I’m irritable and sick, going through all the aches and pains that surface when toxins start to drip from the pores.
I’m coming up the stairs from work, anxious to get all the chores that await me over with.
I open the door to find Duncan sitting in his chair at the kitchen table.
He’s wearing a bib and a bowl of soup is in front of him. It’s button soup, he tells me. He made it in school (Pre-K) after being read the book of the same name, in which “Daisy tricks her stingy Uncle Scrooge into making enough soup for the whole town–using just one button.”
“Daddy, have some button soup. It’s on your diet!” Duncan says as I come into the room.
He’s got that big, gaping smile of his, excited as hell because in the magic of the classroom, he discovered something his Daddy could eat. He knows his father needs encouragement, and he’s eager to deliver.
When you really become serious about kicking addictions, God puts the right people in front of you to make the cold turkey period a little more bearable. I truly believe that.
It’s the Grace that helps you move those one, two or three steps at a time.
A fellow OCD chronicler sent me two articles suggesting a link between OCD and Crohn’s Disease. I have both and several people have asked if I see connections between the two. This is my attempt at an answer.
During the childhood Crohn’s flare ups, a wire was inserted through my neck and chest to send nutrients to my stomach. That way, the lower digestive zone could have time to rest and heal. Not being allowed food or drink when all the other kids on my floor were getting their breakfast, lunch and dinner fucked with my head and led to binge eating as the addiction I would battle most. Getting junk to binge on was a major obsession, one of the loudest OCD triggers of all.
Whenever I would feel sorry for myself, I pictured an enemy holding a voodoo doll of me, stabbing it in the gut repeatedly with a needle. Was the Crohn’s holding the doll, making it do the same motions over and over again?
One article suggests something like that. It’s in Psychosomatics, The Journal of Consultation and Liaison Psychiatry under the title “Abrupt-Onset Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) in a Child With Crohn’s Disease.”It starts with a letter to the editor, which says in part:
Johnny, a 9-year-old boy with Crohn’s Disease, experienced the abrupt onset of intrusive, ego-dystonic,sexualized obsessions (fears that he would lift up the shirtsof random women to feel their breasts) which resulted in long nightly confessions to his mother. He was also overly scrupulous and worried that “the mistakes I’ve made” would result in harm to his family and friends.
The authors respond with this:
Patients with inflammatory bowel disease are frequently describedas obsessive, rigid, and compulsive. Burke et al. found that OC symptoms in childhood IBD did not differ significantly fromthose found in children with cystic fibrosis, suggesting thatsymptoms were related to the demands of chronic medical illness,rather than IBD itself. The pathogenesis of IBD is not fully understood; it may be related to an abnormal mucosal immune system or specific defects in cellular and humoral immunity.
The other article is in The Scientist under the title “Equations that Spell Disaster.” It starts with a portrait of Hurricane Katrina. The storm’s landfall and the aftermath was the perfect calamity because it hit an area loaded with vulnerabilities: weak infrastructure, poor lines of communication, and a dysfunctional emergency rescue system.
“These conditions coalesced to produce one of the worst human catastrophes in recent US history,” the article said. “In a similar way, complex diseases result from a series of events that may not amount to much when considered one by one, but together, coalesce into a perfect storm that spells disaster for a particular organ or system.”
Is that how it went down for me? Perhaps.
But for me, the scientific evidence is beside the point. The things that have happened to me can’t be erased, but it’s more important at this stage of my life to walk away from the wreckage a better man with a better appreciation for the life I have, warts and all. All that matters is the present and the future. The past is something you can’t change, so me obsessing about how I got the way I am is pointless.
There used to be a place for that. When I first started going to a therapist on the long path to an OCD diagnosis, I spent all my time picking through the wreckage of where I came from in search of answers. It was important to do so. But once I found myself, there was no longer much reason to stick around.
So why am I bringing it up here? Because the articles are useful to those just beginning to deal with one of these diseases.
The science can’t change my past, nor should it.
But it can lead to better treatments for people going forward.
The changes have been especially challenging for Erin. I’ll let her explain it from her perspective in a future guest post, but I can tell you this much: It’s a confusing, frustrating thing when your spouse acts one way for a bunch of years and then, suddenly or not so suddenly, ceases to be the person you married.
I’d like to think I’m still the guy she married in the most fundamental ways. My heart and most of my passions haven’t really changed. But as the priest who married us said: “You marry the person you think you know, then spend the rest of your life getting to know each other.”
As far as that goes, I’ve been a moving target, tough to nail down.
I was terrified of any activities that required leaving the house outside of work hours. Now I’ve filled my time to the brim with involvement in one group or another.
I used to eat everything I could get my hands on. Now my diet is pretty buttoned down.
Sounds like a frustrating ball of slime and nails, doesn’t it?
Well, it is. But I’ve put a lot of work into finding the middle speed. Just because I CAN do all the things that used to scare me doesn’t mean I should. I’ve also tried hard to be better at conversation. On that I remain inconsistent to the point of madness.
But despite all that, we love each other. When love is real and you recognize that it takes constant care and feeding to keep growing, you do whatever it takes to stay on top of it. You fail once in awhile anyway, but you get up and try again.
And by the Grace of God, the love endures.
I say all this because I know someone whose husband is working on all the issues I’ve had to work on. She’s probably wondering how the hell she’s going to get through this.
Like I said, that’s a story Erin will have to tell. I only know how I feel and what I’m willing to do.
I also know there can be a lot of happiness between those periods of frustration.
So don’t worry about it too much. The biggest obstacle is the fear of change. Once you put that behind you, anything and everything is possible.
That too can be bad. But it can also be very, very good.
The title of this post is a popular saying among those who use the 12 Steps to bring their addictive behavior to heel. It’s a good line to keep in mind when you’re ready to lose patience with yourself and slip into self-loathing.
Mood music:
http://youtu.be/jYpydtdlWxA
There’s a lot about myself that still has to change. I still get angry too easily. I still get self absorbed. I still give in to OCD thinking and actions, even when I know better. I still suck at saving money. Little problems still turn into big crises in my head.
But I don’t see a reason to beat myself over it, because I used to be much, much worse.
A temper today involves angry thoughts and self pity. As a young punk a temper meant punching dents into walls (I lacked the muscles to make a hole), flipping off people on the highway for cutting me off or, worse, getting touchy when I cut them off. It also meant unleashing a torrent of verbal vitriol.
Getting self absorbed back then meant spending what I wanted, eating what I wanted and making the decisions I wanted with no regard for anyone else. I still fall into that behavior, but I catch it more quickly than before and correct myself as much as possible. Doing service has been good for me because it gives me fewer opportunities to stray. Being a husband and father has helped, too.
Giving into OCD today means I may go on a cleaning spree at the moment I need to be doing other things. It means I may check and re-check my laptop bag to make sure the machine is inside, dooming myself to a longer, more traffic-laden commute in the process. It means I’ll occasionally run short on patience. But back then, it meant being blinded to everything around me by obsessive worrying about things that in hindsight were a lot of nothing. Which, in turn, led to the selfish behavior.
I bring this stuff up because everyone has a cross or six to carry on a daily basis, and it’s easy to give in to the worst kind of thinking and write yourself off as a failure.
In times like this, it’s also helpful to remember what Clarence the angel scribbled in the book he gave George Bailey at the end of “It’s a Wonderful Life” — “No man is a failure who has friends.” I used to think I had no friends. Then I realized the problem was that I was ignoring my friends in favor of isolation.
We all have something to offer and to live for. We’re all screw-ups — nothing like the people God wants us to be.
But if we’re just a little better than we once were, that’s huge.
I’m going to keep working on being who God wants me to be. It’s an almost impossible task, because how do you ever really know what God wants you to be (until you’re dead and he tells you directly, anyway)?
He always leaves clues, though. So instead of feeling sorry for ourselves we can simply do the best with the clues we’ve got.
Addicts often become the way they are because they suffer from severe social anxiety. To carry on in a large group setting is as painful as having a leg sawed off while wide awake.
I know the feeling very well.
Item: It’s December 2001 and I’m at the home of the big boss for the annual Christmas party. I skipped out on this celebration a year earlier because talking to co-workers about anything other than the work at hand terrified me. I came up with a good excuse, though I can’t remember what it was. I couldn’t get out of two in a row, so off I went with Erin to the party. For the first hour I stood there like a stone, not knowing what the hell to say to these people, many of whom I was butting heads with at the office.
I’m offered a glass of wine. I suck it down in two gulps and start to loosen up. So I have another. And another. And another. Conversation becomes easier, so I have another.
I walk away realizing that enough alcohol will numb that itchy, edgy feeling I get around people. So getting drunk becomes standard operating procedure.
After awhile, the social settings are no longer enough. I need to numb myself every moment of every weekend, then every night after work. When I’m back on the newsroom night desk I stay up late on Sunday nights watching TV. Wine is a necessity, followed by a nice food binge.
Item: I leave that job and go to a company full of young, just-out-of college party hounds. The company likes to have long offsites where the free booze flows like tap water. Being an addict, I make sure to get my fill, followed by my fill of food. There’s nothing quite like a food binge when you’re drunk. For someone like me, it’s heaven for the first hour, followed by shame and terror over my utter loss of control. I gain up to 50 pounds in this job as I binge my way through the social discomfort I feel in a setting like that.
Item: It’s 2009 and I’m several months into my abstinence from binge eating. I’ve dropped 65 pounds on the spot and my head is clearer, but the defect in my head is still there, so I go looking for other things: Wine — lots of it. It becomes a necessity every night with dinner. I get itchy when the supply is cut off. By Christmas I realize wine is no longer compatible with a clean life — the kind I have to live, anyway. So I take my last sip on New Year’s Eve and put it down.
Two things are worth noting here:
1. I was never a fall-down drunk. There was always a line I refused to cross, to that zone where you become stupid and incoherent. But I needed to have some. Not having some led to that feeling like your skin is either two sizes too loose or too tight. The OCD behavior worsens, and I’m twitching, pacing and bouncing off walls and furniture until I have some. THAT is addiction. You don’t have to be smashed and stoned 24 hours a day to qualify. All you need is that unquenchable thirst; the kind that drives you mad until it’s fed.
2. My need to fill the hole in my soul with food and drink has almost always been connected to social anxiety. It’s not just the big work party settings. It’s the small family settings, where I feel the pressure to say something useful every two minutes. I stopped drinking and binge eating, but other crutches have emerged to take their place. I stare at my Android phone or flip through a book. I break off and take walks to be alone for a few minutes. I don’t think it’s awful behavior. It’s certainly better than what I used to do. But it goes to show that you never heal 100 percent.
I’m much better with people settings than I used to be. One reason is that in recovery I’ve come to enjoy people more. I even enjoy watching a little dysfunction.
I can speak in front of a room full of people and often do for work. That’s better than when I would be terrified to do so. I can certainly express myself in writing in ways I could never have done a few years ago. But when I’m at a family gathering or with friends I haven’t seen in awhile, the social anxiety still sets in.
I know a lot of people with social anxiety. Some think they are freaks. Others think they’re either too intellectually inferior or superior to those they are with. Others don’t beat themselves over it. It simply is what it is.
The key is wanting to get better, then doing whatever it takes to get there.
I’m better, but I still have a lot of work to do.
It’s like they say in the halls of AA and OA: I’m not yet the person God wants me to be, but I’m not the person I was, either.
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.
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.
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.
If a recent story in The New York Times is to be believed, psychiatrists are ditching talk therapy in favor of quick-to-the-draw prescription solutions because insurance companies won’t pay them enough for the broader treatment.
Like many of the nation’s 48,000psychiatrists, Dr. Levin, in large part because of changes in how much insurance will pay, no longer provides talk therapy, the form of psychiatry popularized by Sigmund Freud that dominated the profession for decades. Instead, he prescribes medication, usually after a brief consultation with each patient. So Dr. Levin sent the man away with a referral to a less costly therapist and a personal crisis unexplored and unresolved.
Medicine is rapidly changing in the United States from a cottage industry to one dominated by large hospital groups and corporations, but the new efficiencies can be accompanied by a telling loss of intimacy between doctors and patients. And no specialty has suffered this loss more profoundly than psychiatry.
Trained as a traditional psychiatrist at Michael Reese Hospital, a sprawling Chicago medical center that has since closed, Dr. Levin, 68, first established a private practice in 1972, when talk therapy was in its heyday.
Then, like many psychiatrists, he treated 50 to 60 patients in once- or twice-weekly talk-therapy sessions of 45 minutes each. Now, like many of his peers, he treats 1,200 people in mostly 15-minute visits for prescription adjustments that are sometimes months apart. Then, he knew his patients’ inner lives better than he knew his wife’s; now, he often cannot remember their names. Then, his goal was to help his patients become happy and fulfilled; now, it is just to keep them functional.
Dr. Levin has found the transition difficult. He now resists helping patients to manage their lives better. “I had to train myself not to get too interested in their problems,” he said, “and not to get sidetracked trying to be a semi-therapist.”
This is tragic on so many levels.
I’ve said it before: Medication (Prozac) has been a critical part of my OCD management. It put my defective brain chemistry into balance and greatly reduced the moments where my brain would pulsate out of control with worry and obsessions until it incapacitated me.
But had I gone on the drug without doing the brutally hard therapy first, I would not be doing anywhere near as well as I am today. I can promise you that.
Mental health is like physical health. There is no magic bullet — or magic pill — fix. You need a combination of diet, rest and exercise to maintain health as well as any medicine that you may need.
Talk therapy helps you build your coping tools from scratch. They become your lifeline to sanity, especially if the drugs stop working, which can happen in a variety of circumstances.
This is just one more example of the health insurance industry putting the bottom line before wellness. I don’t want to beat on the insurance providers just for the hell of it. The industry does face the genuine problem where treatments are becoming more expensive, especially in a population where many refuse to take care of themselves.
Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way…
There are things one can do to cut costs. But when you cut into the muscle of the treatment — in this case talk therapy — the treatment will bleed to the point of near-death.
Now I know what they’re thinking: People can go to a therapist for talking and the other guy for medication, but now we have another problem. Not everyone can afford both.
In my case, I go to a therapist to talk things out, and a nurse on his staff is authorized and in charge of writing my prescription.
Psychiatry and therapy are not exactly the same beast.
But a good psychiatrist includes the talking part and uses it to maximum effect.
Force them to stop doing that and many people will fall through the cracks.
For mental defects like me, a lot of what goes wrong is driven by fear. One thing I’ve learned in a 12-Step program for addiction is that the root of many fears is resentment.
Mood music:
You don’t have to be an addict to have resentments, of course. Most typical families, work environments and fellowships come packed with people you’re inevitably going to clash with. The more you disagree with someone, the more you’ll resent them.
Then, whenever you face situations where the one or more people you resent are present, you’ll be filled with fear: Fear about potential arguments, fear over whether you’ll look “normal” enough to avoid their ridicule, fear over how you’ll perform in public.
I have plenty of my own examples.
–Fear of arguments when dealing with my mother got so bad I had to put the relationship on ice for the sake of my sanity.
–Fear of getting jumped and kicked around kept me from continuing my walks along Revere Beach in my early 20s, after the October 1991 incident.
–Though I’ve gotten very close to my stepmom in recent years, we used to clash all the time, which gave me a fear of any family event that required me to be in her presence.
Those fears filled me with all kinds of resentment toward those people and situations. In response, I plunged into addictive behavior with ultra-reckless abandon.
Fear and resentment are what keeps the hole in your soul from closing up. Until you deal with it at the roots, you will never truly be free or sane. That’s why as part of working the 12 steps, we’re supposed to write down all our resentments and work to make amends whenever and wherever possible.
Chapter 5 of the AA big book covers this extensively. Here’s an excerpt, along with an illustration about resentments:
—————-
Resentment is the “number one” offender. It destroys more alcoholics than anything else. From it stem all forms of spiritual disease, for we have been not only mentally and physically ill, we have been spiritually sick. When the spiritual malady is overcome, we straighten out mentally and physically. In dealing with resentments, we set them on paper. We listed people, institutions or principle with who we were angry. We asked ourselves why we were angry. In most cases it was found that our self- esteem, our pocketbooks, our ambitions, our personal relationships, (including sex) were hurt or threatened. So we were sore. We were “burned up.” On our grudge list we set opposite each name our injuries. Was it our self-esteem, our security, our ambi tions, our personal, or sex relations, which had been interfered with? We were usually as definite as this example:
I’m resentful at:
The Cause
Affects my:
Mr. Brown
His attention to my wife.Told my wife of my mistress.Brown may get my job at the office.
Sex relations
Self-esteem (fear)
Sex-relations
Self-esteem (fear)
Security
Self-Esteem (fear)
Mrs Jones
She’s a nut – she snubbed me.
She committed her husband for drinking.
He’s my friend.
She’s a gossip.
Personal relationship.
Self-esteem (fear)
My employer
Unreasonable – Unjust – Overbearing –
Threatens to fire me for drinking and padding my expense account.
Self-esteem (fear)
Security.
My wife
Misunderstands and nags.
Likes Brown.
Wants house put in her name.
Pride – personal sex relations – Security (fear)
We went back through our lives. Nothing counted but thoroughness and honesty. When we were finished we considered it carefully. The first thing apparent was that this world and its people were often quite wrong. To conclude that others were wrong w as as far as most of us ever got. The usual outcome was that people continued to wrong us and we stayed sore. Sometimes it was remorse and then we were sore at ourselves. But the more we fought and tried to have our own way, the worse matters got. As i n war, the victor only seemed to win. Our moments of triumph were short-lived.
It is plain that a life which includes deep resentment leads only to futility and unhappiness. To the precise extent that we permit these, do we squander the hours that might have been worth while. But with the alcoholic, whose hope is the maintenanc e and growth of a spiritual experience, this business of resentment is infinitely grave. We found that it is fatal. For when harboring such feeling we shut ourselves off from the sunlight of the Spirit. The insanity of alcohol returns and we drink again. And with us, to drink is to die.
If we were to live, we had to be free of anger. The grouch and the brainstorm were not for us. They may be the dubious luxury of normal men, but for alcoholics these things are poison.
We turned back to the list, for it held the key to the future. We were prepared to look for it from an entirely different angle. We began to see that the world and its people really dominated us. In that state, the wrong-doing of others, fancied or real, had power to actually kill. How could we escape? We saw that these resentments must be mastered, but how? We could not wish them away any more than alcohol.
This was our course: We realized that the people who wronged us were perhaps spiritually sick. Though we did not like their symptoms and the way these disturbed us, they, like ourselves, were sick too. We asked God to help us show them the same tole rance, pity, and patience that we would cheerfully grant a sick friend. When a person offended we said to ourselves, “This is a sick man. How can I be helpful to him? God save me from being angry. Thy will be done.”
We avoid retaliation or argument. We wouldn’t treat sick people that way. If we do, we destroy our chance of being helpful. We cannot be helpful to all people, but at least God will show us how to take a kindly and tolerant view of each and every one.
Referring to our list again. Putting out of our minds the wrongs others had done, we resolutely looked for our own mistakes. Where had we been selfish, dishonest, self-seeking and frightened? Though a situation had not been entirely our fault, we tr ied to disregard the other person involved entirely. Where were we to blame? The inventory was ours, not the other man’s. When we saw our faults we listed them. We placed them before us in black and white. We admitted our wrongs honestly and were willing to set these matters straight.
———————
I’ve done a lot of work to overcome my resentments and, at the very least, keeping those resentments from destroying me.
I’ve been able to path up a lot of relationships with old friends I had lost touch with after one petty falling out or another. I’ve worked at being a better arguer with my wife, though she’ll tell you — and I know — that i still have a lot of work to do. And I’ve done specific things to overcome fear: Getting on planes, walking alone in areas I had feared.
Let me take you back about 13 years, when two guys with clinical OCD worked together in the same office. I was one of ’em. The other was an old friend named Steve Repsys.
Mood music:
Neither of us knew at the time that we had OCD. It would be many years before we were diagnosed. In the meantime, we worked together for a small weekly newspaper in an office in Chelmsford, Mass. I was the boss and I acted like it.
I was always stressed about just getting the paper done on deadline. Quality didn’t really matter to me. OCD will do that to you: Getting the task done always takes priority over doing it right. Steve was the whipping boy, the sole reporter. I pushed him hard, nearly to the breaking point. He never let me down. But along the way, he would work so hard that his mind would go into loops. One loop involved a worry about finding an apartment. Another was about whether he would get a promotion. All normal things to worry about, except that he was clinically unable to shut up about it.
During the small windows of downtime, we would convene in my apartment a few steps away from the office and play Star Wars Trivial Pursuit. Star Wars was very important to us back then.
We both got married and had kids. And in recent years, from different states, we’ve come to grips with our mental disease.
Steve and I have been going back and forth sharing our struggles of late, and he recently embarked on a hard-core program to understand his quirks and develop the necessary coping tools. And he was kind enough to write down his experiences to share with you.
So allow me to step back and let Steve take over for the rest of this post:
If you broke your leg, wouldn’t you want to get it treated? Chances are you would get help immediately. Why is it that when it comes to mental illness we let ourselves suffer?
Maybe it’s because in many cases a mental illness isn’t as “obvious” as a broken leg. Maybe it’s embarrassment to admit there might be something not quite right about ourselves. Maybe it’s because the term mental illness conjures up someone in a straightjacket. Whatever the case, mental illness is nothing to fool around with.
I should know. I suffer from OCD.
Most of my life I’ve considered dwelling on things and keeping myself up at night worrying about the future as part of my being. However, after nearly four decades on this earth, I realize I don’t have to live like that anymore. How do I know this? Thanks to strong persuasion from my wife Kara, I recently enrolled in a partial hospitalization program (PHP) to treat mental illness.
All along, the warning signs were there for my OCD. The trouble breathing, difficulty keeping focused, and even chest pains should have alerted me that something was not quite right. When a perceived or a real crisis occurred, I would go into “shut down” mode. Most often I would deal with my problems by trying to sleep hoping they would magically disappear when I woke up.
My obsessive worrying about my family’s finances was gradually driving a wedge between me and my wife. Instead of coming home from work wanting to be a husband to Kara and a dad to my two little girls, I would dwell on the negative. Looking back, I can see why my wife wanted me to get help. At the time, it was hard to see and I thought worrying was something I was supposed to do. I even saw worrying as a badge of honor. The more I worried, the more I thought it proved how much I loved my family.
When my wife first told me about PHP, I thought I didn’t need any help. However, the more I thought about and looked at myself honestly, I realized that maybe I did need help. Worrying was truly running my life.
To no great surprise, an evaluation confirmed that I had OCD. I started PHP immediately. PHP met 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. five days a week for three weeks and covered a wide range of topics including medication, support systems, spirituality, music therapy, and cognitive distortions in a small-group setting.
One of the most important realizations about myself came on my third day at PHP. Looking at the sheet for the day, I remember seeing there was a discussion entitled “Victim/Survivor.” I wasn’t looking forward to it, thinking that it dealt with someone who was sexually or physically abused. The discussion did pertain to victims and survivors, but not in the way I thought.
To my surprise, I felt like this talk was made especially for me. We talked about how survivors are proactive and victims are reactive. Survivors display an “I-can-handle this” mentality while victims cop an “it’s-not-fair-and-this-isn’t-shouldn’t be- happening-to me” attitude. I realized that almost all my life I walked around thinking of myself as a victim. “It’s not fair that we pay more in day care than our mortgage,” and “I can’t handle things” were just some of my more constantly consuming thoughts.
This was probably one of the biggest “a-ha” moments in my life. It dawned on me like a ton of bricks that my way of thinking was not productive for me or my family. I don’t know why it took at that particularly moment to come to the conclusion that instead of being an ostrich that puts his head in the sand, I needed to be a problem solver. I’m just glad it did.
Even while I was at PHP my thinking was put to the test. I noticed that I began thinking more in “survivor” terms. During my stint at PHP, my cell phone was going to be shut off for nonpayment. Instead of getting upset about it and thinking how “unfair” it was, I got into problem solver mode. I called up the cell phone company and told them I got paid in a few days and I would be happy to settle the bill when my check went into the bank. Lo and behold, my carrier agreed and the problem was solved.
While that may seem like a small thing, it’s a big deal to me. Prior to PHP, I would have avoided dealing with the situation or even would have asked my wife to take care of it for me. I can’t guarantee that I won’t fall apart in the future if something doesn’t go as planned, but at least I have new found coping skills at my disposal.
The three-week program greatly helped me in other ways as well. During my time at PHP I learned how important goals are (in fact we started the day off by making daily goals) and that I benefit when I have structure in my life.
In addition, I realize that it’s important to know what triggers my OCD. Now that I know what sets me off (my finances), I can pull out some of the tricks I learned at PHP to extinguish my OCD thinking.
After attending PHP, I realize that I’m not miraculously “cured” from my OCD thinking. I realize that OCD will always be with me, but I don’t need to be a slave to it. I now have a toolbox that’s filled with many instruments to keep my OCD at bay.
PHP showed me that life is always going to be filled with obstacles and problems but I hold the keys to controlling my life.
I was an anxious, jumpy, panicky little bastard when I was younger. Fear made me do the damnedest things. My sister Stacey loves to repeat the story of one of my more embarrassing moments. It used to piss me off. Now I can sit back and laugh with everyone else.
So fuck it. Let’s review the morning a hurricane was coming and I went bat-shit crazy.
Mood music:
[spotify:track:6KfzBFMXEOs7LgBcG4ZxyT]
First, some history. I’ve explained this before, so no need to stick around if you’ve heard it:
Before I got my OCD under control, I was always full of fear and anxiety. It robbed me of a life that could have been better lived. I hid indoors a lot. I favored the fantasy land of TV over the real, scary world. And when the weather got hairy, I over-reacted in ways that are more amusing in hindsight.
I blame the Blizzard of 1978 for that. When you watch the Atlantic Ocean rip apart a beach wall like it’s melted ice cream and head straight for your house, bad things go through your mind when you’re 8 years old. In later years, when comparisons of that blizzard go hand in hand with every new storm warning, the fear flames over everything else in life until your sanity is reduced to a pile of ashes.
So there we were, in August 1991. The news was already full of reports about a military coup in Russia, which was scary because that meant the overthrow of Mikhail Gorbachev. He would be back in power before the week was out, but take the early hours of that crisis and mix it with reports that a hurricane called Bob is coming straight at us, and here’s what you get:
Me running around the house with duct tape, slathering reams of it on every window I could find.
I ran into Stacey’s basement bedroom and proceeded to tape her window. One of her friends was sleeping over, and got to see me in all my crazy glory.
“Get up, a hurricane is coming!” I bellowed. Stacey and her friend remained in the bed, not a care in the world.
“Come on, you idiots!” I yelled. “This aint no fucking Hurricane Gloria.”
Hurricane Gloria was a storm that hit Massachusetts in 1985. It was supposed to be a devastating event, but it passed over us with more of a whimper than a bang. Hurricane Bob was going to be much worse, the weather people were telling us.
They started comparing the expected storm surge with that of the Blizzard of 1978. Panic.
That storm turned out to be almost as anti-climactic as Gloria.
That Halloween, a much more devastating storm hit, and flooded out the neighborhood almost as badly as in 1978. Ours was one of the only houses not to get flooded.
