What is OCD for me?

A lot of peoples perceptions of OCD is being a ‘neat freak’ or excessively cleaning but this is often not the case. For a lot of people OCD can be more about the obsessive part and then internal/mental compulsions. It isn’t seen very much by others but wreaks absolute havoc within your own mind.

There are many types of OCD relationship, harm, sexual, paedophilia, trans, contamination, somatic, responsibility. The list goes on. It is not as cut and dry as doing lots of cleaning or washing your hands loads, it’s the way it overtakes your mind making it impossible to concentrate on other things until you have completed a compulsion, until you have sought out reassurance or checked on someone/thing. Until you have gone through a ritual in your own head, for me it is sometimes physically shaking my head to rid these thoughts from my head. Sometimes I am unable to go to sleep or get out of bed because I might harm someone if I get out of bed. If I go to sleep I might wake up to someone having been harmed but if I stay awake I can prevent that from happening. 

 My day will often start with me imagining awful harm coming to my loved ones. I immediately check on everyone & sometimes check again. This is a compulsion, to a lot of people this might seem like normal checking but for me I HAVE to check because if I don’t what if something happens. What if something has happened. It would be my fault for not checking. 

I believe that this started a lot earlier than postnatally. I believe it started during my childhood. In my family I was always the worrier. What if this happened, what if that happened, what can I do to minimise the risk or stop it from happening. How can I avoid this? When my nephew was born I worried constantly about him, I worried about dropping him or holding him wrong and his neck breaking. I worried about him falling over and hitting his head on a corner of something and splitting his head open. I worried about me accidentally dropping something on him. The thoughts of harm were constant. This isn’t something that I ever discussed with anyone, I kind of thought it was normal at the time. I was a teenager and in the end I got on with my life. My nephew grew up & the worrying eased, I forgot about it. 

In the early stages of mine and J’s relationship I sought reassurance of his love for me, of the security of our relationship a lot. It was my first proper relationship so I didn’t really see this as an issue. Looking back this must have been exhausting at some points for J. Again, I didn’t think anything of this I just put it down to my own insecurities. I blamed myself, told myself I wasn’t good enough to have such a great guy want to be with me. When I gave birth to H it was traumatic and I ended up with a C-Section, my first (as I saw it) failure as a mother. Despite the fact that we both almost lost our lives that day I could not get over the fact I had not given my child the very best start in life. I had failed him. This was just the start for me. I didn’t manage to breastfeed for more than a week and this was my second failure. I didn’t bond with H, another failure. I felt like I was constantly failing. I researched how to be a better mum and threw myself into giving him good days. The only problem was I was constantly thinking about what other people were thinking of me. I ended up really struggling to leave the house and when I did I was worried about a car mounting the pavement or me pushing the pushchair into the road. H falling out of the pushchair, me dropping him, me hurting him.

This is what OCD is for me. The near constant stream of images of harm coming to my loved ones in various ways or of me harming them. I worry about my relationships and how much of a fraud people must think I am. I seek reassurance from J, from my friends and family. I have mental rituals I carry out to stop these harmful things from happening. At work I do not step on the cracks between flooring because something awful would happen. Since starting my medication I have quieter days, some days are so so much easier but I still have awful days.

One day with the help of CBT I hope to have a much quieter brain. A mind that isn’t in overridden with a stream of disturbing images. I hope to be able to take my son out without the worry that I’m going to throw him in front of a car, or that he’s going to break his neck at the play park. One day I will achieve this.