Worry is like leaving your headlights on, and draining the battery. Worry is exhausting and stalls you in the middle of nowhere. The saying that "most of the things you worry about never happen" has circulated for many years. I remember seeing it over 25 years ago when I was in high school. Worry is used as a talisman to ward off disaster. The first time I saw a psychiatrist in the early 90's for my anxiety, he diagnosed me with Generalized Anxiety Disorder(GAD), which involves worrying about several different areas of life. You worry too much. If only you would stop worrying ..read more

Until the 4th grade, I went to a school that didn't have letter grades. When I got my first test paper back with 2 x's, I knew instinctively that this was bad, and I should only have check marks, only right answers.  My perfectionism started early. An x meant I had done something wrong, and I could feel fear in my chest, and a flush of shame in my face. I had decided that being perfect was the key to being ok, to being loved, to being acceptable. This is a potent belief that influenced my life thoroughly, and when mixed with OCD, extremely painful. OCD offered a supposed solution, a met ..read more

I finally made it to Z! I started this OCD A to Z series in May, 2011. In thinking of a Z word, zero came to mind. For those who have suffered with OCD anxiety, there is a longing to feel zero anxiety ever again. Zero tolerance. Zero it out. Zilch. I remember my deep disappointment when I started Exposure Therapy, when my therapist said that we can't rid ourselves of all anxiety, that humans don't get that option. OCD anxiety can be so intense, and my belief was that I couldn't cope with any more anxiety in my life. I also had a subset of existential obsessions about why there was ..read more

It's been a hard month, and when I thought of what to do for Y, the phrase "Yet Again" came into my head. There's a jolt of surprise every time anxiety intrudes into my life, and a heart sinking disappointment. I have been learning to expect the anxiety, with less of a "yet again" and more of a "oh, it's you again." My therapist likes to tell me that I've had years practicing the old OCD stuff, and to expect it to come back. This isn't the same as being doomed, and that's the hard thread to hold onto when I'm having a hard time. If I expect the OCD to be there, and don't give into the "Oh ..read more

I hear a distinct voicing of my OCD thinking, a pattern I am getting better at recognizing. I personify my OCD as a voice that at times I argue with or reason with or acknowledge and move on to something else. When I first started Exposure therapy, whenever I said that "I" wanted to check something, or look something up or find certainty about an urgent question, my therapist would say, The OCD wants this. He said he wasn't suggesting I actually had another person inside me, but that he believed there was more to me than compulsions, that what I wanted was something bigger than my disorder a ..read more

U was a hard one at first, but I remembered how many times I've encountered concern about having unique fears on the OCD Support Yahoo group, and in my own OCD support group, and in comments and emails from readers. OCD is as diverse as the people who suffer from it, with obsessions and compulsions that can be as unique as a fingerprint, but sharing the commonality of being human, and suffering from this disorder. There is a despair that you are the only person who has a unique set of symptoms, and therefore maybe it's not really OCD, but something more dire. There is fear that if no one e ..read more

The International OCD Foundation has a useful checklist of questions to ask of potential therapists for OCD, as well as a database of OCD therapists. There is evidence that Exposure and Response Prevention Therapy works for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and yet very few therapists who are actually trained to do it or who have even heard of it. It's a bizarre thing that OCD symptoms in all their permutations sound incredibly familiar to me, but to therapists who are unfamiliar with OCD, they don't see the patterns. They are baffled, frustrated, or assume there are deeper issues that must be d ..read more

I remember reading that the word "scruple" comes from the meaning "sharp stone" and scrupulosity is like a sharp stone in your shoe, paining you with every step. Scrupulousness can be a form of OCD, with a sensitive conscience constantly jabbed by fears of committing sins, doing something wrong, making a mistake or being negligent. Scrupulosity means never feeling forgiven, redeemed or having any lasting relief from confession(if one is Catholic), or constant fear of eating something not Kosher(if one is Jewish), or fear of breaking the law, being dishonest, or unjust(whether religious or s ..read more

I'd never seen the acronym ROCD before until I came upon it on a OCD self-help list called Stuck in a Doorway. It stands for Relationship OCD, and another one was HOCD for Homosexuality OCD. They are both ways that OCD latches onto whatever is important to us. OCD wants definitive answers, and when an obsessive thought or question centered around being with the right person(ROCD) or gender(HOCD), my desire was to answer the questions so I could breathe, so I could not be vigilantly checking to make sure I was making the right decision, and not be haunted by it later. I was shy, and didn ..read more

Questions are a defining aspect of OCD for me. Something about an unanswered question creates more anxiety for me than many statements of scary facts. "What if that bump on my ear is skin cancer?" kept me suffering more than when the doctor told me it was skin cancer, especially since I obsessed about the bump for 5 years. But then OCD in its opportunistic way turned its attention on "How could I have obsessed about this for 5 years? Why didn't I go to the doctor? What if this means I am a negligent irresponsible person?" As a girl it was, "What if I am drafted into the army?" or "What ..read more