My partner leaves a wee bit of water in the bathtub because our fat cat likes jumping into the mostly empty tub and drink water as if it were a puddle after the rain. I developed a fear of her drowning.
I used to make sure the bathtub was empty and that no candles were burning in the dowstairs bathroom before leaving. I no longer leave any candles in the downstairs bathroom. I would put outside on the veranda. No logic. There is never any logic with OCD. Never mind the fact that I have a huge decorative lantern in the upstairs bathroom with a candle in it. For some reason, I have never feared that one causing a fire. Maybe because I hardly ever light it.
Until very recently, I used to touch the burners on the stove and the element in the stove several times. I also used to touch the electrical sockets to "make sure" that the kettle and coffee machine were Okay.
Before modifying my behaviour, we had to get my brain to start modifying its thought process which is the cognitive part of the therapy. I had to analyze and rate my thoughts and emotions for frequecy and for intensity on a scale of 1 to 100 over a few weeks.
Over the last few years my brain had slipped into the following cognitive errors or distorsions:
Intolerance of uncertainty
Oerestimation of threat
Overestimation of responsibility
Intolerance of anxiety
Emotional reasoning ( you assume that danger is imminent based simply on the fact that you are feeling anxious)
Significance of thoughts (likelyood of thought action fusion)
There are other cognitive errors tormenting other poor souls out there, but those were which I recognized in my thought patterns.
For each of my obsessions, I had to answer the following 7 questions:
1. What am I basing my assumptions upon?
2. What evidence contradicts my thoughts (obsessions)?
3. Are my sources trustworthy?
4. What's my hypothesis? (Either, the thing is off/unplugged or it's not.)
5. What would I tell someone who was acting like me?
6. What if IT happened? What would I do in the worst case scenario?
7. If someone is holding a gun to my head, that would rate 100 on the danger scale. From 1 to 100, how would I rate the thing that I'm obsessing about?
I haven't eliminated everything yet, but I am making progress.
Some things don't bother me anymore. For example, I really don't think my huge cat could drown if for some reason there was water left in the bathtub. She has never jumped up onto the side of the tub when it's been full. And I no longer think that leaving a nightlight plugged will necessarily start a house fire.
I am learning to trust my senses more. I am no longer touching things to make sure that they are off or unplugged.
I read The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg last week. Not all of it was helpful or pertinent to getting over OCD, but I was able to make a few links between my process and how habits work.
There is always a cue. For me, the cue is leaving. Leaving home, work or even parking the car.
The cue is followed by a routine or what we do (a certain behaviour). For me, it was checking things repeatedly with rising anxiety.
The routine is followed by a reward. In OCD, we hope that certainty will be attained if we do the compulsion just one more time, but it never does. We just feel more and more anxious.
I've had to relearn that all of life is uncertain. That's just the way it is. Reading Chris Hadfield's autobiography, An Astronaut's Guide to Life, taught me that his kind prepares repeatedly for the worst case scenario, but hope for the best.
So, I re-analyzed my reward. A few years ago, I managed to get the checking down to a certain number of times. I had set goals (number of times I was allowed to check before leaving the house) and I would reward myself with gifts like a new guitar or an mp3 player. This past week, I realized that tangible rewards meant little to me.
I'm really sick of living with OCD and how I've allow it to limit my life in recent years. With the small changes that I've been able to make, I feel like I'm finally getting the combination right and that the door to my cage is opening. I feel like a caged bird getting ready to fly towards freedom. And as I drew this image in my journal, I wrote down that my reward will be confidence, time and freedom.
So now, my cue is still leaving.
My routine is changing. I am eliminating checking certain things altogether and other things, I am only checking once. I remind myself to be very present, being mindful of my actions.
(There are still some things that I check repeatedly, but I find that my list is getting shorter.) Once, I'm ready to walk out and lock the backdoor, I say a little prayer to boost my confidence and start listening to music. In the last week, when I needed to just leave and walk briskly somewhere, I found Annie Lennox's Ghosts in my Machine to be just right.
If you are dealing with OCD, I wish you peace of mind and freedom.
No comments:
Post a Comment