After two weeks of insomnia, sinister thoughts about my boyfriend played like an audio recording in my head over and over again, and I was convinced that I had finally become my schizophrenic grandfather, who threw himself into a river at 42. Or I had finally become my father, who had a violent temper.
I went to work and suffered the thoughts for hours. Then I called my philosophy teacher at Long Beach City College, Dr. Louis Tharp, who was also a former psychologist, that was the day I was diagnosed with OCD.
It would take about 13 years to be diagnosed with the condition. People’s dismissal of the condition kept me at therapy sessions and on medication for different mental illnesses other than OCD since I was 11-years-old.
It’s a shame that it took me so long to realize that my recurring negative thinking, hypochondria, and fear of losing control were all part of a treatable condition such as OCD. It’s a shame I thought I was a bad person.
Though OCD is characterized as an anxiety-disorder, the treatment of OCD is a little bit more complex than generalized anxiety, and can take years to recognize.
To open up about thoughts and compulsions without fear of being judged negatively, it can present itself in ways that make you question your motives and thoughts and compulsions, every single minute of every hour of every day. It’s exhausting.
For most people, when they hear of OCD they think cleaning, being anal, or obsessing over weird rituals. It’s true I can clean my room spotless, sometimes. And it’s true I wash my hands often.
I don’t touch door handles because there might be a strange, untreatable virus on there that we will surely die from. I have to flick on the lights three times because if not our mothers will die. I have to pray and repent because we had a violent thought, which means we’re now crazy and any day now we’ll lose control and go to hell.
Of the obsessions associated with OCD, the most common are obsessing over health, sexuality, religion, contamination…and violent thoughts.
The latter is the one that finally drew my attention, and the attention of Dr. Tharp, to my OCD.
“Are you capable of killing yourself or your boyfriend?” Dr. Tharp asked me over the phone.
“No,” I said. “But who’s to say I won’t? What if I lose control? I mean, if I’m not crazy why did I think that?” I asked him.
Dr. Tharp laughed and said, “Ah, yes. You’re a classic obsessive.”
In conversations with Dr. Tharp over the past year, I’ve accepted the fact that my thoughts will always be bewildering, and intrusive. But they’ll always be just that…thoughts.
Constantly calling others to see if they think I’m crazy, countless doctor visits to reassure myself of my health, and other reassurance seeking measures to alleviate the pain caused by my thinking were compulsions in and of themselves, and I just didn’t realize it. I thought because I didn’t have the classic compulsions I saw on TV that I couldn’t have OCD.
Nevertheless, Dr. Tharp and research on OCD have taught me how to harness the power of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), and exposure response prevention (ERP) to retrain my brain to wire new behaviors into itself that lessen the power of the intrusive thoughts.
CBT helps in realizing how irrational a thought is, and combating it with other forms of thinking, while ERP exposes an OCD sufferer to a trigger without giving in to the mental or physical compulsion to alleviate it.
Both allowed me to stop constantly researching my emotions, and let the thoughts dwell before finally letting them go.
Both helped me sleep a full night after almost two weeks of the hell that is insomnia also.
With the tools of behavioral psychology and writing, I find myself obsessing over my future rather than my old thinking patterns.
It’s not an easy battle. If I don’t get enough sleep, my brain goes into overdrive and I begin to feel unhinged again. But, I always come back to the core of myself that knows and repeats, “I’m ok.”
“The best doctors and lawyers have OCD. If you can take your obsessions and use it for something positive, you could do a lot with it. Like your writing, or money. It’s a matter of not entertaining the thought, and not giving it power,” Dr. Tharp told me over a phone call recently.
When I stopped giving my thoughts power over me, I was able to put the power back into myself, my career, and my writing.