It's computer dummy heaven today. I just figured out how to fix my laptop all by myself. It only required batteries but normally I would not have been able to even find where the batteries go. My new OCD mindfulness gave me a bonus. I am a 72 year old geezer but giddy as if I had just stolen my first high school kiss.
A fortunate life has been my blessing. But, as my mother used to say, "your worst enemy cannot do to you what you can do to yourself."
What a merciless self-assaulter I have been. We are talking mentally, The pain from a broken brain is ferocious.
I remember trying to lay my dead tired eight-year-old body in bed and go to sleep. But I couldn't. The pillow would not line up to my satisfaction with a thin line on the headboard. So, I would keep popping up out of bed like a jumping jack for hours on end trying to set the pillow exactly the way I wanted it. I would finally just flop into the bed, drenched in sweat, and then pass out because my little body was so exhausted.
The obsessions became worse as I got older. Physical confrontation became the centerpiece of my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. The word FEAR is central to my defective brain. I believe it is to everyone with OCD.
Facing danger, real or imagined, made physical confrontation my curse. I would be mentally obsessed to go back after someone who I decided had bullied me with words or deeds. It could have been a schoolmate from high school who I remember slapped me around thirty years before, or a person who insulted a lady at the golf course this morning who I thought and felt I should have confronted.
I could mentally grab onto any event and conclude that I had to be an avenging angel. All that had to happen was a thought, a mere thought, popping into my head. Bingo. The thought would not go away. Then off I would go to OCD hell.
My stomach would start rolling constantly. Only finding the misguided courage to act by confronting the bully would abate the fear. My delusional missions lasted from days to decades and sometimes in multiple forms. Than the fear would come back about the same thing or something else and often with even more inappropriate acts. I do not know how I led a somewhat normal life.
Symbolically, my efforts at trying to line up that pillow defined my life. Endlessly confronting and chasing people who I felt had picked on or bullied me. I could be tormented for any reason such as someone playing their music too loudly, or to allowing their dogs to bark, or feel that someone insulted me, or made fun of me, or criticizing me, or making what I thought to be an inappropriate remark to my girlfriends, or thoughlessly slammed doors, and countless other events that would provoke the same insanity in me that trying to adjust that pillow triggered.
All it took was for me to think that I was the victim. Then came the conclusion I had to even the score, to take vengeance.
Then the fear took hold. The fear of living for a confrontation I did not want but thought I had to have. Being consumed. Like a soldier anticipating battle. But an irrational battle for all the wrong reasons.
I fearfully and insanely provoked countless confrontations because of the misguided belief that I would get permanent relief after I resolved some issue. I would eventually end up worse off then I was before I started trying to solve the thing that triggered me.
I ended up in court, in front of judges, in jail, and in a mental hospital because of the degrees to which I would go to seek relief.
I went to so many shrinks, took so many pills, read so many books, and even today, I still can suffer as I write about these episodes of OCD sixty-five years later. It has no end. It continues to plague me.
I blessedly and gratefully have found pathways to relief through exercising, writing and journaling, meditating, deep breathing exercises, and just knowing that the OCD urge is just a thinking disorder and can and must be accepted and coped with. That sounds easy but it's not. It takes constant and consistent mind-bending work to come to terms with it. There is hope.
I am not violent or psychotic. I am a lifelong scared little boy who was told to go outside to face the bullies in the old neighborhood. I cried instead. My family's definition of courage was about fists and not words. It took a lifetime for me to recognize my family was fucked up, but with good intentions. They did not know macho was not a one size fits all hat.
After many years of good fortune, except for the few times getting punched and hurt by a neighbor who was slapping around his girlfriend and beat me up for interfering, I never paid a big physical price.
Mentally, it is another story.
I have been arrested several times for minor non-violent crimes. I have been in the mental ward. Everything was connected to OCD.
Endless hours, days, months, years of OCD torture have left me damaged mentally but okay enough to say I am much better after a lot of hard work.
I am now spending time learning how to let stuff go and accept my condition. I never really cared about standing up for myself except for a few times in my life where it was legitimate. It's selfishly only been about relieving the fear that I felt with no alternatives. That is erroneous and wrong.
Writing is an alternative for me. Playing ball, reading, volunteering, running, and almost any mental and physical activity are tools that work well in battling OCD.
Going to OCD group meetings and becoming friendly with and supportive of others who are afflicted, is terrifically helpful and a big step in recovering.
The irrational but overwhelming fear of the "what ifs" of not doing what you falsely believe you must do literally eats you up. However, once you are able to realize that the anxiety of OCD urges can be endured with training, life gets immeasurably better.
Saying no to debilitating OCD urges is the only way to get healthier. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is permanent, but can be effectively dealt with as with addictions like gambling or drinking and many others. It takes time and treatment.
12 step programs are effective.
You can do it.
Why becomes an obvious question to anyone reading this who does not have OCD.
Answer....
Normal brains do not involuntarily attach to abnormal thinking. OCD brains do. They are different chemically and they do not process thoughts correctly.
OCD is always about fear, fear, fear, whether you are compulsively checking and rechecking the stove, door, the dogs water, washing your hands, obsessing about harming a child, facing a bully or some other thought.
But, there are ways to safely treat OCD.
My hope is that this helps some fellow sufferers get some value from my self-knowledge, or even better, some relief.
I have just started to write again about OCD.
My Purpose is to help others with what this is about for me. There has to be more to life than my girlfriend, my dog, pickle ball, golf, eating and tormenting myself with new and age old major OCD issues.
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is all about fear no matter where you start.
Fear can be conquered properly.
Go online and look at resources and blogs on OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder.) There is so much there for every sufferer.
Read about it. Find relief. It is there.
Here are some resources to use. I just want to help. I do not get paid in any way by anyone I mention. I Do not know them. I want to help.
I just Google, do my research, just as you should do.
Here are a few resources around the country that came up:
FHEHealth Restore 888-986-1382
Park Avenue Psychotherapy Associates 973-815-0777
Go To YouTube and punch up OCD
Call 720-605-1316
Call 305-856-9442
Call 754-227-6634
Online Therapy-312-955-1212
Good Luck
David S.
I am an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder sufferer associated with no one.
