I've been experimenting on myself. For some time now. I don't talk about it often and I may have only fully accepted it recently but I have OCD. Not OCPD where I like things neat and how I like them and I'm cool with my level of attention to detail. I have life changing, can't control it, inhibiting my life with intrusive thoughts and time consuming behaviors OCD.
I recently discovered my panic attacks have occurred with enough frequency and strength to be considered a panic disorder. When I read the part about the anxiety and shame knowing that the behaviors or thoughts are standing in your way of a normal life it feels a lot like floating above oneself. Like I must be reading about a clinical study of a patient and not what my life feels like. I spend every moment I'm not trapped in irrational terror really laughing it up and enjoying my time.
It is standing on the other side of sound proof glass.
It is having the world tell you, don't worry, nothing is wrong at all, only to not have them realize that compounds the problem. People with OCD are perfectly aware that something is wrong with us because otherwise we appear in reality perfectly safe. Yes it has occurred to us to stop doing that to ourselves. Yes we may realize where the behaviors or thoughts were developed. But that doesn't make the patterns of chemical reactions in your brain that cause floods of cortisol and adrenaline pumping through your veins any more controllable or feel any less real.
I know what the treatments and available options modern science has for my disorder. I've taken multiple courses on it in high school and college knowing from age 12 that my family is "crazy". Being leery my entire life wondering if I'd suddenly wake up on the full moon a werewolf never realizing I Already had a disorder. The obsessive thoughts wondering about death and what terrible terminal illness I was unknowningly walking around with, or whatever other intrusive thoughts I was having Was my disease. I thought for almost all of my life that other people's minds are as busy and full and inquisitive as my own. I've learned in my old age to see other people's perspective. Which is probably thinking about themselves, and wondering about their own anxieties. But maybe without as much intensity.
I've studied abnormal and child psychology. I know that I would be immediately put on an SSRI drug. And I'd be switched from one to another (experimentation) until I found one with the least awful side effects. That is if I don't kill myself because there is a 1 in 4 chance you'll have a bad reaction to an SSRI and really badly want to commit suicide. I've had that happen. I won't treat myself like a lab animal again. Suicidal thoughts are especially dangerous for people suffering from obsessive thoughts. Once a wound has been suffered it festers and consumes you until you can think of nothing else.
I've had obsessive thoughts about people, money, being a mother, school, work, social interactions. They are also referred to as intrusive thoughts. In elementary school and high school I'd lay awake at night for hours or all night long agonizing about every syllable of every word of every sentence that came out of my mouth that day. All the times I felt I should have held back. All the times I felt I spoke out of turn, or hurt someone's feelings. Or annoyed someone by just being who I am, where I am, with them around.
I know where the seeds were planted that grew into the trees of my mind. My mom, my grandmother's, the foundation, my trunks. My immigrant heritage my roots. But the branches are all the people who I've ever met. The limbs that need to be pruned are memories of who told me in my life that I talk too much. I am too loud or I have too much to say. All these vines and weeds in my beautiful garden.
I am hyper sensitive and attuned to other people's emotions when I talk to them in person. I watch their eyes. And their shoulders and their body language and if they show any indication they want a turn to speak I shut up. People who are my very good friends will cut me off, some people don't know how so they are cruel and funny and say shut up. But the best way to shut me up is to try and speak. And to say something confidently. Whether a story about your life, an idea you have about a theory, or your opinion about anything. Most likely I want to know. I find people are more comfortable sharing with me when I openly share with them first. As a child and into adolescence I was taught my ability to open up, trust, and connect with others was a weakness. Something to be ashamed of. It is my greater strength. It is my gift. But it does drain me.
I was raised to perform. Literally I had formal singing and dancing and instrument lessons. But in another way from age 4 I was raised in a business. I was raised to talk to adults. To entertain people without annoying them or offending them. I was raised to dress and act appropriately in any environment wearing the proper amount of make up.
It was entirely exhausting to be me. I had my few years of High School where I refused to appease and conform with my dress and hair. Blue/black hair. Black lipstick. Black clothes. Anything to make strangers or assholes in high school want to think twice about touching me uninvited. My OCD doesnt keeo me from toucing people all together. But im selective with who I hug. When you become a pretty boob ladden teenage girl, grown men and everyone in general has no qualms about touching your body like they own it or commenting it however they see fit.
But in the salon and many other places like Catholics school I still spoke accordingly. Educated, not too loud, not about controversial things, like a good young lady should. All the while cultivating another personality with my friends who were only my own where we called everyone who was mean a cunt and declared the world was as fucked up as we were. Eventually became one kid in a graduating class of 218 who was on the side of women and choices in the abortion debate and the only 15 year old screaming that we were going to war in Iraq on lies. Everyone loved George W. "He's the kind of guy I'd like to sit down and have a beer with."
I love raw people. That's probably why I thought I could be a psychiatrist. And why I went to school for it Just long enough to know I wouldn't spend my life giving people experimental drugs that affect parts of the human mind's chemicals and energy that we don't fully understand yet. I love people torn open who don't have the choice or privilege of keeping up walls. Everyone has things they are ashamed of. Often when people criticise me for my awkwardness or my talkativeness I remind myself that I am not awkward, I am not overly talkative in my opinion, and that is their personal insecurity spilling forth onto me. The more secure and accepting I am of myself, the less I have the desire to hurt other people with my words and the more I try to think about what I say so I don't hurt anyone by accident with an unresearched opinion or a matter I don't know is personal to them because people keep their most guarded secrets sometimes only to themselves.
Those of us who are surviving life well know that the key is in telling other people your story. The more people you can trust with your truth, the more your ability to love and forge new connections grows.
In all of my research into mental health I've discovered that modern sciences answer for me is that I will develope chronic depression from not being able to control my obsessive dermatillamania. That one will constantly fuel the other until I die from that or something else unrelated. But that answer means it will always inhibited and dampen the joy in my life and I don't accept that answer.
Many times in the past, science and the modern consensus of the time has gotten reality very wrong. Mental health, specifically OCD and depression I've personally experienced are entirely mishandled. In my second hand experience I've seen other anxiety and psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia completely misrepresented and mistreated.
Much of what we know about the human mind and how it developes and works is from research done on people who lived in cages. I think all of the experiments we take for granted should be thrown out and all further studies should be done without allowing for testing on humans. Studying life is one thing. Experimenting on people or animals in cruel ways should be against the ethics of modern science.
We should not ever start from the assumption that other humans are animals we need to study and fix. Humans are fellow beings of energy and light who need knowledge and guidance. You can not force change onto people, you can not "fix" them. Teach them history. Let them see all we know of technology and science and the universe. They don't need fixing. We are designed to heal ourselves with help from one another. And that's not to say that we don't all get a few chips and cracks around the edges before we leave this life. Relationships of love are the glue that binds us together. The epoxy that smooths our edges. The spackle on the walls we've built to protect ourselves.
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