself when I was around 13 years old after being bullied by a neighborhood friend named Kasie. Kasie’s mom accused me of being the bully and began threatening me (yes, a 40 year old woman threatening a 13 year old girl) and putting our family in danger. This went on for a few years until my family and I had all reached our breaking points and decided to move to a new home about 1 ½ hours away. The interesting fact here is that my scrupulosity was triggered by being bullied, and for some reason, after the bullying incident I started obsessing over having a life changing experience with everyone I met. Then I became obsessed with serving others. If I wasn’t making a life-changing difference in someone’s life everyday, panic would rack my brain and I would use “neutralizers'' to calm my anxiety down. A person uses neutralizers when he/she experiences extreme anxiety; he/she quickly thinks of a thought or asks someone for help to calm him/her down. This technique would work in the moment, like when I felt bad about not befriending someone that had been left out, and to neutralize my anxiety I would have to ask my mom for reassurance that I wasn’t a bad person. A normal people pleaser would feel bad about leaving someone out for a moment and then quickly dismiss the thought. A person suffering from OCD would magnify that thought into the size of a mountain and constantly think about it over and over again like a broken record no matter how much reassurance was offered. OCD never left me alone, causing guilt and anxiety whenever it had the chance to; gratefully however, there was a light at the end of the tunnel.

Although the medication and small doses of therapy through the years helped, I still spent too much time wrestling the horrible obsessive thoughts from “fart face.” My saving grace came when I was 19 and attended the OCD and Anxiety Treatment Center in Bountiful, Utah. The clinical assistants at the OCD and Anxiety Treatment Center exposed me to my smallest and biggest fears and I was forced to work through them in a safe environment. Though I had contamination concerns and many more nagging compulsions, my biggest obsession during this time was being accepted. Studies have shown that people that have been bullied in the past need to feel accepted by everyone as if they have something to prove, and this was clearly me.

One of the first techniques/tools I learned in the OCD and Anxiety Treatment Center was to talk about my past without neutralizing or saying, “Don’t worry, I’m okay.” Sometimes I would laugh to neutralize the anxiety I was feeling. The technique used to satisfy the exposure and conquer the fear was a two step process: First, experience all the anxieties of the exposure. Second, don’t allow yourself to neutralize them. After several times of doing this correctly, the annoying OCD trigger would slowly become less relevant in your life.

One of my second exposures was to go without makeup in the treatment center. I was asked to walk around the facility and talk to others in my vulnerable state, and not allow myself to neutralize. An example of neutralizing in this situation would have been asking people if I looked okay. Before attending the treatment center if I went a day without wearing makeup, I would obsess the whole day that people were staring at my acne and possibly thinking of how ugly I looked.

The second tool I learned was utilizing hook statements. A hook statement is actually supposed to create anxiety; not telling OCD to stop, but to welcome the fear. A hook statement might be: “Maybe everyone is looking at me and they think I’m ugly, but maybe everyone isn’t. I will never know.” I am reluctantly admitting that I am afraid of people seeing me without makeup on and then, I am allowing myself to be okay with not knowing exactly what they think about it. I am not neutralizing anything or trying to find certainty, I am simply accepting the uncertainty in my life. The clinical assistants at the OCD and Anxiety Center also had me debate controversial opinions; having me say what I wanted to say, and living with the uncertainty that my comment may or may not have made others feel uncomfortable. The clinical assistants did however teach me to decipher when it was or was not an appropriate time or place to completely speak my mind out of respect for other people, meanwhile still maintaining my authentic “self.”

The OCD and Anxiety Center specializes in Exposure Response Therapy, and it is what saved me from constantly succumbing to the damaging inner voice that belonged to OCD or “fart face.” This facility changed my life for the better and I will forever be grateful.

This experience has led me to dream of owning my own type of treatment clinic someday. I would like to treat personality disorders that are often overlooked and under-treated. I suspect that OCD tendencies accompany many types of personality disorders and should be managed and treated accordingly.

When going through the OCD and Anxiety Treatment Center I often wondered, “Who would I be without OCD controlling so many aspects of my life?” I feared I wouldn’t be as genuine and sincere; fortunately, that wasn’t true. I am still kind and like to help and serve people. I still like to smile and make people happy, only thankfully now I’m not overly obsessive about it. I’ve realized that I have changed a bit through this growing process: I am not as outgoing as I used to be because I don’t have thoughts pushing me to please everyone anymore, but I’m okay with that. I have found my true self, and I know who I am. A mental illness is part of you, but it definitely is not who you are.

Citations

Kaplan, Josh. “Contamination OCD and the Fear of Germs: Symptoms and Treatment.” NOCD, NOCD Inc., 6 May 2021, www.treatmyocd.com/blog/contamination-ocd-fear-of-germs.

ocfoundation.org. “Scrupulosity.” Iocd.org, IOCDF, 2010, iocdf.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/IOCDF-Scrupulosity-Fact-Sheet.pdf.

Rachel, Nall. “What Is Catastrophizing? 6 Ways to Stop Catastrophic Thinking.” Medical News Today, MediLexicon International, 7 Feb. 2018, www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/320844.

Silver, L., Silver, L., Panel, A., 3, K., & Says:, K. (2021, April 26). OCD and ADHD: The polar opposites that are not. Retrieved May 09, 2021, from https://www.additudemag.com/ocd-and-adhd-are-the-polar-opposites-that-are-not/

Stanborough, Rebecca Joy. “Dueling Diagnoses: Do You Have ADHD, OCD, or Both?” Healthline.com, Health Line Media, 24 Mar. 2021, www.healthline.com/health/mental-health/adhd-and-ocd#takeaway.

Yuhas, Daisy. Untangling the Ties between Autism and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. 28 Feb. 2019, www.spectrumnews.org/features/deep-dive/untangling-ties-autism-obsessive-compulsive-disorder/.