Sharing My OCD Experience

[thistooshallpass1996]

Deep breath.

So, if you're a current OCD sufferer who was in the dark like I was then this is for you, consider it an enlightenment. But it's also for myself, to get something off of my chest. I have never written or spoke about my type of OCD before, so I feel like right now I'm officially bringing it to light. It has always been and felt real, because well, it obviously is real. In one way, it was all in my head within the sense that thoughts were and always have been "just" thoughts, but the impact the intrusive thoughts have had on me in the past has been extremely real and difficult to come to terms with. I'm not sure if this is for most OCD sufferers with my type of OCD, but I never forgot the day I had my first intrusive thought. I must've been about 12. My family situation was a little bit different to the majority of people's and I didn't live with my mum, but instead my grandparents, for personal reasons. My mother wasn't a "bad" person, her heart was in the right place although she made some awful life choices. I had a very sheltered childhood, and my grandparents protected me from as many bad things as they could. Anyway, I remember one night I went to stay with my mum overnight for the first time in a while on one of her "better days" and everything was fine, until it started to get late and she decided to have an in-depth conversation with me about why she couldn't handle looking after me and her past with alcohol, etc... I won't go into too much detail. She also suffered from mental illnesses, mostly just depression. She had no one else to talk to and she proceeded to tell me about one psychotic experience she went through where she got so drunk and high that she would hear voices, see things that were not there, etc... And in the space of a minute, everything I had been sheltered from just hit me. Hard. I honestly believed that was the trigger and I was genuinely disturbed for the first time in my life and I had never experienced that kind of emotion before, and being so young I had no idea how to handle it. And I couldn't handle it for a very long time. That night, I didn't get much sleep. I remember thinking thoughts like "what if I start hearing things and going crazy?" and that's when it all started. That night was followed by many sleepless nights, just obsessing over my mum's story about her past. It only got worse from there. "what if?" this, "what if?" that. My head became flooded with "what ifs" and whenever I got over a thought, another would take its place. Intrusive thought after intrusive thought. My OCD would feed off of my fears, and this continued throughout secondary school without anyone having any idea. I just said I was depressed and "didn't know why" because I was scared. I would obsess over one intrusive thought until harm OCD threw another, more exhausting one at me about something happening to my family and I would forget all about the previous thoughts and start obsessing over the new one instead. At this point, I couldn't do it by myself anymore and I found the guts to tell my grandparents, which was horrifying for me. I was terrified they would see me as a psychopath or something and that they'd send me somewhere, but they were much more understanding... or maybe just biased. None of us knew anything about OCD and the multiple types, so they just put it down to me having an overactive imagination and hopefully I'd grow out of it because after all, they were only thoughts and as much as I feared I'd act on them, I never did and I knew I never would, but there was just always this "what if?" in the back of my mind. Some nights were harder than others, and I'd sit there crying and blaming my mum for it but as the years went on, it got a lot easier to handle the more I matured. I find that OCD never disappears, but it gets easier to manage and the key is to stay occupied. I found what honestly helped and almost cured my OCD was researching it and learning about it. I remember the day I educated myself on the type of OCD I had and I just burst into tears out of pure relief. I remember shouting for my grandparents. We finally had answers, although my grandparents never thought I was a bad person. People with OCD need to know they're not alone because before I researched it, I thought I was this insane freak of nature but now I know I'm far from it. These days, I can almost always laugh an intrusive thought off, which just goes to show how far I've come from being a scared 12 year old crying on her bed to how I am now. OCD is not me, and it isn't you either. We're better than OCD. Thank you for reading.

[Chirpy]

That was a brave and great post. You were so young and not to know what you are suffering is hard as well. My ocd started when I was twenty I am 53 now. My ocd comes and goes but I do try to keep busy. Thank you for your post it helps to know there are other out there that understand.