Brain Lock: Free Yourself From Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior (25 page)

Karen recalls that she was frequently so depressed, tense, and frustrated during bad bouts of OCD that she became extremely irritable. “My husband called me a bitch, which infuriated me, since I felt too much of a burden already. So my response was, ‘Well, you certainly ought to be an expert on that. There are enough of them in your family.’” Their fights escalated, and their sex life diminished. In therapy, she learned that her husband also had OCD, which explained why he had tolerated her hoarding all these years.

Because they were kind of coconspirators in this ridiculous ritual of collecting worthless junk, there were no reality checks, and things got to a tragically absurd crisis state. Old friends from out of town came to visit, but could not be invited in, so they all stood around the yard talking. When friends from Canada called to say they were coming to town, Karen and her husband arranged to meet them at her mother’s house. Nevertheless, Karen was terrified that they might show up unexpectedly at her door. “I felt compelled to park our cars several blocks from our house, so they would think we were not at home. We went to bed as soon as it got dark, so they would not be attracted by lights and drop in on us.”

Barbara’s husband was loving and understanding about her checking compulsions, even though he found them difficult to understand. But when she came home and announced that she had the awful feeling that she had hit someone that morning while driving to work, he lost patience. “That was the final straw for him,” she says. “It was too ridiculous, too bizarre, too completely detached from reality. It shook him up, really sent him over the edge.” Whereas she understood that it was just another of OCD’s dirty little tricks, he did not. He snapped, “You would have heard a ‘thunk’ if you’d hit someone with your car. You would have seen a body in the road.” She was stunned by his overreaction: “I knew it was the same thing, whatever
this thing was that was happening to me.” Soon afterward, she read a newspaper article describing a person with severe OCD who had the same symptoms as hers. At last, Barbara knew what she had.

As Barbara progressed in self-directed therapy, her husband handled his role well. He refused to check things for her unless she was completely exhausted. Then he might make a joke out of it, announcing, “Check!” This is actually a form of Relabeling. She says, “He knows he can’t fix me, that I have to fix myself. So he never got overinvolved. He is an amazingly tolerant, well-adjusted, normal person. If I’d married someone like myself who had all sorts of dysfunctional family issues, it would have been a disaster. He’s had to deal with other problems, not just my OCD. I was an alcoholic and had to recover from that. I had a crippling self-esteem issue. I had a lot of baggage before OCD.” That baggage included a mother with mild OCD who used to send her daughter back into the house to double-check the stove before they could leave. Barbara admits, “I didn’t even go into the kitchen. I’d come back and say, ‘Oh, yeah, Mom, it’s off.’” What irony—years later Barbara would ask her husband to check the stove for her.

Today, Barbara’s OCD is very mild and under control. But when it was at its worst, her husband was there for her. “I could unload on him and decompress, and he’d just sit there patiently and talk to me until I felt better.” He did complain occasionally, “You know, you’re not connecting with the world. You’re in a cocoon. You have no involvement with the world or other people. It doesn’t matter to you that you live in a vacuum.” True, sometimes she would just lie in bed on weekends. Sometimes he would come in and hang out with her; other times he wouldn’t. Barbara has since had a baby and quit her job. Now that she’s started to feel less stressed out, she is initiating social contacts and is becoming much more interested in the outside world.

The fifteen-minute rule is very helpful in enhancing communication between family members and the person with OCD. If family members can say in a supportive way, and it must be done in a therapeutic manner—“Let’s just wait fifteen minutes. I’m not going to do this for you now, but I’ll do it in fifteen minutes. I know your OCD is really bothering you right now, but let’s just wait fifteen minutes and see how it goes”—the person with OCD is apt to reevaluate the situ
ation at the end of that period. Again, this intervention must be approached with goodwill, or it will only make things worse.

DON’T PUSH, DON’T RUSH

Because they have had years of practice, people with OCD are clever at hiding their illness when it is to their benefit. A number of people have told us that for many months into an intimate relationship, they had no reason to suspect that their partner had a mental disorder. There may be quirky little behaviors that can be shrugged off and rationalized. Domingo’s ex-girlfriend, Kathy, told of how, very early in their relationship, Domingo had a bad OCD day. She knew almost nothing about OCD and had no idea what to do. “It was like, ‘Oh, my God, oh, my God,’ I didn’t know the magic words to tell him to get him out of it, and I’d be saying all the wrong things, everything that would make him angry.” Sometimes Domingo would make light of it, telling her, “Why don’t you just get naked and stand in front of me, so my mind’s thinking of something else?” When his OCD was that bad, she said, she was willing to try anything to snap him out of it, but “nothing short of a bomb going off next to him would help.”

She laughed as she told us, “The funny thing is, our dog has the same anxious behaviors. You know how they say animals pick up your personality? Well, it’s weird. This dog is a real clingalong. He has to be next to us all the time. We created a monster. If we leave and he has to stay home, his breathing gets funny, and he starts licking and gets this really goofy look on his face. It reminds me of Domingo’s anxious feelings. I tell him, ‘You two guys are just the same.’” There is, however, no clinical evidence to show that dogs of people with OCD develop OCD.

Moving can be traumatic for people with OCD, as can any disruption of their routine. Frequently, they resist the idea of travel, especially when they have contamination obsessions. Travel means using public bathrooms and sleeping in beds where strangers have slept. Domingo bought himself a $500 mountain bike and fixed it just the way he wanted it, but when Kathy suggested a day’s outing to the mountains, she practically had to drag him and his bike out the door. He remembered, “I was afraid the bike would get scratches on it.
But, the funny part is, when I went to the mountains, suddenly it was not
my
bicycle, so I was able to enjoy riding it. I didn’t care if I broke it or scratched it. OCD is weird.”

Although Domingo and Kathy lived together as a couple, they each had a bedroom. She used to tease him and call his room “the mausoleum,” a space where he had his precious collection of art objects arranged just so. She knew better than to rearrange anything. “If I ever clean his things,” she said, “it just freaks him out. He has to go and check for damage. I don’t even do his laundry. I’m a terrible washer. I tend to get bleach spots on things, and he freaks out about that, too.”

Kathy came to see that Domingo’s resistance to change and disruption in his life had an unexpected side benefit. She told us, “If he didn’t have OCD, he’d probably have ten girlfriends because he is, by nature, very promiscuous. But because of the OCD—and this is the part I love—he’s faithful. He’s Latin, right? But if he wanted to cheat on me, he’d have to tell me. For one thing, there’s the contamination thing. He’d have to tell me if he’d touched somebody else.” Domingo confirmed what she said. “Once I’m used to something—somebody—my anxiety gets less and less. With somebody new, I have to start from the beginning. Those of us with OCD are different. We get used to things.” There is security in familiarity.

Kathy used to come to our family support group, where she met parents and family members of other people with OCD. Many of them had been through hell with OCD and, Kathy remembers, “a lot of them were wondering what I was doing with Domingo. They couldn’t understand why I would be involved with this guy if I had a choice not to be. I wasn’t born to it. I wasn’t a parent.” The answer was that, OCD or no OCD, she appreciated him for his good qualities.

It’s not that they didn’t go through some tough times. Kathy’s natural instinct was to pull away, to withdraw, when she saw the OCD coming on. “I would be like, ‘Oh, God, I’ve got to get out of here. I can’t deal with this. How can I deal with this for the rest of my life?’” But when she asked me what her role should be, I told her that if she chose to be with Domingo, she had to take an interest and be involved in his treatment.

After five years, Domingo and Kathy split up for reasons other than his OCD. It was a terrible time for him, and he suffered a relapse in
treatment. He explained, “I get used to people and things very fast. If that pattern is broken, my peace has been broken. Then I have to struggle a little so I can get my peace back.” He recently married a woman he met after the breakup. Ironically, they met when he went to a health-food store to buy the weight-gain supplement that Kathy insisted he continue to take. The first time his wife met him, she told him later, she sensed there was something “different” and “interesting” about him. He took her out to dinner and laid it all out for her about his OCD. She had never heard of OCD and really didn’t understand, but she is learning. Domingo told her right off, “Never push me, never rush me, or you can expect me to get aggressive. Don’t ever tell me, ‘Hurry up!’ because that brings out my bad side. I get really mad when people rush me because they don’t understand what I’m going through”: why it takes so long for him to do simple things like put on a pair of socks or take a shower. Domingo gets lost in his ruminations. If he sees a catsup spot on his pants, he may obsess that it is blood and stare at it until his mind understands that it is only catsup.

“Don’t rush me” is good advice for anyone living with a person who is struggling with OCD symptoms.

JILL AND HER DAUGHTERS

When Jill’s older daughter, Erica, was 11 years old, Jill’s best friend died in a car crash. Jill was devastated—the two women had worked together in a real estate office and often shared confidences over dinner afterward—but Jill could not go to the morgue to identify Marilyn’s body, nor would she attend the memorial service. She couldn’t. If she had, her whole world would have become “contaminated.”

The day Marilyn died, Jill remembers coming home to find both her daughters—Erica and 8-year-old Tracy—at the door waiting for her. “They were crying and I was crying and they reached out to hug me and I said, ‘Stay away from me. I’m dirty.’” Jill then took her clothes off, right there, and went in to shower.

She stayed in the house for weeks. “I couldn’t go anywhere where Marilyn and I had been together. It was the contamination thing.” For more than twenty-five years—since she was a teenager and had to go to the open-casket funeral of her boyfriend’s best friend—Jill
had suffered from contamination fears tied to death and dying. Though it would be years before she would be diagnosed, she was suffering from severe OCD.

The day of Marilyn’s memorial service, the unthinkable happened: Knowing that Jill was devastated by the loss, friends dropped by to bring her a fruit basket. When Jill peeked out the window and saw them standing there, she told Erica and Tracy not to open the door. These were the people who had identified Marilyn’s body for the coroner. They were contaminated. The fruit basket was contaminated. Jill, her daughters, and her house would be contaminated if they came inside.

“It was horrible,” Jill says. “All I could do was stand there and say, ‘I can’t take it, I can’t take it, I can’t take it!’ But I wanted to take it, so finally I told Erica to open the door, take the basket, take it into the bathroom, and stand in the tub. My friends left, and here was Erica, just standing there in the tub, holding this basket of fruit. I didn’t know what to do with it. She was contaminated and the basket was contaminated.”

It was Erica who jolted her back to reality, screaming, “Mom, you can’t just wash Marilyn down the drain!”

Jill told Erica to put the basket on top of the refrigerator, where she could see it but couldn’t touch it, and then to take a long shower. The basket stayed on the refrigerator for a long time and then Jill threw the fruit away. But the memory of that day has stayed with Erica and Tracy.

Tracy listened recently as Jill told that story. She is now 22, and only in the past few years has she been able to let go of the anger she felt toward her mother for what her mother did to her and her sister when they were growing up—the bizarre cleaning rituals; the moves from city to city and state to state, in search of a place that wasn’t “dirty” and the embarrassment of trying to explain to their friends why they could never come into the house.

Jill married when she was only 18; by the time she was 20, she had two babies. Several years later, she and her husband divorced. Stress piled on stress. She was a single mother now, trying to hold down a job, and she was sick. She didn’t know what this sickness was, but she knew it wasn’t normal. She knew it wasn’t normal to talk to relatives through a closed door or to forbid her girls to kiss their grand
father because he was a meatcutter and had touched blood. Sad and depressed, she wouldn’t leave the house for months on end except to buy groceries or drive the girls somewhere.

For sixteen years, she cut off all contact with her mother, father, brother, and sisters. They were contaminated, and she couldn’t even talk to them by telephone. Jill, Erica, and Tracy moved repeatedly because whole neighborhoods and whole towns would be contaminated.

Tracy is able to laugh now as she remembers, “We always had to find a two-closet apartment.” Setting aside one closet as the “dirty closet” was Jill’s way of dealing with the fact that her girls had to go to school—where they could become contaminated. She devised a routine to keep them and the house “clean”: When the girls came home from school, Jill would open the door to let them in. They weren’t allowed to touch the doorknob. They would then tiptoe through the house to the “dirty closet,” where they would strip off their clothes and dump their book bags. They would then tiptoe to the bathroom to shower. If they had homework, the routine was a bit more complicated. They would have to sit in the closet with the door open doing their homework. Then they could shower. Jill, of course, never went near the “dirty closet.” Tracy remembers that if she or her sister had to use the bathroom while doing homework, they would have to shower first (to keep the bathroom clean), go back to the closet to finish their work, and then shower again.