The evolution of my OCD – Early Days.

I want to start this blog off by shouting out everyone that has shown me support and words of encouragement. I honestly didn’t know what kind of reception I would receive when starting up a site dedicated to a mental health disorder. Frankly, I thought to myself this wouldn’t garner any attention or it’s not an interesting enough topic to bother writing about. However I can now say with earnest humility that not only are people interested but many are also dealing with these very same issues or know someone who is. So with that in mind, I am feeling motivated to continue writing and hopefully create content that resonates with everyone.

Before I illustrate and go into detail about the evolution of my OCD, I need to explain what OCD can look like in its various forms. OCD is often broken into subtypes or categories that fit a certain narrative we tell ourselves. These subtypes are defined by what triggers our fear or worries and what compulsions are used to abate that fear. Some common examples (but not a fully exhaustive list) include;

• Harm OCD – Fear that one could lose control and harm themselves or others. An example of a compulsion would be to hide knives so they aren’t in plain sight to be used as a weapon.
• Contamination OCD – The worry that a germ or other foreign substance could harm themselves or that they could transmit something harmful to others. An example of a compulsion would be to wash hands constantly to know for certain you are clean.
• Scrupulosity OCD – More commonly know as religious OCD, it relates to a fear that you’ve upset God, you’re not following the Bible or you’re not praying well enough. An example of a compulsion would be to pray a certain way/amount or avoid going to church.

Again this was just a quick list of some of the more common subtypes to help demonstrate the nuance and diversity that defines OCD. I must also mention that I am not an OCD specialist nor a therapist on the matter. I do my best to educate myself on this topic.

Very little time had passed since my sister’s death and so my experience with OCD up to this point was very much in a vacuum. Not only did I not know what OCD was, but the fleeting encounter with it was very much a short-lived anomaly. This was a benefit likely attributable to my youthfulness and lack of maturity. My parents likely had no idea this was OCD either, as anyone who had the inclination to overtly question things were historically labelled a ‘worry wart’ in English society. What does that term entail? Your guess is as good as mine.

This obliviousness of course didn’t last. ‘Once you open the floodgates’, the old saying goes. Well, my OCD metaphorically came rushing in. My mother was a child daycare provider operating from our residence for decades. I spent all of my childhood raised in a shared environment where the only quarters I called my own was my bedroom. It was both an entertaining and chaotic environment to grow up in. My mother had many children come and go, but a select few came in as infants and grew into adolescence while in her care. I grew close to one boy in particular who was about my age (roughly 9 years old) and we spent countless hours playing video games, sports in the backyard and rough housing. I never had a brother, but he often fulfilled that void. One day in particular we were rough housing on my parent’s couch. He had entered my personal space on said couch and I wasn’t okay with that, so with a quick shove I forced him off when he wasn’t expecting it and he landed hands out awkwardly on the floor. This fall was enough to bring him to tears, and apparently some considerable pain. His mother was contacted to come pick him up where he was inevitably taken to the hospital for x-rays and I was subsequently scolded by my mother for my actions – justifiably so. The boy had a fractured wrist as a result of my behaviour.

Up to this point in my life I had never caused any significant trauma to another person. While it was my intention to bother and disrupt my chum with the shove, I don’t think I was aware that my actions could have severe consequences. This was prime opportunity for my OCD to latch onto an alternate narrative. My mind was now considering the possibility that maybe I intended to cause him harm. Maybe I’m a bad person. Maybe I should tell my mother I meant to hurt him. And so I did what I felt compelled to do and I informed my mother. Her response was predictably words of reassurance that I wasn’t a bad person and the rough housing simply got too rough and I should be mindful of that going forward. This again was enough to ease my troubled mind in the short term, however I would discover in the months to follow that no amount of reassurance was going to be enough.

This would turn out to not be the last time we played rough. As with most things particularly at a young age, time heals all wounds. And so we continued to rough house, however markedly different than before. As I mentioned earlier there are many subtypes of OCD; ‘harm’ was one such type. This form was manifesting in my interactions with this boy, and so after every time I made contact or I lay a hand on him I would need assurance that I hadn’t caused him harm. While the boy would obligingly confirm I had not hurt him, I would incessently need to hear him say it sometimes several times in one interaction. This became constant and obsessive and I couldn’t continue playing and would often stop and force his response. At times his words were not enough to alleviate my worries so I would involve my mother and ask for a second opinion on his well-being. I’m certain she knew it was irrational for me to ask such a redundancy, but she nonetheless accommodated.

It was a demanding need to know for certain, and at times I simply couldn’t grasp what reality actually was and what I was being told. After many months of this my anxiety calmed down enough and I found myself asking others for reassurance out of habit instead, as that’s what I was accustomed to. Eventually we must have grown up enough to lose interest in fighting one another and so did my obsession.

If I were to use a measurement to determine the level of anxiety this obsession caused from a scale of 1-10, 1 being barely noticeable and 10 being crippling and debilitating this would rank a solid 3. Not lasting much longer than a few weeks/months, at this stage in my life these particular intrusive thoughts had very little impediment to my daily routine. Morphologically speaking however, I had created new neural pathways that would lead me down ever deeper, uglier holes the older I would become. Harm OCD would recur later in my adult life, but alas this is for another blog to come.