I am forty seven years old and have been dealing with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder for the vast majority of my life. I can trace it back to when I was nine years old to the Summer of 1970 immediately after my uncle, aunt and their twelve year old son were killed in a car accident. I remember having horrific thoughts of the three of them covered in blood and being unable to shake these pictures from my mind. I can also recall the excessive feelings of guilt and shame I experienced as a reaction to these obsessive thoughts. In my nine year old mind, these thoughts were very frightening and unsettling to me. And because I couldn't get rid of them, I adamantly decided I was a terrible person for having them. It seemed the harder I tried to fight them off, the more powerful and intense they would become.
From the ages of 13 and 14, my obsessive thoughts became even more frightening and disturbing. I started having obsessions of me killing my mother. These obsessions would become so intense at times that I remember being in the same room with her in the house I grew up in and just suddenly having to leave. Somehow I came to the conclusion that just having these thoughts was a horrible thing but the fact that they kept coming back and clearly just wouldn't go away was a sign that I was definitely going to act on them. And the level of guilt and shame I felt at this vulnerable time of my life in some ways seemed to equate to that I would've felt had I actually acted on these obsessions. Being raised in a devout Catholic household obviously added fuel to the fire of my dilemma because there is no guilt greater than Catholic guilt. At least not from my personal life experiences.
Obsessive thoughts would plague me throughout my life pretty much right up to the present. When I was first married, it was obsessions of me killing my wife. When her and I had our two daughters, it was obsessions of me kiling them. It always would come down to the ultimate worst scenerio I could imagine which in my mind was me murdering those of whom I loved the most. The purpose to having these obsessions seemed to be inflicting the most enormous level of guilt I could create within myself. And that purpose would always be fulfilled since this was always the end result. The guilt was more often than not both devastating and overbearing. And this OCD I was struggling with would have a negative impact on every important aspect of my life.
I became an alcoholic at the age of twenty-one shortly after my marriage to my first wife. It would be fifteen years before I would learn that there was actually a name for this "thing" that was inside me that would constantly cause me to question my sanity and make me deathly afraid that I would act on it one day. I continued drinking heavily and on a pretty regular basis for the next fourteen years until I entered treatment for the first time. Drinking became the only way I knew how to medicate this sickness and also live with myself. I still thought myself somehow responsible for these obsessive thoughts and the guilt was at least just as enormous as it had always been, maybe even more so. My marriage was an unhappy one. I became verbally abusive and eventually my wife retaliated with the same behavior as me and this would carry out throughout the entire fifteen years this marriage lasted.
This OCD would also have a negative affect on my roles as both a father to my two daughters and a provider to my family. My wife and I had decided soon after our second daughter was born that one of us should stay home and be a full time parent to our little girls. My wife was a Registered Nurse at the County Hospital in the city we lived in and making almost twice as much money a week as I was. So I became a house-husband and full time father to my daughters. For the most part I think I did well and instilled goodness and open-mindedness within them and overall was a positive influence as a father to them. But I also know that there were periods when they would both witness my erratic behavior when I was drinking. A a provider previous to becoming a househusband and father, it seemed I was always at risk of losing whatever job I had because I would miss a lot of work.
I entered treatment for the first time in April of 1996. I was thirty four years old. By this time my marriage was clearly ending and my life had become even more horrendous and in turmoil than it was previous to this time. This was the beginning of a six year period that up until that time would be the absolute worst time of my life. This treatment was unsuccessful because I was dealing with only the present stresses of my life during that time and not all the years I had struggled with this OCD that was realistically the underlying cause to my drinking. I still didn't know that it even had a name since I hadn't been diagnosed with it yet. Upon leaving this treatment, my times of sobriety were sporadic and eventually the term "relapse" no longer applied to me because I was drinking regularly.
It was also during this time, immediately upon leaving treatment, that I started seeing a therapist of whom I would continue to see for the next six years. I also went through four or five psychiatrists who had come and gone through that same clinic within that six year period. I was originally diagnosed with Major Depression and prescribed Prozac. Both this and the therapy did nothing for my emotional state of mind even after the Prozac had been increased to its highest dosage. Anti-anxiety medications such as Buspar and Neurontin were added to the Prozac. Still there was absolutely no change in me.
It was sometime in July of 1997 that I had called the Crisis Line to this clinic I was going to see my therapist that I ended up there in my therapists office with a brand new diagnosis. Previous to coming into her office, I was evaluated by a psychiatric nurse to make sure I wasn't suicidal or needed to be hospitalized for any other reasons. She had asked me what was bothering me and when I told her her face lit up and she looked at me and said "You have OCD." When I asked my therapist to please explain to me what that exactly was she clearly didn't know a whole lot about it, at least not as it pertained to me. She talked about the classic kinds of OCD like people who can't stop washing their hands or checking the knobs to the burners on the stove. None of this applied to me and I couldn't make sense of it. It wouldn't be long afterwards I would read books on the subject of OCD and learn that there are different types and symptoms of this disorder. And I would learn about the Pure Obsessional, or "Pure-O" type of OCD, which is what I dealt with at that time and still do. It was gratifying to find out that this "thing" inside of me that had caused so much turmoil and self destructive behavior on my behalf as a reaction to it actually had a name.
I entered treatment the second time in early November of 1997. This time I knew what I had to do to maintain my sobriety and was ready to commit myself entirely to this program. I knew that it was the underlying cause that ultimately had to be dealt with to end my drinking and I knew that underlying cause was OCD. This treatment was a complete success and upon graduating from it I attended AA meetings regularly and also continued with my therapy and psychiatric care. Although the latter turned out to be detrimental to this underlying cause, I still did manage to remain totally abstinent from alcohol.
Neither my therapist nor any of the five psychiatrists I had confided in within this six year time frame were equipped or educated in dealing with this "Pure-O" type of OCD I was struggling with. The end result was them giving up and overmedicating me to the point that I was barely able to function. Somehow I did manage to work and support myself through this time, although just barely. And to this day I am still beside myself with wondering how I did that considering just how dead to the world I was. I know I would phase out of reality and stare into space and drool. When I would go to this clinic in a state of crisis it seemed the only answer these psychiatrists had was to increase one of the medications I was taking or else add a new one.
It was in the Summer of 2002 that I finally came to the conclusion that this therapy and psychiatric care was going nowhere. I began to ween myself off of every medication I was taking, one by one. By the end of 2002, my insurance changed and I was no longer able to go to this clinic. Realistically, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Within a relatively short period of time, this person inside of me of whom had been hibernated for the past six years began to re-emerge. My life would eventually take a 180 degree turn for the positive. My job became important to me and I became a hard worker and reliable and ultimately one of my boss' most valuable employees. I started making new friends and dating and doing things that I had never done before in my life. I had developed so much confidence in myself that went beyond that which I'd ever had. I would often refer to this transition that had happened in my life as a miracle. But I always made it clear that this wasn't a miracle from God, but that this one belonged solely to me. After all I'd been through and the monumental progress I'd made in my life, even God would understand my feelings about this.
As for my OCD, somewhere along the way of this journey I had taken I decided that I would learn to live my life in spite of it. No matter how bad it got, it wouldn't keep me from moving on with my life. And since this transition began six years ago I have had numerous episodes with my OCD where it feels as intense and overbearing as it did before this started but I don't let it have any power over me and just keep moving ahead with my life anyway. I haven't just done well with this, I've done outstanding.
There have been a couple tools I have learned to use and apply to my life in terms of dealing with my OCD. One is exposure therapy. Although I did go to a ten week therapy program of "Exposure/Response Prevention Therapy" the majority of this is something we learn to apply to our everyday lives.The therapy itself, more than anything, is an educational process of learning how to do just that. The philosophy of this therapy is very simple and down to earth. The only way to overcome our fears is to confront them. And the more we keep on confronting them, the less afraid we become. This is called "habituation." Once we're not afraid anymore, the fears, or obsessions, will go away because they have no reason to hang around anymore. The other tool I apply to my life on a daily basis is relaxation. There are plenty of CD's we can purchase just for this purpose. Or we can learn to do it on our own. I have learned that a relaxed body equates a relaxed mind. And my thinking becomes much more clear when I am relaxed.
I would like to end this in saying that it wasn't until I was in my early forties that I finally started to take control of my life in spite of my OCD. This proves that it's never too late to get a handle on it. In spite of how big and monstrous it feels sometimes, it's an anxiety disorder and realistically nothing more than that. Truthfully, it only has as much power over us as we allow it to have. It's neither rational or realistic.
And we can learn to live our lives in spite of it.