Color Me Obsessed
Posted by fxckfeelings on February 14, 2013
To paraphrase Keyser Soze in “The Usual Suspects,” the greatest trick mental illness pulls is convincing the sick person it doesn’t exist. Either through making you feel perpetually insecure or unbelievably happy and confident, mental illness’ true gift is preventing you from knowing you have an illness and thus blocking you or the people who love you from helping you. Acknowledging you’re unwell may be hard news to face, but it gives you two valuable gifts; the opportunity to manage your illness, and the ability to spare yourself responsibility for the feelings and thoughts your illness can cause. You may never exorcise your illness entirely, but you can learn to identify it before it limps away with your life.
–Dr. Lastname
I wonder if I could have OCD and if I should consider getting evaluated. I spend a lot of time going over social interactions and thinking about what I should have done differently. Often I get very silly fears about having hurt my friends’ feelings and need to apologize or get reassurance that things are OK, or asking my friends/husband for reassurance about things I may have done to upset/hurt someone else. I am constantly questioning my own perceptions and have a very, very difficult time making even minor decisions (like whether to save or throw out leftovers). My husband claims that I shower 3x longer than most people and thinks I avoid showers for that reason. I am very slow and meticulous at almost everything I do (gardening) and wish I was different. I don’t have any unusual fear of germs though I do work in a lab and sterile technique is a big part of my job. There have been times when a 1-2 hour task took me 3 hours because I was behaving so irrationally about sterilizing the instruments (and I knew this). Sometimes though I think maybe I want to have OCD because otherwise there could be something even worse wrong with me.
Your obsessive worries probably have a positive side, in that they make you very, very good at your work using sterile technique in a lab, but make you very, very miserable in the process.
While the fact that you hold down an exacting job and have friends and a husband to pester with worrisome questions means that your constant worries haven’t stopped you from doing what’s important, unfortunately, that support team hasn’t stopped your constant worries or the worrying about worrying. So, while being obsessive isn’t all bad and hasn’t impaired your life too much, it doesn’t make you feel too good, either.
Getting evaluated and possibly treated for OCD can help, but be careful not to become too focused on the diagnosis. It’s natural to obsess about controlling your symptoms, finding out everything about your diagnosis, trying every treatment you’ve ever heard of, and then feeling like a big fat failure if you don’t achieve a cure for your OCD. If that happens, your obsessions become dangerous, not just because they’re causing you pain or interfering with activities, but because they’ve insinuated themselves into your identity.
So without making yourself too responsible for solving OCD, shop for a therapist who is good at reminding you that, while obsessions are uncomfortable feelings and impulses, they’re not who you are. You’re the person who manages them and keeps on going, and a good coach or therapist never lets you forget it.
Behavioral treatment may help you change worry-driven behavior and eventually reduce your pain, even though, in the short run, forcing yourself to stop obsession-driven behavior, like re-doing a task or requesting reassurance from a friend, may make you feel worse. Eventually, however, stopping these behaviors can reduce their power and intensity.
Medication can also help, although you won’t know until after trying one for several weeks. The risk of dangerous side effects from such a trial is very low and the risk of bothersome side effects doesn’t matter, in part because they’re not frequent, but mainly because you can stop the medication quickly if side effects happen.
Instead of obsessing about OCD, take pride in what you’ve done with your obsessions and ask yourself whether the discomfort is worth trials of various kinds of treatment. Then, if you elect treatment, don’t become obsessed with making it work.
Give yourself credit for doing your best to get relief and living a full life even when distracted and distressed by symptoms. Whether or not you have OCD, you have a full life, and when it comes to managing your obsessive impulses, you have options.
STATEMENT:
“My endless self-questioning leaves me feeling like a weird, insecure, broken person but I know my temperament helps me do good work and hasn’t driven off a decent husband and close friends. I respect the fact that I’ve made a good life in spite of these symptoms, even as I decide whether treatment is worth pursuing.”
I wish I could get my husband to see that he got weird a couple years ago (you know what I mean) and that he needs treatment. We had a happy marriage and he had always been a good dad, devoted to our kids, but two years ago he became convinced that I didn’t understand him and he needed to do more good in the world. He started to preach to people and cut back on his work time. I had to get a second job to make ends meet, because he told me that people needed him and that he didn’t have time to work, that he’d come up with a sure-fire way to salvation and owed it to the world to share his amazing ideas (that I think were totally confusing and mostly nonsense). I know from reading and talking to a psychiatrist that he’s got all the symptoms of mania—the fast-talking, no-sleep, I’ll-save-the-world fervor—but I can’t convince him. My goal is to get him to understand that he needs help.
It’s frustrating to know that someone you love has gone bonkers in a way that devalues your relationship and other good things in his life and that, in spite of his appearing superficially rational, you can’t persuade him otherwise. What you probably want to believe is that an expert like me would know what to say to get through to him, and while I wish that were so, crazy is a language that you get better at understanding with experience but never truly learn to speak unless you take a trip to Insania yourself.
From my experience, within the first six months of undergoing this kind of change, people like your husband get encountered to death by friends, relatives and professionals, and it doesn’t work for reasons that should be obvious; everyone’s so-called rational decisions are actually very emotion-driven, so mental illness doesn’t have to work hard to persuade its host that the entire meaning of his life lies in grand gestures. After all, if everyone’s pleading with him to save his mind, they should accept his quest to save the world’s souls.
The only good news is that his change of heart is not personal; it’s just illness, and if he was still totally behind the wheel of his mind, he’d love you just as much. Unfortunately, he’s left the driver’s seat and his body is now inhabited by a replacement messiah-husband who is driving you crazy. After two years, the chance of his returning is, sadly, low.
It’s time to comfort yourself as you would any widow who lost, if not her whole husband, at least the best part. Instead of burdening yourself with responsibility for finding a solution that doesn’t exist, ask yourself what you want to do now. His illness makes it impossible for you to protect him but, in doing so, it also relieves you of that responsibility. What you do have responsibility for is the future you create with what you’ve got left.
Consult a lawyer on ways to limit the damage he and his illness can do to your bank account and the support he owes you and the kids. If necessary, document his craziness if you need a court to limit his custody and visitation rights for the kids’ safety. Now that you can’t cure him, your priority must shift to protecting your kids’ security and your own future.
Maybe a treatment will come along that will re-set your husband’s brain back to what it was before. Until then, don’t make yourself responsible for getting through to him and don’t make him responsible for listening in a sane, sensible way. Your responsibility, unfortunately, is to accept a terrible loss and deal with the ongoing risk of having an adult partner with no reliable judgment. You can wait for divine intervention, or you can save your kids and yourself.
STATEMENT:
“I can’t believe it’s become so hard to reason with a guy I could once count on as a sane, sensible partner, but I’m proud that I’ve done my best to get him to see how ill he is and accept treatment. Not what I know I can’t help him, I will do what’s necessary to protect my family from his illness and reconstruct my future.”
