Category Archives: terror

A Portrait of Uncertainty, Before & After

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SONY DSCUncertainty, Before ERP: intolerable agony. Even a sliver of uncertainty would collapse my entire self. It was torture, hell on earth. I didn’t think I could stand it for one more minute. And, in fact, because of that intense pressing need to erase the uncertainty, I’d usually do something to alleviate the ugly anxiety … but compulsions prevent you from realizing that you can live one more minute. And then another. And as the minutes stack up, you start to get used to the cold water. In fact, it stops feeling icy.

Uncertainty After ERP: uncomfortable still, but necessary. These days uncertainty feels like a built-in, expected part of life. It’s no one’s favorite thing to experience, but I experience it much the same way as the general population. It’s not an emergency; it’s just an inconvenience. And because I learned that I could survive– and even thrive– by embracing uncertainty, I actually love it more than most people.

Uncertainty isn’t the enemy. ERP can set you free.
Go to www.jackieleasommers.com/OCD-help for more details.

 

Image credit: Mark Turnauckas

The Darkest Days

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artwork in retro style, woman and cup of teaThere is a little Caribou Coffee in Long Lake, Minnesota, where I sat one morning since I’d arrived too early to my visit to Orono High School. I stared at my steaming hot cocoa and repeated to myself: You are going to hell. 

Swallow that down, I told myself. You are going to hell, and there is nothing you can do to change it. This realization is your eternal reality.

In the car, I’d been listening to “Spirit” by Switchfoot on repeat: I’ve found all that I want, all that I long for, in You.

It was true then. It’s true now. But in those days, it was a truth that I imagined fell on deaf ears. Spirit, come be my joy.  It was the cry of my heart, but I knew I was damned and that joy would be forever inaccessible to me.

I can’t detail exactly how creepy it is become a cardboard person.

To ride the rollercoaster to the deepest depths and then to climb off there.

A reader asked me if I’d ever felt like God wasn’t with me through the storms of my life.  Have I felt that way? Yes, intensely.

But I was wrong.

Praise God I was wrong.

All these years later, God has stormed in, torn off my blindfold, wrapped me in his arms, and repeated truth to me till I came to believe it.

Do I still have moments where I doubt? Yes.

But my anchor holds.

I wrote this to remind myself of the truth– the truth that no disorder or devil can withhold from me because my God is stronger:

anchor manifesto

Co-Morbidity

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comorbidDo you know the term?

Co-morbidity is the presence of one or more other disorders co-occuring along with the primary one. For those of us with OCD, our OCD is often co-morbid with depression. The depression seems to usually be a result of the OCD (as opposed to the other way around).

On their website, the Stanford School of Medicine writes:

Patients with OCD are at high risk of having comorbid (co-existing) major depression and other anxiety disorders. In a series of 100 OCD patients who were evaluated by means of a structured psychiatric interview, the most common concurrent disorders were: major depression (31%), social phobia (11%), eating disorder (8%), simple phobia (7%), panic disorder (6%), and Tourette’s syndrome (5%).

They also say:

In Koran et al.’s 1998 Kaiser Health Plan study, 26% of patients had no comorbid psychiatric condition diagnosed during the one year study period — 37% had one and 38% had two or more comorbid conditions. These proportions did not differ substantially between men and women. The most commonly diagnosed comorbid conditions were major depression, which affected more than one-half, other anxiety disorders, affecting one-quarter, and personality disorders, diagnosed in a little more than 10%.

OCD is enough of a beast on its own, but the truth of the matter is that many who struggle with OCD are fighting other demons too.

In my experience, OCD and depression teamed up against me, though, as I wrote before, the depression was secondary to the OCD (in that it was caused by the OCD). Some days I would be full of intense, manic fear caused by OCD, and other days all my sharp edges would be dulled by depression and a feeling that nothing in the world sounded exciting or worthwhile.

I’m so grateful that when ERP helped me steal power away from OCD, the upshot was that depression was defeated too.

For (lots!) more about OCD and ERP, go to jackieleasommers.com/OCD.

 

Image credit: Gerald Gabernig

 

Sweet Freedom

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freedom in redAlison Dotson, president of OCD Twin Cities, and I were emailing recently about how sometimes we feel as if we say the same thing post after post, article after article, especially since they usually involve our own stories with OCD, and history doesn’t change.

But I reminded her that even if we’ve heard our stories over and over, someone else might be hearing it for the first time. Not to mention that sometimes those of us with OCD need to hear the truth multiple times before it is finally able to sink into our heads and hearts.

So here it is again:

I was in bondage to obsessive-compulsive disorder for twenty hellish years. I was plagued by ugly, intrusive thoughts that caused me intense anxiety and even terror. Many days I felt completely out of control of my own thoughts, and I hated the ugliness that polluted my mind. I was sad, lonely, depressed, lost, engaged in an ongoing war where the battlefield was my own brain.

And then an amazing psychiatrist named Dr. Suck Won Kim gave me not only a prescription but also the phone number to a cognitive-behavioral therapist in the area, along with the warning that ERP therapy “will be hell” and the encouragement that I had to do it anyway.

And I did. For twelve grueling weeks, I practiced the exposure therapy assignments set out by Dr. Christopher Donahue, and after twelve weeks of hell … I was free. Free for the first time since I was seven years old. I could barely even remember what freedom felt like, what it felt like to be master of my own thoughts, to rule over my OCD instead of having it rule me, and so it was actually a little scary at first.

But let me tell you: you get used to freedom, joy, and light pretty darn fast.

The last five years have been magnificent.

Please, please ask me questions if you have them.

For (lots!) more about OCD and ERP, go to jackieleasommers.com/OCD

Image credit: Jesus Solana

Obsessive-Compulsives are Brave.

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bebraveSometimes I think we OCs view ourselves as the antithesis of bravery because we experience so much anxiety, so much fear … and often over things that no one else seems to be struggling with.

But here’s the thing: we do it.  We battle this anxiety every. single. day.  

We get up.  We go to work and school.  We battle our way through days and nights like warriors.  People who don’t have OCD can rarely understand the terror that we stare in the eye every day.

And, most importantly, we seek out treatment– and that is the bravest thing of all.

 

For more about the ERP therapy that set me free, go to jackieleasommers.com/OCD.

Image credit: Kelli Murray

The Dreadful O of OCD

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My friend Janet over at OCDtalk recently blogged about how, so often, all people know of obsessive-compulsive disorder are the visible compulsions, as opposed to the invisible obsessions.  And back in November, The Atlantic also posted about the debilitating nature of obsessions.

As I’ve said before, “If it doesn’t hurt, it’s not OCD.”

OCD begins with obsessions.  Compulsions are actually just a monstrous side effect of OCD.

Source: deviantART "Torture" by eWKn

Source: deviantART
“Torture” by eWKn

Compulsive hand-washing is hard to hide.  Hoarding, definitely.  Even repetitive reassurance-seeking and confession (compulsions of choice for a Pure-O) are easy to notice once someone points it out to you.

But it’s harder to see the obsessions that are driving them.

Imagine the deep horror of constantly imagining you’ll hurt someone you love.  Or the intense mind-screw of questioning a part of your identity that you’ve always gripped tightly.  Or feeling as guilty as a rapist, a pedophile, or a murderer … when you haven’t even left your room.  You know that wrong feeling that you sometimes get to which you can never find the words to describe it except for that it’s just wrong?  How’d you like to feel that every waking moment?  Obsessions come hand-in-hand with such intense anxiety, horror, and guilt that obsessive-compulsives feel they cannot bear them.  Hence, so many compulsions.  And, devastatingly, suicides.

That, my friends, is why I get upset when people say things like, “I’m a little OCD; my handwriting has to be perfect” or “If my socks don’t match, it bugs me so bad.  I think I’ve got a touch of OCD.”  It feels like someone is comparing their hangnail to your amputation.  Does that make sense?

So many people in the OCD community have not yet found their voice, and that prompts me to be even louder.  I know no one likes the person who is so easily offended.  Heck, those people generally annoy me too!  But I’m reacting on behalf of a broken, abused, tortured community who– this is heartbreaking– believes themselves worthy of only brokenness, abuse, and torture.

So I choose to be loud about it.

Thanks for understanding– or trying to.

ERP & Imaginal Exposures

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I’ve written elsewhere on this blog about Exposure and Response Prevention therapy (ERP) and how different my life is after I underwent an intense 12 weeks of this type of cognitive-behavioral therapy.  ERP is exactly what the name says it is: you are exposed to something that will trigger your obsessions and then you are prevented from responding with a compulsion that will relieve your anxiety.

For example, someone who has contamination obsessions and hand-washing compulsions might be made to touch garbage and then is not allowed to wash her hands.  Instead, she sits with that anxiety, feeling it intensely.  If someone has HOCD obsessions and seeking reassurance compulsions, she might have to look through a Victoria’s Secret catalog and is not allowed to ask, “Am I gay?  Am I straight?”

So, what happens when you have Pure-O obsessions?  What if your obsession is that you will kill your newborn daughter and your compulsion is to stay away from her crib?  What if your obsession is that you’re going to blaspheme God and go to hell and your compulsion is repeating a prayer in your head?

Then what?  You can’t really kill your daughter (um, big DUH there, but you get it!) and you can’t really go to hell, so how in the world are you able to practice an exposure then?

"little sad song" by *TrixyPixie on deviantART

“little sad song” by *TrixyPixie on deviantART

Imaginal exposures, baby.  Brilliant and brutal.

In situations like these, what you might be expected to do is to write down all the ways you could kill your daughter, read it into a digital recorder, and then listen to it over and over.  Or maybe you’ll create a story in which you go to hell, where you’re forever condemned, and you read that story again and again.

If you’re an obsessive-compulsive, trust me, these imaginal exposures are going to FREAK. YOU. OUT.  They will be so triggering and so terrifying that your anxiety is going to spike, no problem.

Meanwhile, no compulsions allowed.

Meanwhile, ERP is re-wiring your brain.

Meanwhile, you’re stepping toward freedom.  And “all” you had to do was listen to a story.

This was my particular brand of ERP actually.  I had to listen to my recording for about 80 minutes a day until my anxiety levels (self-measured at the beginning, middle, and end) decreased by 50%.  For the first ten weeks or so, my anxiety levels were NOT dropping, and I very nearly gave up.  I mean, why put myself through this misery and terror every day if it was doing no good?

But then.

Sometime during week eleven, those anxiety levels started to drop.  I developed a whole new way of looking at my intrusive thoughts.  I tiptoed up to OCD.  I can still remember the day when I was listening (again) to that horrid recording, and instead of feeling anxious, my thought was, “This is getting so annoying.”

And then I laughed … because … because finally.  You know what I mean.

Satan is the accuser; Christ is our defender.

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Recently, one of my blog readers asked me how I could tell when a thought came from OCD or from God, especially because one of my formerly intrusive thoughts was of a Bible verse that seemed to condemn me.  She wrote, “I keep reading that Bible verses spontaneously popping into one’s head is a prime way God speaks to people.”

What a great question.  One I’m not entirely sure I’m qualified to tackle, although I do know that the more I learn about and understand my OCD, the easier and easier it is for me to spot it.  I can recognize its tell-tale voice from a mile away now.  And while I don’t think that OCD = Satan (at all), they are both my enemies and they are both accusers.

Here is the (in flux) conclusion (is that an oxymoron?) I’ve come to:

I guess the big thing is this: when OCD would bring up that Bible verse, it worked like an intrusive thought and brought deep anxiety to me, but with God … his kindness leads us to repentance, not to shame.  The voice of God showers me with kindness, grace, conviction that leads to change … but I don’t think God’s voice is one of shame and accusation. In fact, scripture even tells us that SATAN is the accuser and CHRIST is the one who defends us.

Remember, Satan used and twisted scripture when Christ was going through his temptations, so we know that it’s part of the devil’s arsenal.

frustration4My friend Erica told me something fascinating she’d once heard: “The Holy Spirit does not motivate with guilt.”  Likewise, my incredibly wise writing professor Judy said, “I know the voice of God because that voice invites me to move closer without shame while the voice of Satan fills me with an electric dread that makes me want to hide.”

As always, I encouraged this blog reader to explore Exposure and Response Prevention therapy.  In the four years since my ERP, the voice of OCD has become so easy to recognize.  I finally know my enemy’s voice.

And better yet, I know my savior’s.

 

In the Moment

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It’s one thing for me to declare over my blog to a primarily anonymous audience, “Dear obsessive-compulsives, this is what you should do.”

But then comes the moment when your friend says, “Hey, can you talk to my friend on Facebook?  Here’s her name.”

It’s not that I’ve never been there before, the frenetic chaos of an obsession.  I know what it’s like to feel that furious terror, to need to know that things will be okay.  I get it.  I really do.

But I know the other side now.  I know that reassurances aren’t going to get this girl anywhere.  Know that discussing her obsession is like clipping off the leaves of a weed, when what we really need to go for is the root.

In that moment– those wild minutes of obsessive pandemonium– it’s hard to talk calmly, to keep redirecting someone back to the idea of treatment, to feel like you’re doing them any good.  In fact, you imagine they’re thinking, No, you’re not getting this.  You don’t know what I need.

But I do.  Because I do get it.  Because I was there.  Because I tried for years to put a quick bandaid over the cancer that needed to be cut out.

Breathe, I tell her.  Breathe tonight, and then educate yourself tomorrow.  It’s time to go for the root.

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