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When the Best OCD Management Tools Fail (and What to Do About It)

Admission: Despite all the training and tools I’ve accumulated to manage clinical OCD over the years, the demons still run over me in spectacular ways on occasion. Yesterday was one of those days.

Mood Music:

Things I’ve learned about OCD management:

  • Practice mindfulness through meditation
  • Push back thought distortions — the kind associated with something like impostor syndrome.
  • Take walks
  • Prayer (as part of that first one)

Sometimes, though, my passions run so hot that I flat-out forget to pick up those tools.

In recent weeks, my work has involved producing a lot of written guidance for businesses trying to maintain security as workforces go remote. I’ve taken the task close to heart because it’s one small way I can do my part to get society through this, aside from the physical distancing. Also: It’s my job.

But when my OCD runs hot, my patience grows threadbare. I want to get content out quickly. It’s the old newsman in me. Which can be at odds with another truth: When dealing with technological guidance, the more painfully rigorous the process, the better.

Yesterday, I realized that my obsessive-compulsive nature was trying to circumvent that process, and I suspect it made life difficult for a couple of my colleagues. To them, I apologize.

The good news: I caught myself, with gentle pushback from a couple people. Now I’m going to step back a little today and pick those tools back up.

This isn’t meant as a public self-flaying exercise. It’s a message for everyone working through these times with OCD, anxiety, depression and other mental disorders:

  • You’re not alone.
  • You’re not stupid or weak.
  • Health management of any kind is a titanic task in times like these.
  • Yes, past generations have weathered trying times (The Great Depression and WWII come to mind), but individuals who did great things along the way still failed from time to time.
  • Beating ourselves up — something I excel at — is worse than useless.

When we have bad moments, let’s take a breath, step back, dust off and get back to work.

That’s what I’m going to do.

But first, a nap. That’s a good OCD management tool, too.

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Living in the Precious Present (If You Can Find It)

One of the basic traits of someone with OCD is an inability to live in the moment. Learning to do so is one of my big projects at the moment.

 

I’m better at living in the precious present than I used to be. I can remember being a kid, always daydreaming about the future: what I’d look like and how cool my life would be if I were thinner, the clothes I would wear, the girls I would date and the music I would write.

As I sat in my basement pondering such greatness, I’d be binge eating, drinking and smoking and wasting the moment.

Wasting the moment will prevent the future dreams from coming true every time. And so it was with me for a long time. It’s ironic that I did that sort of thing, because I had a nasty fear of the future that was caused by a fear of current events. I was convinced the world wouldn’t make it past 1999. That being the case, I should have embraced the present.

For whatever reason, I didn’t.

Later on, I’d daydream about what life would be like if I got a better job than the one I had at the time. I would have been better off finding ways to make the job I had and myself better day to day.

Through intense therapy for OCD and a program to control the binge eating, I’m much more able to live in the moment.

But I still struggle to keep my head in the moment, especially lately. My wife once compared some of it to my inability to see food portions in the proper perspective. I have no concept of what too much food looks like, so I have to put everything on a scale.

When the OCD runs hot I get the same way about time. I lose perspective on how long something will take or what I should be doing with the moment. I’ll go on the tear around the house doing chores, for example, when more important things are right in front of me, like spending some time with the kids.

It’s a confusing mix and it may not make much sense to you. But it is something I’m working on.

There’s plenty of things to be hopeful of and worry about concerning the future. But in the end, we can only do so much about what’s going to happen.

Better to embrace the moment then, right?

I don’t know how I’ll perfect that one, if I ever do.

For now, I’ll just be grateful that I’m better at it than I used to be.

survival-425

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The Dark Side of Mindfulness

Mindfulness has been important for my OCD and anxiety management. When used in the right amounts, the tools are immensely helpful. But mindfulness has a dark side, too.

Mood music:

Dawn Foster points out the dangers in a post she wrote for The Guardian that asks “is mindfulness making us ill?”

In the article, we hear from a 37-year-old woman named Claire, who started suffering from panic attacks and depression when she started taking a mindfulness course. The mindfulness training dregded up childhood traumas, which in turn sparked panic attacks and depression.

I didn’t start taking a mindfulness class until eight years after I began to tackle my demons. Had I taken the class at the beginning of the journey, I think I would have had the same reaction as Claire. Luckily, I had peeled back the onion layers of my past long beforehand, which saved me from a fresh deluge of bad memories.

As it was, the mindfulness class I took in 2012 was overwhelming in some spots and boring in others. The yoga and the role-playing games for conflict resolution bored me. I found that trying to spend blocks of time on mindful exercises each day was unworkable. If I was having a busy, stressful day, blocking off the 30-40 minutes for yoga and breathing exercises simply stressed me out more. The reason, I realized, was that the only remedy for the stress was to tackle the root challenges head on.

All in all, mindfulness training was good for me. I just had to find a way to integrate the techniques into my life. I learned to break things into smaller pieces. Instead of doing multiple exercises in large time blocks, I found that spending two minutes here and five minutes there worked better. Ten minutes of guitar playing helps to keep me in the moment. Breathing exercises in the car help me deal with the stress of traffic jams. These things have made a positive difference.

Some exercises I dispensed with entirely. The whole business about chewing your food slowly and silently, pondering the taste and texture with each chew? That did nothing for me.

When we’re desperate to fix ourselves, we look for a silver bullet. Maybe it’s a new workout craze or a mindfulness training course. In my experience, however, the bite-sized techniques always work better. When broken into pieces, the effect is less overwhelming. But I’ve also learned that there is no silver bullet.

If someone pitches mindfulness classes as a useful tool in a bigger toolbox, great.

But if they tell you they’re THE SOLUTION, walk away.

Savage Namaste by Eddie Mize, 2009
Savage Namaste
by Eddie Mize, 2009

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Dear Prudence, I’m Coming For You

By the end of 2015, I made a decision: I wasn’t going to let newfound pressures and responsibilities overtake the most important things in my life. Managing the loose ends of a family business — a task I inherited when my father died in June — had done just that. It was time to stop. I asked a friend for advice, and he told me to practice prudence.

Prudence is about using reason to govern oneself. In my case, prudence means putting the added responsibilities in their proper place, behind the things that are more important, specifically my wife and children and my career.

Indeed, 2015 was about doing the best I could with the added pressures. I think I did OK, for the simple reason that I still have a pulse and can stand up. I was able to keep doing my day job well. I can’t say I would have achieved the same results if this all happened a decade ago.

But 2016 is going to be about taking my life back.

The need to do that came into clearer focus last night. I went to a wake for a mentor from my North Shore Community College days and ran into several people who were part of that circle 25 years ago. We talked about what we were up to these days and the twists and turns our lives had taken. It reminded me of how hard I’ve worked since then to get to where I am now. If I turn my back now, I’ll be putting all those years to waste. I’m not going to let that happen.

I’m not tossing the new responsibilities aside, however. But from here on out, they’re taking a backseat to my real work.

Reset Button

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When Life Changes, So Do Your Coping Tools

I used to post in this blog at least once a day. Now I struggle to write a couple times a week. What’s going on?

Mood music:

When I started this blog, I was writing one or more posts a day, almost every day. Then it was four times a week. Then it was three. Lately, I have a hard time finding the motivation to write.

It’s odd, because writing has long been my most important coping tool for navigating life.

It’s not writer’s block or a lack of ideas. I have a backlog of topics I wrote down some time ago. I’m realizing that the problem — if it can be considered a problem — is that the contours of my life have changed, requiring me to rethink my coping tools and how best to use them.

I’ve experienced big changes in my life these last few months. Three people who were each a major force in my life passed on, and I found myself responsible for cleaning up and selling the family business. And in the last two years, the nature of my work has changed.

As a result, all my tools — the guitar playing, writing, breathing exercises, prayer, and so on — are in flux. I still use them, but the amount of each is changing.

Especially the writing.

My love for writing is as strong as it’s ever been. But as the busyness of my days has crowded out the time for it, I’ve realized that the world isn’t going to end when I don’t produce for this space. I don’t need to type a post every day for writing to be a critical tool.

It’s also true that a lot of my writing time has shifted to work projects. I’m working on the kind of research, intelligence gathering and report writing I’ve long wanted to do. But it’s a more demanding kind of writing, so I’ve shifted a lot of my strength and discipline there.

The family business stuff is something else entirely. It sucks up a lot of time and there are many moving parts. I’ve been learning a lot about the law, real estate, environmental remediation and insurance.

I also need to do my best for the family, and it’s become necessary to cut some of the writing time I used to have.

I don’t have a plan yet outlining the new order of things. My breathing exercises and praying is pretty much unchanged, I still see the therapist every other week and I take my meds on schedule. The guitar playing and personal blogging are moving targets. Some weeks I play a lot, other weeks hardly at all.
The writing has been even less predictable. For now, I’m scheduling posts for Monday, Wednesday and Friday each week.

All this will sort itself out and before long I’ll have a new tool-using structure that works for this new world I find myself in.

In the meantime, if you don’t see me posting, don’t worry. I’m fine — even better than fine.

I’m just busy living.

Spectre of the Past by EddieTheYeti

“Spectre of the Past” by EddieTheYeti

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Remembering Cliff Burton, Metallica’s Original Bassist

I couldn’t let the day go by without acknowledging a grim anniversary. Twenty-nine years ago today, Metallica bassist Cliff Burton was killed when the band’s tour bus flipped over on a lonely road in Sweden.

Mood music: 

The band’s first three albums had a huge impact on me.

In fact, Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” album helped me get through my last major attack of Crohn’s Disease.

It might seem bat-shit crazy of me to intertwine these two things, but the fact is that the “Master of Puppets” album DID help me get through that attack. That, and the book “Helter Skelter.” I read that book twice as I lingered on the couch, rising only for the frequent bloody bathroom runs that are the hallmark of Crohn’s flare-ups.

I listened to Master of Puppets nonstop. It tapped right into the anger I was feeling as a 16-year-old still reeling from his brother’s death and under the influence of Prednisone.

I had plans back then. I was going to lose 30 pounds, grow my hair long and find myself a girlfriend. I was going to live a life closer to normal. Not that I knew what normal was back then. As an adult, I’ve learned that normal is a bullshit concept, really. One man’s normal is another man’s insanity.

When the blood reappeared and the abdominal pain got worse, I wasn’t worried about whether I’d live or die or be hospitalized. I was just pissed because it was going to foul up my carefully designed plans.

When I listened to the title track to Master of Puppets, the master was the disease — and the wretched drug used to cool it down.

“The Thing That Should Not Be” was pretty much my entire life at that moment.

I related to “Welcome Home: Sanitarium” because I felt like I was living in one at the time. I was actually lucky about one thing: Unlike the other bad attacks, I wasn’t hospitalized this time.

Though Master of Puppets came out in March 1986, it was that summer when I really started to become obsessed with it. At the end of that summer, the Crohn’s attack struck. The album became the soundtrack for all the vitriol I was feeling.

That fall, as the flare-up was in full rage, Metallica bassist Cliff Burton was killed in that bus accident in Europe. It felt like just another body blow. I found this band in a time of need, and a major part of the music was ripped away.

I recently found a track of “Orion” where Cliff’s bass lines are isolated. It puts my neck hair on end every time I play it.

 

I haven’t been much of a Metallica fan in recent years. I enjoy some of what they’ve done from the fifth album to now. But the first three albums were special. Especially “Master of Puppets,” which was there when I needed it most.

File:Cliff Burton Memorial.PNG

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The Most Important Skill to Deal with Life

I’m trying to teach my kids to be flexible. Like me, both are obsessive planners. Just yesterday, my older son was telling me he’d been planning out his entire school year right to the last day. My advice to him?

Don’t get too locked into those plans.

Mood music:

I’m not trying to discourage careful planning. It’s good to plan; it keeps us organized. I find daily list making to be enormously helpful. I’m also not encouraging them to lower their expectations of life. We need our expectations to motivate us toward great things.

What I am trying to tell them is that when you set your heart to lofty expectations, you risk huge letdowns when things don’t go as planned. Letdowns are important, too, because they humble us and help us to learn and move forward. But too many letdowns can beat a person down, and a lot of the time it isn’t necessary.

I’ve set myself up for those kinds of letdowns in the past, when schedule changes seemed like calamities.

When I was a kid, I’d throw epic tantrums if we went to the movies and the film we wanted to see was sold out. That’s typical childhood behavior, but it followed me to adulthood. I’d rage if a traffic jam threw off the timing of when I’d get from point A to B (I still hate that, but my reaction is more muted). If plans for a night out with friends or a quiet night at home suddenly changed, I’d sink into a depressive funk.

I used to get ridiculously dramatic when something failed to meet my expectations. I’d give in to my addictive impulses, mope for days and, perhaps worst of all, I’d let disappointment completely destroy the rest of the day, weekend, holiday, what have you.

As I get older, I’m better at going with the flow, though I admit I still succumb on occasion. I have my expectations out of life, but I always keep in mind that unforeseen obstacles will appear. That way, when it happens, my brain can more readily move on to a revised state of affairs.

If I miss an appointment because of traffic, I can always reschedule the appointment. If we don’t get to a movie on time, we can find plenty of other enjoyable activities to fill the time. If one work opportunity caves in, there are always other opportunities waiting around the corner.

It’s a lesson I hope to pass on to my sons.

Survival Book surrounded by a jungle

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The Sea Will Save You

During vacation last week, Erin and I visited Arrowhead, the home of author Herman Melville. I bought an illustrated copy of his most famous work, Moby-Dick and got a whole new appreciation for the opening paragraphs, which I hadn’t read since college. It’s where the character Ishmael says:

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off — then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.

I relate, because when I’m depressed, the sea helps me. Always.

Mood music:

During moments of unhappiness in my younger years, the ocean was an escape route within feet of my front steps in Revere. I would sit on the rocks and think things through. I would walk from the Point of Pines all the way to the other end of the beach and back.

The process would usually take about 90 minutes — enough time to process what I was feeling. It didn’t necessarily make me happier, and much of the time thoughts just swirled around uselessly in my head. But I always came back from the beach a little calmer, a little stronger and ready to deal with whatever I had to face.

You could say the ocean would speak to me, talking me off the ledge.

I live away from the coast now, in a city sliced in half by the Merrimack River. The river has an equally calming effect on me, and I walk along it every chance I get. But every once in a while I go back to Revere or a closer place like Newburyport or Salisbury to get my pep talk from the sea.

To be fair, Ishmael’s adventure in Moby-Dick turned out to be anything but pleasant, and growing up by the beach wasn’t always sublime. The Blizzard of 1978 and the Perfect Storm of 1991 were destructive, and seeing the ocean rage as it did scared the hell out of me.

But those experiences are far outweighed by the many gifts the sea has given me.

Revere Beach Gazebo at Sunrise

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The “I’m Surviving” Checklist

I’ve learned that in times of disorganized thought, depression and anxiety, it’s good to make lists. Want to squeeze out all your negative thoughts about people? Make a resentment list. Need help getting your diet in order? Write a daily food list, also known as a food diary. Feeling overwhelmed by work and family responsibilities? Make daily to-do lists to stay on top of it all.

Mood music:

https://youtu.be/oKujsRIjoOA

Life has been pretty chaotic lately, and it feels like I’m losing my grip on everything. I know that’s not really true, but another list exercise is in order. For this one, I’ll focus on the positives.

“I’m Surviving” Checklist

  • My children are healthy and thriving.
  • My wife is excelling at her business, and she loves me even though I’m not always pleasant to be around.
  • My father is dying, but he’s able to live in comfort for whatever time is left.
  • I’m getting lots of quality time with him, which is a blessing.
  • Despite the family upheaval, I’m still able to do my job do it well.
  • I have legions of friends who stick by me for some reason.
  • My Crohn’s Disease is in check.
  • My eating is off, but I haven’t gone on any binges. I haven’t picked up a bottle, either.
  • Helping my father tie up loose ends with his business is a harrowing experience, but I’m learning a lot and that’ll be to my benefit later.
  • Summer is upon us, and that’s my favorite time of year.
  • I have a really good therapist.
  • I’m sleeping OK under the circumstances.
  • I have plenty of coffee to keep me going.
  • I have music.

It would appear my life is still pretty damn good, despite my perceptions lately.

Beat-up journal labelled

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Life Doesn’t Suck, We Just Need Our Life Jackets

Lately, I’ve been going through a tough period and been documenting it here because it’s another journey and I like to document all my journeys.

One thing I’m re-learning on this trek is that it’s important to find life jackets that keep you from drowning when the floods come. Put on the life jacket for a couple hours or a couple of days pockets to keep your head above water.

Mood music:

https://youtu.be/EkPy18xW1j8

Last weekend while the kids camped with their Boy Scout troop, Erin and I enjoyed a full day of quality time, walking around Newburyport, watching TV and having a romantic dinner. This weekend, as I type this, we’re having the first family camping trip in the new camper we were fortunate to have. We’ve been taking sunny walks, reading by the fire and taking life slowly.

Yesterday I went to the gun range with my father-in-law. I picked a target with a big, ugly mosquito on it. Like most people I hate mosquitoes, and I blew off a lot of steam shooting at it, trading off between a gun and a rifle.

The troubles of life aren’t far away. My father is still in hospice, and managing his real-estate business for him is a full job atop my real job. But I’m visiting Dad a lot and talking about old times. I call him every day. It’s a blessing to have that time with him. The business stuff is hard, but I’m figuring it out and it will be fine.

I can deal with the stressful side of those things because I’m also taking time for myself. It’s easy to forget to do that when life gets chaotic. It’s easy to let the harder things eat you alive. I’m grateful that through the grace of God and a lot of support from family, friends and work colleagues that I can find the pockets of solace.

Life’s journey is full of peril. Remember to bring along your life jackets, and everything will be fine.

The author, taking aim at a giant mosquitoPhoto by Robert Corthell