OCD Flare-ups

I don’t normally mention OCD flare-ups or obsessive compulsive disorder here. Gosh the word ‘disorder’ sounds so pejorative! Wouldn’t it be better if it were called an Obsessive Compulsive Condition?

Years ago, I wrote about life with OCD. That was just when I’d sought help from my GP. I’ve just given it a read and oh my word, I have gone such a long way since then. It’s like a different person wrote that post.

I can relate and empathise with ‘old me’ but I also feel sad for her. She was so broken, so negative, such a shadow of the person she was meant to be. I feel like the ‘me’ typing now is a colourful butterfly compared to the sad little grey caterpillar with so little hope I was when I wrote that post.

You can read it here if you want an idea of how intrusive thoughts can get when you have OCD. I want to go back and give her a massive hug and tell her everything will be okay. 

This is the only photo of me I could find from around the time I wrote the post I’ve just mentioned. It was my boy’s 6th birthday party. I look so lost in thought, so unlike me.

OCD as a Cause for Depression?

I’d had antenatal depression and was really struggling with post-natal depression as well as my precarious home situation. The doctor had just referred me for a course of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy sessions to try and avoid a complete breakdown. CBT was life-changing, alongside discovering visualisation, meditation and mindfulness. 

Don’t be fooled; I hated every single minute of my CBT sessions: having to talk to that stranger who gave me zero feedback, the fact our sessions were recorded, the fact I had to fill in the same pieces of paper at the start of each session.

It felt like a test I failed week after week after week. I ugly-cried every single time, feeling like a snotty loser.  I vividly remember feeling like it made zero difference.

Why was I bothering? I was still filling in the same forms over and over again, confirming I still felt awful, didn’t it? But then, after dutifully doing the ‘homework’ the lady was giving me for a few weeks, I had an epiphany: the problem wasn’t post-natal depression. The fact I cried all the time and couldn’t feel happy about anything wasn’t the problem. It was the result of something deeper, buried within me. 

The problem was my obsessive-compulsive behaviour, which was absolutely crippling. And the more I talked to the lady, who listened but never seemed to say anything, the more things started unravelling. We managed to find the root of the nervous apprehension I was living with. That’s where the intrusive thoughts and compulsive behaviour were coming from! My marriage was in shambles. Our relationship broken by lack of communication. Too much coercive control and too little effort. But I didn’t want to let go of my romantic idea of the nuclear family I’d always dreamt about. It was my one and only life’s ambition not to have a ‘broken’ family after all…  

OCD as a Coping Mechanism 

So the real problem was my irreparable marriage. OCD was my coping mechanism and post-natal depression was the consequence of unmanaged OCD. Wow, my mind was blown when we got to that conclusion. 

I’d reached the darkest, deepest pit of depression. With that realisation, I could start to heal. It took weeks, months, years for things to get better, but eventually I got there. With the help of my GP, the CBT lady, my babies and my friends. 

My friends were the brightest beacon of light you could ever imagine. You know who are, you wonderful humans. I will forever be grateful for your being there, always, with your words, the meals made for us, the impromptu babysitting offers, the money transfers when things got tough, the ‘interventions’ and the hours spent chatting and crying and looking for a solution to this big bad mess. 

Then one day, just like that, my then 7-year-old cheerfully said to me: “Maman, you’ve stopped crying in the toilets like you used to do!” And there was me thinking I’d managed to shield them from all that. Next time you go and hide in the loo to cry yet again, remember that your children are more perceptive than you realise. If you need help, seek help. 

OCD when it Comes out of Nowhere

Sorry, I digress. Oversharing, much? I was planning to share a bit more about OCD creeping in when you least expect it. I hope this doesn’t read too much like a brain-dump (but to be fair, it is a bit of a brain dump, and it feels good to offload). My children went to their dad’s for five days last week and I’d planned to do quite a lot of work for school, my website and intended to clear the mountain of paperwork that had piled up on my desk over the previous weeks. I was also going to give the house a bit of a clean.

I had my eyes set on the girls’ room. That room has been my nemesis for years. Most of the time, I manage to close the door and ignore the clutter. But this week, I was going to tackle the chaos that would have made a hoarder recoil. 

Anyone else ever think (even for a millisecond) that it would be so much easier to start again with a blank canvas rather than try to get on top of the mess that seems to get everywhere? 

Just Blink and OCD Takes Charge

I won’t lie: When I started tidying my girls’ bedroom last Tuesday, I was tempted to grab a bin bag and dump half of the stuff without giving it a second thought. 

But then my OCD reared its ugly head and I had to meticulously separate minuscule LEGO pieces from Playmobil cutlery. I also had to completely empty and reorganise every single storage unit in the room. I arranged pens with pens, pencils with pencils, organised the books in height order and made sure every rogue LOL shoe was matched with its twin, amongst many other things. 

The ‘bedroom of doom’ became my number one priority, my Holy Grail. I couldn’t think about anything else. Could I do anything else? Absolutely not! Dates with friends were cancelled. I didn’t do one bit of work for school or for my website. Oh, and I went to bed at 6 a.m. the day before the children came home.

As I was sorting out the girls’ bedroom, I created little pockets of chaos all around our home. 

The minute my children came back, my OCD ‘episode’ came to an end. I was ‘me’ again, completely normal…

OCD Flaring up

What they don’t tell you about OCD is when it ‘flares up’ (can you even say that about OCD?), it takes the help of your brain and will not let go. And by the way, OCD doesn’t necessarily look like the clinically clean, germ-obsessed hand-washing pro people often depict or picture. I don’t actually worry much about  germs to be fair. Or hand washing, for that matter. OCD is different for different people. The compulsive part of my OCD is all about organisation, and compartmentalisation. 

99% of the time (when I’ve got a rein on it), OCD is amazing. It helps me be the most effective ‘me’ there is: meticulous, quick-thinking, organised and pretty efficient.

OCD can look like this:

An Urge to Organise

When the obsessive compulsive part of OCD rears its ugly head and takes control of my brain, I have an irresistible urge to organise things. Everything else on my to-do list is going to be ignored, no matter how many times I write it down or symbolically prioritise it on paper. The problem is I can’t let go. I also never do things in half when OCD takes charge. Under the influence of OCD, I fastidiously sort things into an order that makes sense to me at the time, one cupboard or one folder at a time. When I start, there isn’t space for anything else in my mind. It becomes my one and only priority, as debilitating as if it were a life-or-death situation, a puzzle I had to solve to save Planet Earth and the whole of Humanity. 

I organise that one room / cupboard / folder like my life depends on it. Whatever overflows or doesn’t belong in there gets piled up in other areas of my home / hard drive. It can stay that way for months afterwards without bothering me in the slightest. 

OCD can also look like that:

Until I get another flare up, that is. The itch is normally bearable, but at times, it becomes so irrepressible that you have to itch, then scratch until you’ve broken the skin. It is debilitating. 

Is that one cupboard or folder that important? Absolutely not. It usually is something trivial that shouldn’t matter, and doesn’t matter most days. Can I rationalise things when OCD takes over? No, I cannot. When the thoughts start creeping in, actions have to follow. 

Compulsions, Compulsions

I also cannot stop until what I have set to do is done. Literally. It’s not like I don’t want to stop. I cannot stop. It’s like my life and the lives of everyone I love depend on it. It is debilitating. I went to bed at 6 a.m. on Sunday because I couldn’t stop in the girls’ bedroom. I woke up around 8.30 am. Because I needed to finish it. I didn’t mind the lack of sleep. I actually enjoyed getting it done. 

My house is never particularly tidy or spotless. I’m pretty relaxed about housework and mess in general. But on the rare occasions OCD flares up, it is all-consuming. 

Here are 2 photos of my bedroom. On the left, you can see my bedroom after an OCD flare-up. I have tidied another room and created a mess everywhere else. On the right, my bedroom after an OCD flare-up: I have tidied my room. I can guarantee there would have been lots of little messes everywhere else…

Day-to-day Life when OCD is Under Control

Once these compulsions have been satisfied (shall I call them OCD episodes?), life can resume its normal course, just like that. As I said before, 99% of the time, OCD and I live in blissful harmony. 

Stress doesn’t really trigger my OCD, because I am so organised 99% of the time (thanks to the OCD) that I can be exceptionally efficient when most would crumble under pressure. My trigger when I was younger was every other Sunday when I was going to my dad’s. My trigger as a 41-year-old woman is when my children are going to their dad’s for an extended period of time. The cyclical way in which everything happens can be a funny thing, can’t it?

I can control my impulses fully when my children are around. They probably see me as a bit messy and scatty. I love the fact that my maternal instinct is fiercely committed to shielding them from ‘the ugly’ part of OCD. I have no intention of passing on my ‘quirks’ on to my children. 

My four are now back from their dad’s. The girls’ room was tidy for about 12 minutes. Chaos has resumed and there’s absolutely no way I’m cleaning anything for a week or so!