Hi
This is my first post on here, our issue is we have a 12 year old daughter who is suffering with OCD. The problem only really presents itself at bedtime, she has for probably 5 years or so performed certain rituals around her room before going to bed which for the first couple of years were no big deal, didn't take very long and there was not really any visible anxiety involved.
During Covid her mood started to change, she was a lot more stressed probably due to missing her friends and the bedtimes started to get stressful. Some nights she would keep getting up saying she couldn't sleep, gradually this happened more often and got worse, then sometimes she'd start re-doing the checks after getting up and that's when we started to notice things change.
She started secondary school in September last year, the weekend before starting secondary school her anxiety went through the roof, she was up every night in great distress saying she couldn't sleep. We would try desperately to settle her back to bed but it was impossible and started keeping us up later than we wanted. The OCD got a lot worse, the checks themselves became very stressful for her as she wouldn't know how to stop, then at the end she just wouldn't settle into bed, and she started having major meltdowns.
We have seen a therapist privately and had managed to get her to a place where the checks would take about 1 hour 30 mins and then she'd settle into bed listening to a meditation. On a good night that's it finished (would be 11 - 1130pm though) and on a bad night she'd get up a few times distressed. On really bad nights she'd be so stressed she won't want to start them, and have a major meltdown downstairs. Or she'd start them, keep delaying and stopping, then when we say we can't wait any longer she'd go into meltdown.
So long story short we did make some progress, at one stage we had to move her out of her room and into her brother's room as the checks were so overwhelming she couldn't even face them. We got her back in her own room and got them under control most nights, all be it at the expense of our own evenings and with wobbles here and there.
The last couple of months though things have taken a turn for the worse again, she now has two new things she does which I think are destroying her bedtimes. The first is she says she has to write a confession down for us, right at the end of the night. This can take a very long time, if we try and rush her she gets angry and a meltdown will happen, same if we say we're not going to read it as it's taking too long. The other thing is she calls out from her bed after we've left the room, these are reassurances about various things and 'bad' thoughts she's having in the moment. These last two things can take an hour alone, and often it goes wrong and she has a meltdown anyway.
This last couple of weeks we’ve not got to bed before 1am, sometimes as late as 3am as we try to settle her and calm the situation. I now feel completely burnt out and have had to take some time off work, not just for myself but so I can concentrate on helping our daughter through this extremely difficult time.
We realise we've accomodated the OCD for too long but we didn't know what else to do, if we say no to things she has major meltdowns around the house (hits walls, bites herself, throws things) and we have 2 younger children who get woken up. We wanted to try and approach this by easing her anxiety, and this has worked to a certain extent but not with the new rituals appearing, and even when things are better we still have no evening to ourselves.
Our therapist has advised going cold turkey, i.e. saying we'll allow a certain length of time for her checks then go to bed. We tried this for a while but it was awful, she'd follow us into our bedroom, pull the covers off us, switch lights on and wake everyone up by screaming, it just didn't seem to work. We're in the situation where if we say for example we'll only answer 5 things she calls out at the end we guarantee a meltdown, we can't win.
Has anyone else experienced anything like this and does anyone have any advice? We're pretty desperate to get some normality back into our lives.
Sorry for the long post.
