Life With Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

As a companion piece to the Describe It: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, one of a series about how to write mental health conditions, I figured I’d get into my experiences with mild-to-moderate Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Considering I have a grab bag of neurodivergences, you guys are going to get to know me real well with these “Life with…” compendiums.

There will be times I switch tense below, because some of this doesn’t have the grip it used to have on me. But it’s still there. I’ll actually get into it below.

First, let’s talk definitions (from Oxford Dictionaries):

Obsession: an idea or thought that continually preoccupies or intrudes on a person’s mind.

Compulsion: an irresistible urge to behave in a certain way, especially against one’s conscious wishes.

Disorder: A disorder is often diagnosed when an issue is prevalent in the day-to-day life of a person and negatively impacts their quality of life, including causing issues with making and maintaining relationships, impacting their ability to work, etc, along with other diagnostic criteria.

When I got my diagnosis, it was a surprise. Somehow.

This came alongside my C-PTSD diagnosis, and despite being a very introspective person (it’s part of my OCD), I had no clue what I was experiencing was this disorder.

My therapist quickly latched onto the fact that I’d grown into compulsive behaviours to control my environment. I needed to control my environment because of trauma I’d been through my whole life. It made life feel like I had a say over it. But the counter to that is that it can destroy relationships, put people on edge around me, make it hard for me to do anything remotely spontaneous.

This wasn’t me needing to line up containers in the fridge into specific areas, things always needing to be in the right spot. This was more like if things were messy, for example, I was a wreck inside. Let’s delve into what that looked like. I say looked because this is one that doesn’t quite have the same sway over me, but it’s still a bit of a daily fight.

While I never exerted my need for control over people, it did make me obsess over every possible way anything could go wrong and plan for it. Prepare for it. Be ready for the worst case scenarios. It also made me unable to cope well when there was chaos around me. Too many dishes on the counters…immediate stress and compusion to deal with it. That sort of thing. And did I get mad at people (in my head) when they didn’t help me control my environment to my expectations? ABSOLUTELY! Then that would build up because didn’t want to take my anger out of people, and I could get snappy. I did moderate this fairly well (though doing so made things feel torn and stretched inside), but occasionally it got the best of me, and I’d blow up. Tears. Desperation. Rarely but it happened, words I didn’t mean.

Chaos, in any way, doing things spontaneously without planning, OH MY GODS did that feel like jumping out of an airplane. It was like vibrating inside. Anger and tears in my bones. At its worst, it often felt like the world was falling apart around me and like there was a violent threat simply from say an invitation I had to respond to without thinking it through for twenty minutes first, weighing pros and cons, who else would be there, doing a full risk assessment…

But, OCD rarely sticks to one thing. It often manifests in several different ways

The above is the one that affects my life the most, but here are other ways it manifests in me.

Getting real personal here, it manifests several other ways like I cannot break a nail and not fix it immediately. My brain will obsess over that nail to the point I often have to pull over if I’m driving so I can concentrate on the things I should. I’ve actually been fighting this for probably a decade now, not doing what my brain tells me I have to do until much later. It’s barely budged, but it has gotten better. The thing is, my brain creates a sensation that goes with that broken nail. My finger literally starts to ache, right into the joints and everything!

But the best way I can explain what OCD feels like is what happens when I find an imperfection on my skin. That’s right, that bloody (sometimes literally) skin picking thing. Again, this is something I’ve fought for years and have made nominal progress on. The funny thing? OCD can be genetic, and this particular one can be seen in many of my family members.

This is how it might happen: I’m concentrating hard on something, and my hand drifts to my face. I lightly scratch my forehead…only, was that a bump?

Here’s where my brain begins to fight with itself, if I realize what I’m doing at all. Part of my mind screams “leave it alone” while it directly keeps me doing it. I can literally be repeating in my head “stop it, Shonna. Stop. Stop. Stop! You’re going to cause a scar. Stop!”

It doesn’t matter. It used to be that ten out of ten times, I’d scratch or pick at it until it was gone. Now, that’s about five out of ten times.

I can’t tell you how much I can know to stop, try to stop, but my body keeps going. Sometimes, I stop myself, only to have ten minutes later subconsciously restart.

It steals your control over yourself and takes over

So what does all this feel like on the inside? I talked briefly about this above, but specifically …

During: You know you should stop. You know it’s dumb or dangerous. But your body seems to be acting while either your mind spirals on the trigger, or you scream at yourself inside to stop. Or outwardly, I won’t judge! It can be scary because you feel helpless against yourself. Against a body that seems to be acting without your permission. You might be angry at yourself or feel shame. You might question why you can’t stop, and why you can’t get over it. Not even after years.

After: It’s all that anger and shame and the questions. You can feel defeated. I don’t even want to know what it’s like for people who have compulsions that feed themselves, such as washing your hands only to have to touch a doorknob and now you have to wash your hands again, but they you scratch and itch and need to wash your hands again. Think about what it would feel like to be violated by your own mind, enslaved by it.

That’s what OCD feels like, and mine is typically mild to moderate.

• Life With Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
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