While most people have heard of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), many hold a perception of it that isn’t quite accurate.
When most people think of OCD, they think of germophobes and clean freaks. They think people with OCD feel the need to keep their room spotless, that they like things to be “neat,” and that that’s about all there is to it. Because of the way the media has portrayed OCD, people often see it as more of a “personality quirk” than a disorder. People have even turned it into slang, saying “I’m so OCD!” when they are focused on perfecting minor details.
This a grave misrepresentation of OCD. It dangerously undermines the severity of the disorder and what it’s like to actually live with it.
OCD is defined as a disorder “marked by uncontrollable and recurring thoughts (obsessions), repetitive and excessive behaviors (compulsions), or both.” Contrary to popular belief, you aren’t born with OCD. OCD symptoms can begin at any time, but they usually start between late childhood and young adulthood.
The two components, obsession and compulsion, usually go hand in hand. To give a commonly represented example, someone with OCD might obsess over the idea of germs and develop an irrational fear that they will get sick and die from these germs. As a result, they wash their hands every five minutes to ensure they’re “clean enough.”
To the average person, a lot of OCD compulsions seem ridiculous and over-the-top. People often mock germophobes who constantly wash their hands, for instance, sometimes even calling them “freaks.” A person without OCD logically knows that washing your hands every five minutes won’t protect you any more than washing them the standard amount. In fact, it might even increase your chances of falling ill.
What most people don’t know, though, is that someone with OCD knows that too. As someone who suffers from OCD myself, there have been plenty of times when I logically know that doing my compulsion won’t help anything or that it will only make me feel worse. But I still can’t stop myself from doing it; there’s part of me that just has to do it.
That’s part of why OCD is so hard to live with. You can’t stop yourself from acting on your compulsions, even if it is disruptive, time-consuming, or worse… destructive. On top of that, people with OCD also experience intrusive thoughts, which are often highly disturbing, graphic, and downright disgusting. These thoughts try to do everything in their power to convince you that you’re a bad or evil person. And if you don’t complete your compulsions, the terrible thoughts in your mind will become a reality.
If you’re interested in learning about OCD, many great articles give an overview of the disorder and what it’s like.
Today, however, I would like to share my own experience living with OCD. It used to rule over my life, but the tips and tricks I learned along the way made it more manageable as I became a young adult.
How OCD Affected My Childhood
I can’t pinpoint exactly when my OCD developed. It was most likely very early in my childhood, because I’ve experienced symptoms for as long as I can remember.
For me, my OCD is all about having control. I had a turbulent childhood that lacked a lot of stability, and it created a deep-seated need for me to find control over my life in any little way that I could, even if it wasn’t real. And, as the oldest sibling, my family placed a lot of responsibility on me at a very young age. Not only did I feel like I needed to be in control of my life, but I also felt like I needed to control the lives of my sisters as well, because that was the best way to keep them safe. My OCD convinced me that no one else is capable of taking care of the people I love besides me, and that’s a debilitating belief that I still struggle to let go of even today.
It started small. Every night, I prayed for safety and protection for the people I love. I feared that if I skipped a night or failed to mention someone, something terrible would happen to them. This was one of my first compulsions, one that I still do even as an adult.
Then, as OCD often does, it got bigger. I have a vivid memory of one of my first major panic attacks caused by my OCD. When I was younger, my sister left the house for a dance class. But before she did, we got into a fight. We didn’t make up by the time she left, and that set me off into an anxiety spiral.
Somehow, I convinced myself that she was going to die on the way home from her dance class. I thought that the last words I ever said to her would be mean and angry. My OCD found my biggest fear, buried deep inside my brain, and then fed it to me as a truth. Against all logic and reason, it convinced me that this horrific scenario I came up with was not just a small possibility but a complete certainty.
The whole time she was at her dance class, I sat on the couch crying. Nothing could console me. I didn’t have her phone’s location at the time, so I had nothing that would settle my nerves.
She came back home perfectly fine. It’s been eight years since then, and she’s still perfectly fine today.
But my OCD didn’t just fixate on the safety and well-being of the people around me. It also fixated on my own. The first time it became a problem that severely affected my life was when I was 16 and experienced my first heart palpitation.
Since I had never felt it before, my mind immediately jumped to the worst-case scenario: I was dying. I remember running upstairs, waking up my family in a panic. They consoled me and sent me back to bed. When I confided in my grandmother, a former EMT, that I was scared of having a heart attack, she laughed in my face and assured me there was almost zero chance I’d have one at such a young age. I knew she meant well, but the logic she presented still didn’t quell the fear.
My OCD latched onto this fear almost instantly. I became convinced that I was going to die young of a heart attack. I taught myself how to take my own pulse. In addition, I researched the signs and symptoms so extensively that I can still list them off the top of my head, and obsessed over every little sensation in my body. Completely unaware that heightened anxiety often causes symptoms that resemble cardiac arrest, I checked my pulse every time I felt even a slight fluttering of my heart or a twinge of pain in my torso. I trapped myself in a spiral that quickly took over my life. I was anxious, which led me to feel symptoms, which made me even more anxious, and then I would do my compulsions to try and calm myself down, but it only made the anxiety worse.
This obsession spiraled into a fear of dying in my sleep. The same year, my OCD convinced me that I was going to die in my sleep before Christmas. To try and settle my nerves, I created a countdown calendar, but my anxiety only grew as the holiday approached. I wrote a last will, which said goodbye to my family and listed what I wanted done with my belongings. I left the note folded up on my bedside table where someone could easily find it, just in case they found me dead one morning. On the night of Christmas Eve, I slept on the floor next to the Christmas tree with my sisters on either side of me, trying to conceal my tears as I mourned what I thought would be my last night alive.
That was 6 years ago. I woke up that Christmas morning, alive and relieved. But since that day, I still feel increased anxiety before any event or holiday I look forward to, because a part of me still believes I’m destined to die young.
There are many, many other instances of my OCD creating these fears that spiral into panic attacks. Too many to count, really. But after I was officially diagnosed with OCD—and once I started learning more about what the disorder really is—that’s when I started figuring out how to take my power back.
Battling the OCD Monster
The best way I know to describe OCD to someone who has never experienced it is that it feels like a monster that lives inside your head. This monster controls your fear, feeds you thoughts that it knows will terrify you, and then revels in the downward spiral it causes. Sometimes the monster is smaller and quieter, easier to ignore. But sometimes the monster is big and loud, the only thing you seem to hear. The monster never truly goes away once it’s there. In order to cope with OCD, you have to learn how to co-exist with the monster: how to quiet it down, how to talk back to it, and how to ignore it altogether.
One of the best places to start with tackling OCD is deceptively simple. Start calling it out for what it is. When an intrusive thought enters your mind, don’t frantically try to push it away. Let it enter your mind, and then say to yourself, “That doesn’t sound like me. That is an intrusive thought.”
A lot of times, people with OCD ruminate on intrusive thoughts because they react to them. They’re terrified that the thought is theirs, or that they like whatever horrible thing just popped into their brain. But that’s not the truth. That’s exactly what the OCD monster wants you to think. And the best way to shut it up is to not give it the reaction it wants.
Tell your brain over and over again if you have to: “That is not me; that is an intrusive thought.” It takes practice, but it will eventually help you calm down. You’ll ease your guilt and anxiety that comes with the intrusive thought, therefore giving the monster less negative energy to feed off of.
Once you start practicing that, you’ll be ready to take care of the part of you that feels scared and anxious. It’s easier said than done, but practicing kindness toward yourself is an essential part of healing and dealing with OCD. Don’t blame yourself for the intrusive thoughts or get mad at yourself for completing a destructive compulsion.
Instead, try showing yourself a little compassion. Recognize that it’s not your fault, that your brain is just trying to protect you in its own roundabout way. Reassure yourself; tell yourself that everything will be okay, that nothing bad is going to happen. Self-soothe until the panic subsides, and then treat yourself to something that will cheer you up.
The OCD monster thrives on shame, anger, and fear. Even if you stand up to it, you’re still letting it win by blaming yourself for reacting to mental stress that you didn’t ask for. So don’t give in to it. Even if it takes time, practice saying kind words to yourself after an OCD-induced panic attack.
If you find yourself growing paranoid and irrational, kindly introduce logic into your thought process. “That is not true. The likelihood of that happening is so low that it’s not worth worrying about.” Don’t judge yourself for your irrational fears, but still try to gently correct them when you can.
And finally, although this might seem like the hardest thing to do, talk to someone about it. Most people with OCD, including me, can’t imagine opening up to someone else about what we’re going through. We worry that the other person might think we’re terrible and disgusting if we confide in them about our intrusive thoughts.
Or, we worry that people will laugh at us and call us crazy if we are vulnerable about our compulsions or the panic attacks that come with them. But that’s what the OCD monster wants. OCD thrives in the shadows, on the emotions that build up when we try to hide what we’re going through.
But talking to someone, receiving their support, and hearing reassurance from other people not trapped in the anxiety feedback loop does wonders. It strips away the power that OCD holds over you. And it reminds you that you don’t have to live in fear. It’s like turning on the lights in a dark closet—you might think there’s a monster in there when the lights are off, but once you turn them on, you realize it was only a sweater, and your mind was playing tricks on you all along.
Living One Day at a Time
Although there are ways to make OCD better, it’s hard to make it go away entirely. You’ll have good weeks and bad weeks, good days and bad days. But most of the time, it stays with you.
Because, unfortunately, OCD adapts. It might be more manageable when you’re busy, because you don’t have time to overthink, but then it might attack you as soon as you have your next day off. Maybe it will catch you off guard when you’re in the car alone or right before you go to bed. Maybe you’ll have one particularly stressful day, and your anxiety will seize the opportunity to drag you into a week-long spiral over something small and random.
I have my good days, and I have my bad days. There are still weeks when I’m terrified of dying in my sleep from a heart attack. I still have panic attacks in my car on my way home from work because I’m convinced that since I didn’t touch the door three times, I’m doomed to get into a car crash. I still get anxious when a friend takes too long to text back, or when my sister does something outside of her regular routine, because my OCD tells me that it means something terrible has or will happen.
But the tips I’ve learned since getting diagnosed and starting therapy have changed my life for the better. I used to live every single day paralyzed in fear, but now the good days outweigh the bad ones. Sometimes the road to healing has bumps or U-turns. But it’s important to look back and remind yourself that any progress is good progress.
If you’re also struggling with OCD, I hope you know that you’re not alone, even if sometimes it feels like you are. And if someone you love has OCD, I encourage you to remind them that you’re there for them and that they’re strong.
