Erin’s Avett Brothers Birthday Present, Part 2

This post is for Erin on her birthday.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/3uy4tK5q0KE

I know I gave you your birthday present early: an Avett Brothers concert almost a month ago. But I’ve been thinking about this band lately and realize that one reason I like them so much is that a lot of their songs make me think of you.

A lot of their songs are about love that gets tested only to grow stronger than before, and that’s been our journey.

The song “And It Spread” makes me think about how self destructive I used to be and how you pulled me through it and made me a better man.

There was light in the room
then you left and it was through
then the frost started in
my toes and fingertips

and it spread into my heart

then for I don’t know how long
I settled in to doing wrong
and as the wind fills the sail
came the thought to hurt my self…

then you came back from space
with a brand new laugh and a different space
you took my hand and held it up
and shot my arm full of love

and it spread
and it spread into the world
and it spread
and it spread into the world 

One of my favorite songs is “Head Full Of Doubt / Road Full Of Promise” because of this one section:

When nothing is owed or deserved or expected
And your life doesn’t change by the man that’s elected
If you’re loved by someone, you’re never rejected
Decide what to be and go be it

When I think of your love for me and others and the things you do for everyone — no matter how ungrateful some people are — I think of that song. I hope you feel the same way, that “If you’re loved by someone, you’re never rejected.” Some friends and family will get self-absorbed and stupid sometimes, making you feel unloved and under appreciated. But I know they love you a lot, too. But like me, they just lack the ability to show it sometimes.

“Kick Drum Heart” has a great line that makes me think of my life with you.

There’s nothing like finding gold
within the rocks hard and cold
I’m so surprised to find more
Always surprised to find more

I won’t look back anymore
I left the people that do
Its not the chase that I love
Its me following you. 

I’m always going to follow you, because when you lead the way, we find more gold.

Not material gold. I’m thinking gold in the form of our children and the beautiful experiences we continue to collect.

You fill in all my holes. I hope I’m doing the same for you.

You often make remarks about how you’re getting old. It’s usually after a long day, when your tired and all the aches and pains are amplified.

But as far as I can tell, you’re only getting better. That sounds corny and it is. But it’s true. You left a dead-end job and started a business that’s flourishing after less than two years. Sean and Duncan become more amazing by the day and that’s more because of you than me.

If this is what getting old is about, I’ll take it.

This is just another long-winded way for me to say Happy Birthday.

I love you more every day.

A New(ish) Weapon Against OCD Fidget Syndrome

At any number of events, you can see me darting around all over the place, taking pictures with my Android phone. The obvious reason is that I want to capture the special events in life. But it has also become a good weapon against what I call OCD Fidget Syndrome.

Mood music:

I’ve mentioned the fidgeting before. A byproduct of my OCD is a serious discomfort with sitting properly for any length of time. One way I manage it is by putting my feet up on the desk when I work, which for some reason helps me minimize the bobbing and weaving. There’s also the windmill hands. Those who know me well have seen it at one time or another, usually when I’m sitting at a desk engaged in a project. My face gets slightly contorted and I start shaking my hands around like they’re on fire.

Taking pictures gives me a positive outlet for all that nervous energy. But I’m no professional. For that you have to talk to my sister-in-law Amanda or my friend Kevin Littlefield. I just mess around with the phone camera. But lately I’ve gotten more brazen about it.

Now I’m experimenting with all the nifty free camera apps available in the Android Marketplace.

My favorite is Retro Camera, which gives every image a rustic glaze. It was a life-saver earlier this month when Sean and I were camping in the driving rain. Sitting under a tent can be bad for my fidgeting ways, but the camera helped:

I also used the app to take one of my profile pictures. 

In this one, I took Retro Camera into the bathroom  and put the phone behind my head as I stared in the mirror:

Here’s one of Sean reading in a tree out back, also taken with Retro Camera:

I recently discovered some other apps that allow all kinds of craziness for the less-than-average photographer. There’s the Camera Illusion and Photo Illusion apps that let you take pictures that look like pencil drawings and infrared images. I’ve gone nuts with that one, as the following snaps show:

My niece, Madison, in the supermarket
Erin giving our nephew Owen a smooch
My massive re-usable Starbucks traveling cup
Someone left this Curious George stuffed doll lying around
Self portrait using the pencil feature and a red overlay

For this one I used the emboss effect, which didn’t make me any less ugly. But it was still a fun experiment.

Nothing special. But it beats fidgeting.

A Visit To The Prozac Nurse

Last night was my annual pilgrimage to Beverly, Mass. for an appointment with the nurse who manages my Prozac intake. She has done better for me than my primary care doctor did. Here’s why.

Mood music:

Drugs used to treat mental disorders must be tightly controlled. Too little and it won’t help you. Too much can make your disorder worse.

When I first started taking Prozac in 2007, my primary care doctor was prescribing it. My depression and anxiety were melting a hole in my heart and I was at my wit’s end. I had resisted medication for a long time because I didn’t believe in them. I saw it as quitting.

Needing medicine to balance out my brain chemistry and make me human meant I was weak and couldn’t control the OCD on my own.

That’s the thing about OCD. The craving for control blinds you.

But years of therapy, though helpful, hadn’t helped me break the spell of fear and anxiety, and that was limiting me. So at my doctor’s suggestion, I gave it a try.

The anxiety and depression evaporated within two weeks and I felt like a new man. But I would still be in and out with mood swings. I eventually figured out that my doctor wasn’t the best person to manage this drug. He’s a fine doctor, but these capsules have a complexity I think was beyond his expertise.

When I started seeing my latest therapist, he gave me a hell of an education.  He was the first therapist to help me understand the science behind mental illness and the way an inbalance in brain chemistry can mess with your thought traffic. He also provided me with quite an education on how anti-depressants work. Indeed, there’s a science to it. Certain drugs are designed to shore up the brain chemicals that, when depleted, lead to bi-polar behavior. Other meds are specifically geared toward anxiety control. In my case, I needed the drug that best addressed obsessive-compulsive behavior. For me, that meant Prozac.

He also told me it was stupid to take my prescriptions from a primary care physician. Essentially, he said, that was like putting a 12-year-old in charge of a dynamite stockpile.

So he sent me to my current Prozac nurse.

Last year, she knocked my 60-milligram dosage back to 40 for the summer. With the longer days and extra sunlight, the logic was that I wouldn’t need as much. It worked until late summer, when a couple weeks of cloudy weather and earlier sunsets sent my brain chemistry out of whack.

I went back up to 60 and had some steep mood swings in the process. It evened out fairly quickly, but as far as I was concerned, those mood swings weren’t worth the experiment.

So last night, she decided to keep me at 60. If it isn’t broken, why try to fix it?

She asked how I was doing with my therapist.

“Excellent,” I said. “I walk in there with a large cup of Starbucks and he glares at me like a father who can’t get his kid to tie his shoes just right.”

She smiled. “Next time,” she said, “You should walk in with two large cups.”

To that, we laughed like schoolkids who had just shared a dirty joke.

My therapist has buttons I like to push. One button is that he thinks everyone should quit caffeine and do yoga. I’m apparently not the only one who likes to have fun with that. The beauty of it is that I can do that, he can take it, and I still get something valuable from my appointments.

As I’ve said before, drugs without therapy won’t work in the long run. Mental wellness requires a lot of things: Careful diet, therapy is a must if you have a disorder and sometimes you need medication, though that isn’t always the case.

When I have an appointment with the Prozac nurse I usually cuss about it. It takes me an hour to get to her office for something we could do over the phone.

Yesterday, I badly wanted to cancel.

Erin wouldn’t have let me, anyway.

“You need these appointments,” she said yesterday, as she frequently does when I balk at going.

And so I went. I’m glad I did.

OCD Diaries

A Relationship That Changed for the Better

Since my father’s stroke last month, I’ve had some long talks with Dianne, my step-mom. Those conversations illustrate how much we’ve both changed over the years. Or is it just me who has changed?

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/S4v-_p5dU34

Let me be honest: Ours has never been an easy relationship. I spent the better part of my teens and 20s resenting her to the core. Our quarrels had all the drama of a TNT series. The two of us in the same room was like throwing a match on gunpowder.

I’ve often wondered who was more at fault along the way. Knowing myself as I do now, I tend to think the trouble was more my fault than hers, because she had the misfortune of joining the family right as I was hitting my malcontented, conflicted and rebellious teenage years. I had a chip on my shoulder the size of an ashtray and I was full of hatred for a lot of reasons real and imagined.

A look at the broader picture shows how she was really at a disadvantage.

My brother died only a few months after she appeared on the scene, and she was home the night he had that final asthma attack. She plunged the adrenaline needle in him while waiting for the ambulance because that’s what you were supposed to do in the event of these attacks. But his number was up, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

She was also there a couple months before, in October 1983, when Michael had a similar attack that almost killed him that night. The doctors didn’t think he was going to make it that night, but he bounced back from the brink just in time, just like I bounced back from the brink more than once when the Croh’s Disease was attacking me so bad that the doctors were ready to pull out the colon and throw it in the trash.

I guess I was just a little luckier than he was.

Anyway, me and Dianne were always in conflict. I thought she was in the marriage with my Dad for his business success. I fought constantly with the step-sister she gave me. I was jealous of the step-brother she gave me because he was suddenly the cute youngest kid. Before my parents divorced it was Michael, Wendi and me, the youngest. Being sick, I was also spoiled rotten. Then the step-siblings came along and Michael died, making me the oldest son, a title that carried a lot of pressure.

I blamed it all on Dianne.

Of course, she also gave me a beautiful half sister in late 1985 who came along at just the right time, bringing joy to the family I never thought we’d see again. I was always grateful for that.

But still we fought. By the late 1990s we were barely speaking to each other. The resentment and hurt ran too deep on both sides. Then, sometime in 2000, things started to change. We met in a small breakfast place on the Revere-Malden border and talked it out, civil in a way that had been inconceivable just a year earlier.

I don’t remember the contents of the conversation exactly. But somewhere in there, we agreed that something had to change. I think the change really set in after Sean was born a year later. Becoming parents gave her a whole new respect for me and Erin. Actually, I think that for me, becoming a parent was when I finally started to grow up. A decade into parenthood, I get a lot of what she was trying to tell me back when I was a self-seeking kid.

Fast-forward to 2011. I know now that back then I was looking for people to blame for my pain and she was too good a target to pass up.

She has stuck by my father through all kinds of illness and turmoil. She loves him deeply, and worries about him constantly.

Nothing has made that clearer than the past month.

I’ve watched her push past the point of exhaustion and borderline madness to care for him.

She’s lost a lot of sleep and you can see it in her eyes. This month has been vastly more brutal for her than the rest of us, except, of course, for Dad. She’s gone over the cliff for him. That’s what love is all about.

I’m sorry I ever doubted her feelings for him when I was younger.

But that’s in the past. We talk to each other as grown-ups now. The respect is mutual. Things can never go back to the way they were.

Thank God for that.

OCD Diaries

Screwing Your Kids In The Divorce, Part 3

This is one of those things that is technically none of my business. But when I see a beautiful little girl suffering the consequences of someone else’s stupidity, it’s hard to stand there and say nothing.

Mood music:

There’s a guy I know who is staring divorce in the face. This is a message for him.

When a marriage falls apart it’s never a one-way street. Husband and wife are both guilty of falling short in this union. But it happens. We’re all human.

Here’s the problem: When divorce is imminent, both parties tend to find ways to hurt each other, even when they don’t mean to. It’s simple, really: You hurt like hell because it didn’t work out. It’s easy to focus on your future ex’s role in the failure but hard to look at where you fell short.

And so, seething with anger and eager to land a few crushers, you do little spiteful things to get back at her.

Exhibit A: You both have a little girl and need to share custody. Who gets her three days a week? Who gets her for four? What works best for each work schedule?

You’re not working, so you can have her any time you want. So you pick your days and leave your ex with the days you know she has to work.

This forces your ex to find daycare for your daughter and it ensures mother and daughter will hardly get to see each other on what is supposed to be their time together.

Now, in the best of circumstances people work and family time often suffers due to crazy schedules. That’s life. But when you can prevent such a situation from happening, why wouldn’t you?

Because you’re a wounded animal, and you want to maul the person you feel put you there.

Your own faults are too big to face right now. In fact, you probably can’t even see them. Your faults are like the sky — so vast it’s hard to focus on every bird or plane that crosses it.

So fuck her, you say. Let her deal with it.

Here’s the problem: You’re not just hurting your ex. You’re hurting your daughter.

I’ve seen it for myself. She bounces from one relative’s house to the next. She gets all the love a little girl can get, but she misses her mom. And because her mom has to drop her and run, she’s upset and confused a lot.

I remember when my parents divorced 31 years ago. I was 10 years old — in a much better position to process things than your little girl is now. And I was still confused and angry when they shipped me off to summer camp. I felt unwanted, lonely and isolated. The scars burn me to this day. Then the custody battles intensified and I felt like a piece of paper tugged at from both sides. Grab at something fragile that way and you tear it down the middle.

And my parents’ intentions were good — they wanted to shield me from the court proceedings and ugliness that goes with it.

Your intentions are crap. You just want to stick it to your ex.

You love your daughter and want to protect her. I’ve seen that. Your feelings as a Dad are not in question.

But you’re hurting her anyway. She’s collateral damage in your little dance with stupidity.

Nobody can make you do things differently. It comes down to the future you want for your daughter and whether you want peaceful co-existence with your ex in the years to come.

People can help you with a lot of things, but nobody can make your decisions for you.

So here’s a little advice from someone who was burned by divorce as a kid and just spent the last few years facing down a bunch of personal demons:

–First of all, start dealing with your issues. You have serious depression going on. I’ve lived with depression for much of my adult life and I know it when I see it. Find a good therapist who can help bring it out of you.

–Try harder to find a job. Sitting on your brains all day is fueling your depression. You have talent. I’ve seen it. You can never feel whole if your abilities are stifled. Besides, as a dad you have financial responsibilities. That includes helping to pay for repairs around the house. You may not live there anymore, but your daughter does. Refusing to help pay for things because you were kicked out hurts your little girl. That is unacceptable.

–As you approach future divorce proceedings, think about what’s best for your daughter — not about what’s worse for your ex.

You didn’t help bring a kid into the world to kick her around and leave her adrift. That’s certainly not what you want, is it?

I’m also sure you want her to love you the way you love her. Trust me: If you don’t stop this bullshit, she will learn to hate you.

She’s a smart little firecracker and she catches on quick.

Once she sees your role in all of this, she will hurt you back. Trust me: I’ve been down this road. The names, faces, finances and geography were different, but the hurt and the effect it had on me as an adult is the same.

Don’t let it happen.

Sincerely,

Bill

OCD Diaries

Medical Marijuana For OCD Treatment: Not For Me

I just read an interesting blog post on how medical marijuana could be used to treat OCD. There are medicinal helpers for this disease, but pot would never work for me.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/pjloMejBQEU

Here’s an excerpt of the article, from the official website of hemp legalization advocate Jack Herer (originally published on the All Voices site):

OCD is a treatable disease. With adequate therapy and correct counseling by experienced psychiatrist and physicians, the intensity of the disease can be decreased in little time. Effective treatments for obsessive-compulsive disorder are now easily available, and fresh researches are yielding new and improved therapies that can help people with OCD and other anxiety disorders lead productive, fulfilling lives.

Some doctors even say that Medical Marijuana (Cannabis) can also help in eliminating the disease. Dr. Breen of Southern California insisted that he has been successful in treating two patients with OCD via medical Marijuana. He shared, “Today I had two patients who have been successfully treating their symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder with medical marijuana. One was a 46-year-old man whose symptoms are primarily having ‘to check things all the time.’ He explained having to walk back to his car all the time to check his door locks etc. The second was an 18-year-old male who had the compulsion to try and touch the ceiling in a room. In both cases their symptoms were disruptive to their daily lives.

Let me be clear: I personally have nothing against pot use. I’ve seen alcoholics do far more damage to themselves and others than those who smoke marijuana. I’m also dumbfounded that we don’t use hemp a lot more often as an alternative fuel source and other things, like paper. Keeping pot illegal does nothing to curb drug use. It’s as useless as Prohibition was in the 1920s.

It may even be helpful to those suffering with OCD.

But it is not for me.

The reason is simple: I have an addictive personality. I can get addicted to just about anything with destructive results. My main problem is with flour and sugar. Alcohol is a close second.

I smoked plenty of pot in my late teens and early 20s and I know how I react to it: I binge on any kind of food available to me until I’m ready to explode. Then I pass out and, when I come to, forget what I was doing. I must have liked that enough to keep doing it for a time. But then I kept binge eating long after I stopped enjoying the feeling I got — if I ever did at all.

I also bristle at the suggestion that a drug can “eliminate” the disorder. You never completely get rid of it. You just learn to manage it in a way where it no longer makes your life unmanageable.

But if a little marijuana helps someone else get there, who am I to judge?

OCD Diaries

Looking For The Bright Side

My attitude sucks this morning. I explain some of the reason in my last post, but there are a variety of factors:

Mood music:

1. Despite my best efforts to be the family man I’m supposed to be, I always find myself coming up short.

2. The weather has been a gray, depressing soup since I got back from California, where the weather was perfect. This makes for a hard re-entry.

3. I seem to have no control over my days lately. This would make anyone cranky.

This too shall pass, like all the bad moods that came before. For now, my challenge is to keep it all together and not give in to self pity. I’m going to lean on the 12 Steps hard today. I have no choice.

Writing this is part of that. By writing about my shitty mood, I’m wringing the venom from my soul, and that will serve me well as the day goes on.

I have another tool I’m going to use to re-start the day and send it in the right direction. I’m going to write a little gratitude list.

This morning, I’m grateful for the following:

–My family still puts up with me

–I have some great friends who help me along

–I remain sober and abstinent.

–I’m done traveling for a bit, so I can be back in my routine.

–My father seems to be slowly getting better nearly a month after his stroke.

–The sun is finally breaking through the clouds. I hope it stays that way.

–Church is in a couple hours. Time with God will re-set my attitude. or so I hope.

Seize the day, people — no matter how imperfect the day may be.

OCD Diaries

Me, Dad And The Kill Switch

My father was passed out cold during my visit to the rehab center yesterday, and I left feeling depressed. I hadn’t seen him in a week because I had a business trip to California, and I kept hearing about how much better he was. I wanted to see for myself.

Mood music:

But he slept the whole time. That’s probably for the best. The more sleep he gets, the better.

But the self-absorbed side of me was feeling cheated as my gaze alternated between him and the floor for more than an hour.

Sleep has never been a problem for Dad, and I’ve inherited that trait. Like Dad, I can fall asleep at the drop of a hat. I’m particularly susceptible to sleep during a wave of depression or anxiety. My brain has a kill switch that goes off in times of maximum stress.

I’ve learned to disable the kill switch in recent years, because I’ve learned it’s better to face your problems with both eyes open.

But I know that to a certain extent, Dad’s deep sleep is because he’s depressed. Who wouldn’t be after a stroke and nearly a month in the hospital?

I’m told Dad has always gone through depressed periods, and it’s always been somewhat surprising to me. He’s always been able to appear in complete command around us kids. Even after my brother died, he seemed to be in control of his emotions, though I did see him cry once during that period. I’m sure he cried more than that. But I almost always saw Dad in control.

Looking back, two things come to mind:

–That he could be in control as two of his three kids suffered sometimes debilitating illness (Michael’s asthma, my Crohn’s Disease) is amazing to me. After Michael died and I got sick a few more times, he got to deal with another child in crisis: My sister, who has gone a few thousand rounds against depression herself.

–His sleeping patterns have probably been driven at various points by his own depression. Call it his own kill switch.

Before my parents divorced in 1980, my mother regularly went out with friends in the evenings while Dad lay in bed, watching TV.

He’d fall asleep instantly. I always chalked it up to exhaustion, given his relentless work schedule. But looking back, maybe there was some depression in there and the kill switch was taking over.

I used to spend those nights watching all the bad TV the 1970s had to offer. Sometimes, I’d get into trouble, especially the kind that involved matches and plastic.

Recently, I had a conversation with Dad where he acknowledged that his orderly exterior often masked huge emotional difficulties when I was young.

That still floors me.

At the same time, it makes perfect sense.

Life is unfair. We have to be able to carry on in the face of adversity.

The kill switch was one of the coping tools in my father’s arsenal.

It’s a tool he passed down to me.

Like father, like son.

OCD Diaries

‘It Comes Alive And I Die A Little More’

There’s a Metallica song called “The Unnamed Feeling” that nails an important truth about OCD and anxiety. We have our triggers, but many times we can’t see or describe what’s pulling us apart.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:4RCJ2xbTfJalOq7RtTsOPv]

I mentioned this a little bit in a post I wrote earlier about A&E’s “Obsession” series:

Things eat at you in a more gradual, quieter fashion. By the time the hand washing and contorted expressions begin, the sufferer has been boiling in obsessive thinking for hours. To me, that’s the worst part — when you’re alone, trapped in a spinning mind. It’s a lonely, alien feeling. You feel like the last man left standing after a nuclear explosion. Nothing is left. Now what the fuck do you do?

By the time the stereotypical behavior comes out, there’s almost a relief because you’ve reached the beginning of the end of an attack.

To say it’s a faceless, shapeless monster that comes alive is fairly accurate. I was chatting a fellow OCD sufferer on Facebook recently and this came up. She found this blog through the Facebook page I set up for it, and she pinged me to share some of her own unique quirks.

She mentioned the usual things like repetitive actions. But then she nailed what for her is the most hurtful part:

“I would rather have the physical manifestations of ocd, (hand washing, checking, germ phobia) rather than the exhausting-beating myself up mentally about something. Even though the physical stuff can be very frustrating, painful, and exhausting; it is not nearly as painful and damaging as dwelling on things.”

Dwelling on things.

That’s where it starts.

Life can be flowing along peacefully and then it comes out of nowhere and stabs you right between the eyes: A stray thought about someone or something. You think of an appointment in the calendar or a loved one taking a plane ride. That’s where it starts: Just a random picture.

You begin to focus a little more on the image, and the imagination starts to run wild.

Location plays a big part in this. The random images start to spin into a damaging funnel cloud when I’m in closed up spaces: An elevator, a traffic jam, a meeting.

Those places make my mind wander until it finds its target.

From there a small concern becomes a sickening worry until you can no longer contain yourself.

That’s when the stuff everyone can see starts up: The windmill hands. The fidget, relentlessly tugging at my clothes because maybe — just maybe — something is embarrassingly out of place.

It sucks a person’s vitality from every pore.

Thankfully, I’m over the worst of it. I still have my OCD moments, but smaller things drive it.

The internal brain spin and the demon that triggers it is in its box most days now. The box is made out of the coping tools I’ve built during six-plus years in therapy. The nails that keep the box shut are made from Prozac.

Writing in this blog is a powerful tool because I spill all the dark thoughts out onto a page. One I write about it, it’s no longer in my head.

The unnamed feeling is the toughest beast you’ll ever wrestle. But if you think it’s unbreakable, you’re wrong.

A&E’s ‘Obsessed’: First Impressions

My fellow OCD buddy Steve Repsys pinged me the other day about an A&E program called “Obsessed.” This morning I finally got around to checking out some clips. It has it’s good points. And it’s not-so-good points.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/72rWAe0pUdQ

I’m a big advocate of any programming that educates people about OCD, addictions and other demons of the soul. That’s why I’ve written a lot about the movie being made called “Machine Man.” But reality TV leaves me cold almost every time because, well, it’s not really reality.

There’s always more drama when the cameras roll. People change in front of the camera whether they mean to or not. Nobody wants to be boring on film, so, somewhere deep in the brain, the instinct to play things up nags at you.

Add some drama music and fancy lighting and you get something that’s not 100 percent truth. Lies infect the mix.

A&E is a chief offender. Last Halloween they did a show called “Amityville: The Last Testament” where a clairvoyant woman who investigates paranormal activity for the police is contacted by Ronnie DeFeo, who has been serving a life sentence for killing his family in their Amityville home (he originally claimed demonic possession made him do it, and the crime gave birth to the “Amityville Horror” movie and book franchise). In the episode, DeFeo — famous for his constant changing of stories — again claims posession, and reaches out to the woman to help prove it.

Somewhere in the episode, she says she has to investigate the house, and there she is, in a house that is clearly not THE house to those who have seen pictures of the inside or been there. It’s also well known that the current owners allow nobody inside to film, especially where the haunting hoax is concerned.

People eat it up and accept it as truth because they don’t know any better.

Tell someone a program is based on a true story and they instantly believe everything in it really happened.

That episode ran through my head as Steve presented me with the link to this “Obsessed” series. So let’s have a look. 

The series is explained this way on the A&E site: “Intense and highly personal, A&E’s true-life docu-series “Obsessed” examines the lives of everyday people impris- oned by unmanageable, repetitive behaviors and sometimes debilitating fear. Whether it is Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Panic Disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder, General Anxiety Disorder, Hoarding or a variety of phobias, the unscripted series gives viewers a chance to see first-hand how an obsession can radically affect a person’s life.”

There’s the woman who has trouble with intimacy because she’s afraid to tell her new boyfriend about her OCD. There’s a guy obsessed about how to cross a threshold. Then there’s Chad, a rock musician who suffers from severe anxiety, accompanied by a hand-swiping ritual. Passing cars terrify him. He takes care when crossing on of the spaces between granite slabs that make up the sidewalk.

There are shards of truth throughout, and I’m glad to see that. A lot of people suffer from these things, and the uneducated just thinks they are weird.

But the Chad segment plays up every stereotypical quirk to the point where the viewer misses something important. They hear the dramatic music. They see the facial expressions and the uncomfortable looks from friends and family.

But the camera can’t capture some of the more hurtful truths about OCD and anxiety. Things eat at you in a more gradual, quieter fashion. By the time the hand washing and contorted expressions begin, the sufferer has been boiling in obsessive thinking for hours. To me, that’s the worst part — when you’re alone, trapped in a spinning mind. It’s a lonely, alien feeling. You feel like the last man left standing after a nuclear explosion. Nothing is left. Now what the fuck do you do?

By the time the stereotypical behavior comes out, there’s almost a relief because you’ve reached the beginning of the end of an attack.

The cameras will always capture the latter part. But it can never, ever touch the stuff that starts it all — the insanity that attacks the center of the mind.

That’s my take, anyway. Someone else with OCD will probably explain it differently.

Which is actually why, despite all I just said, “Obsessed” is worth checking out.

Even though the drama is amplified and A&E has a history of loosening up on truth in favor of theatrics, there are some important truths in there.

People often see someone with the repetitive actions and wonder what that person’s problem is. This series will at least answer that question. That’s a start.

And in breaking a stigma, we have to start somewhere.

Even a channel like A&E.

OCD Diaries