I was doing an intake for a new therapist and was asked to describe my OCD. Here is what I told him.
My OCD is like a room of TVs surrounding you. Each TV shows the same channel but someone else controls the channel and volume.
The person who controls the TVs likes to scare you.
So they’ll show videos of your house burning down or your loved ones dying. Maybe they’ll show videos of your past but those videos are changed to make you the bad guy.
Not only are these videos unsettling but they don’t go away. You panic and feel the anxiety crawling all through your body but you can’t get rid of the thoughts. These are the obsessions.
You don’t want these videos to come true. So you do what you can to avoid this future. Maybe it involves checking everyone’s breathing or triple checking that the stove is turned off. One of mine is to make sure I park perfectly within the parking spot so that my car will start. These are the compulsions.
And the worst part about OCD is that it creeps up on you. Each compulsion takes longer than the last one to get rid of the obsession. Soon your entire day is just made up of compulsions. That’s what makes it a disorder.
How do you describe your OCD to others?
