OC87: A Movie About Courage and Living Your Life in the Midst of OCD

My husband was away, and I was feeling anxious.  I've come a long way since the time I walked 7 miles around a lake in order to ward off the anxiety of being alone for a week, but I'd been having physical aches and pains in the weeks leading up to his leaving, and my OCD was stirring.

Feeling achy and anxious, I started searching for movies on Netflix.  This was my way of avoiding searching for the meaning of my symptoms, but still, compulsive and exhausting.  Working my way through the alphabet and the numbers, using the arrow keys to navigate to one letter at a time.

Then OC87: The Obessive Compulsive Major Depression Bipolar Aspberger's Movie came up.  I remembered hearing about it when it came out a couple years ago, but I hadn't seen it.  It was already midnight, but I started watching.

Bud Clayman majored in film in college, but thoughts that scared him, and depression infiltrated his life.   OC87 refers to 1987 when he built his life around attempting to control the world around him, and the thoughts within him.

I was moved by Bud Clayman's persistence in making this film about his life now, after 30 years of OCD, depression and Asperger's, which involved dealing with people, dealing with his intrusive thoughts, indecision, anger and grief.  I particularly liked the scene he wrote where he played both "Good Buddy" and "Bad Buddy" in a riff on a scene from Lost in Space.  Part of this is in the trailer for the movie, the Bad Buddy telling the Good Buddy that he isn't capable of living without him, but Bud Clayman is capable of living his dream, even with the spectre of OC87, in the midst of the imperfections.

What this film reminded me was that to spend the week trying to figure out if my symptoms were a physical problem, or whether it was OCD, and freezing myself into a block of worry was a manifestation of my illness, and not what I want in my life.  

In one scene, Bud asks a woman what films she likes, and she asks him the same question, and his answer is that Ordinary People is the best movie ever made.  He describes how OC87 evolved out of a desire to describe how therapy had helped him, how it was a safe place, and how Ordinary People resonated with him, in its depiction of therapy.

Ordinary People is one of my favorite films, and I hadn't expected it to come up in Bud Clayman's film. I saw it when I was 12 or 13, several times, mesmerized.  Netflix had it, and I watched it next.  I'll write more about that.

Have you seen OC87?

Fear of Thoughts Getting Stuck: The Challenge of Reading OCD Self-Help Books

I had several responses to my review of J.J. Keeler's I Hardly Ever Wash My Hands: The Other Side of OCD, expressing fears that reading the book would give them ideas or cause anxiety.  I've been mulling this over, because it's a challenge to respond.

The simplest answer is that I don't know if J.J. Keeler's account of her OCD, and the specific things she worries about, will "stick" in your mind or create new OCD obsessions.

This is the nature of OCD that one person's trigger can seem completely harmless to someone else with a different form OCD; it's not only those without OCD who think that a particular obsession is incomprehensible.  There is a tendency to assume that other people's obsessions are easier to bear.  Conversely, if we suspect that a person's obsessions might be similar to ours, then there can be a desire to quarantine them, and not get anywhere near, as if the fears were contagious.  Or we are afraid of adding a whole new category of obsessing, and again, stay away.

This is OCD's mode of operation, to convince you that you can avoid the contagion of life, if you just screen out all things that might set you off, and enlist those around you to help in this task.   I know this from the inside.  Public health campaigns to raise awareness about various illnesses seemed designed by very cruel folks to torment me.  I was already highly aware of things that could go wrong, and I didn't want to know of any additional ways to monitor and worry about.  When I was a kid there was no internet but there were posters on the bus, public service ads on tv, special episodes of programs where someone had a disease, and magazine articles.  Women's magazines were the worst, and my mood would plummet if I was in a waiting room, reading one(which I picked up because I was anxious to be in the waiting room to begin with).

In college I was doing fairly well for awhile, avoiding obsessing about moles, until a classmate opened up his datebook, and I could see he'd written in an appointment for a mole removal.  I couldn't have predicted this.  Now, it might seem that you could at least keep yourself safe by avoiding what seems obvious, like Keeler's book or other OCD self-help books, or my blog, or the OCD Yahoo Group, or OCD support groups, but what is your definition of safe?  Avoiding all possibilities of help is not safety.  OCD would have you believe that it is possible to maintain complete quarantine, but triggers are part of life.

The irony is that when I was in an anxiety spike, I would then search out articles about whatever symptom was catching my attention, in order to reassure myself that I didn't have something serious.  There would be an initial calming effect if my symptoms didn't match, but then as I'd keep reading, I'd find something that again put doubt into my mind, or introduced an even more scary possibility.

I am not minimizing the abject fear of being seized by an OCD obsession.  I've been there.
But getting help for OCD is where the true hope of living beyond your obsessions resides.  OCD wants to maintain the status quo.  Don't get help.  Don't learn about how other people have coped.  Don't risk new pain.  

If you can't read a self-help book or OCD memoir because it's too terrifying, then this is a signal to find an exposure therapist, or a self-help group, where other people can help you.  I understand the irony in this.  I was once incredibly shy and my therapist suggested group therapy, and I was appalled.  How could I go to a group for help if I was terrified of groups??  But eventually, I realized that I didn't want to go on the way I was going:  the cost of my fear was too much, I was missing my life.

Keeler, in the preface to her book, writes of having severe fears of harming someone while at Disneyland, and self-loathing for what kind of person she must be, when a toddler ran over and hugged her leg.

It felt like she was telling me I wasn't what I feared.

I have no idea who this toddler was and I never saw her again.

But she saved part of me that day.  

Hopefully, this book can save part of someone else. 

 

 

Intrusive Thoughts and Harming Fears: A Review of I Hardly Ever Wash my Hands: The Other Side of OCD by J.J. Keeler

TLC Book Tours contacted me about reviewing J.J. Keeler's I Hardly Ever Wash My Hands: The Other Side of OCD, and I was intrigued by the title because my OCD doesn't manifest in handwashing rituals, and this is the short-cut metaphor for OCD much of the time.  After reading the book, I felt like I'd found an OCD-Soul-Sister and although I am never glad that someone else has OCD, and I am glad when they can write about it in an articulate and insightful way.  

I had to laugh when J.J. Keeler describes how her twin sister had hypochondria with fear of many diseases(a type of OCD I am very familiar with), but the author had only "had" one disease: AIDS.  In the irony of OCD, in elementary school she is triggered into worrying about AIDS when her parents mention a blood transfusion she had, but what her OCD latches onto is the risk of "dirty needles" which in her young mind means thumbtacks, staples, pine needles, with dirt on them.  Humor is a major component of Keeler's account of OCD, grabbing the edge of ridiculousness about OCD fears and pulling the whole thing apart, so that the sufferer can catch a glimpse of OCD's game of generating endless scenarios and holding life hostage.  

The second chapter, The Bomb in my Teddy Bear, is a marvel of encapsulating the experience of morphing OCD thoughts.  When she was 8 years old, neighbor gives her a teddy bear at a yard sale, and a chain of fears links itself around her.  She started getting a weird feeling about the bear, and wondered why a relative stranger would give her a teddy bear for free.  Then it came to her, "The reason was obvious.  There was a bomb in the teddy bear."  Keeler agonized over how to dispose of the bear, without harming anyone else, and then when it didn't explode, wondered if the neighbor would come back to finish the job.  Her rituals to keep the anxiety from exploding were a constant stream of "figuring out" and "analyzing" combined with tin cans at the door to let her know if there was an intruder, and plotting how she could take the bear on one of her father's fishing trips and throw the bomb overboard.

Eventually, OCD moves onto other topics in Keeler's life, but the same corrosive fear and desperate maneuvers to make the fear go away.  In addition to fears about AIDS(and calling the testing center before her test was even received, to check, check, check), she feared causing harm to others after being deluged with intrusive thoughts.  If you suffer from this very painful form of OCD, please read this book.  Keeler has known the despair that made her consider suicide, because she didn't want to harm anyone and yet these images would pop into her head, and she has survived, and now thrives.  

The most difficult part of reviewing I Hardly Ever Wash My Hands: The Other Side of OCD, is that I want to quote everything, but it would be better for my readers to go find a copy of this book and read it for themselves.  

Read J.J.Keeler's Introduction to Harming Obsessions on her blog.  

Find J.J. Keeler on Twitter

Related Post:

Fear of Thoughts Getting Stuck: The Challenge of Self Help Books for OCD

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Intrusive Thoughts and the Fear of Being Unredeemable

Rosalie Stanton recently found my blog and shared a post she wrote about her struggle with intrusive thoughts.

I had no idea my obsessions were perfectly in-keeping with my particular case of OCD until recently. I'm not certain if it helps others afflicted with OCD, but the knowledge that I was NORMAL probably saved my life. For as miserable as I was, thinking I was wrong and twisted and evil, finding out that my disease had a name and there was nothing I could do to prevent it, nothing I was at fault for thinking, was the biggest blessing I've ever received.

The pain of feeling wrong and twisted and evil is something I know as well. When I was 9 or 10 years old, I started having thoughts that most adults would find scary, violent, disturbing, let alone a child. It was as if they were injected into my mind, just suddenly there, in an occupation, a siege. I wondered why I couldn't make them stop. I began to enter the world of my thoughts in a set way, in a ritualistic sequence, as if I was standing in front of a mirror, looking at my face, and crossing through into a world of torture of women, an observer of it all.

How I came back out each time, I don't recall, but I remember feeling defeated when the thoughts came back again. The images spun themselves into a series of stories, expanding seemingly endless to my young mind. It was as if they wrote themselves. They were unfamiliar, alien. Even now, I can't comprehend where they came from. They so crowded my mind, that one afternoon, I asked a friend to play out part of the story where doctors kept women captive. Her look of confusion combined with a stabbing sense of shame, but also gave me a little room, to feel grounded in the actual world, not in my head.

She was completely uninterested in cooperating, and from the day onward the thoughts did not return in that form. I was amazed that I no longer was sucked into the narrative of fear and violence. The thoughts did remain as a memory, as something I wondered about, as a part of my history.

In college, I participated in a survey about women's sexual fantasies, and I was stricken with fear that my old thoughts were a fantasy, that they were something I wanted to think about, something I enjoyed. Filling out the survey filled me with dread about what my thoughts meant. Then I went to a presentation about the destructiveness of hardcore pornography, with a series of slides of some of the most violent images in magazines, and it was as if the images from my past were there right in front of me. I was in a state of anxiety and fearfulness. The slides repulsed me, and yet the old images from my mind were of the same substance. I was startled by the resemblance, and even more troubled about what this meant about me as a person.

I started to worry that somehow I had been subjected to pornographic magazines as a girl, but couldn't remember it. Or maybe I had been sexually abused. Or maybe I was just bad. That all my interest in helping women, the classes I took on women's history, my compassion for suffering, was all a lie and in fact I was twisted, that all girls were twisted in some way. I spent a lot of time in my head, trying to figure out the nature of my soul, the origin of the images, and the new set of horrors that the pornographic slides had introduced into my head, and desperately wanting to make them go away.

To be continued in another post.

VH1's OCD Project: Reactions from Someone with OCD Part 2

VH1's OCD Project premiere with Dr. David Tolin was hard for me to watch. Not because of the shoe licking, but because Exposure and Response Prevention Therapy(ERP) is portrayed as something to be inflicted on people with OCD in a boot camp manner, with a dose of "all or nothing" thinking thrown in--ie. either fight your OCD or get out. If my therapist demanded I do exposures "for my own good" I would flee.

Leonard often says that if clients don't agree to the goal of learning to live with uncertainty, they are not going to want to do any exposures, and his job is work in partnership with clients to understand the nature of OCD and of the need to accept uncertainty. OCD isn't happy with 99.9% assurance that my health symptoms aren't dangerous. It wants 100% certainty, and this can make my life hellish. This is not to say that Leonard isn't frank. He'll tell me that I could worry about one symptom and then have a completely hidden disease kill me, but if a therapist feels their job is to push their clients off a cliff into dramatic exposures, this is inappropriate.

ERP is about starting with what you can and *will* do. What is the first step you can take to fight the OCD? I was often paralyzed with making perfect decisions. I started with a small exposure of choosing something by flipping a coin, at least once a day. Should I wear a green shirt or a blue one? Flip a coin. This created a wave of anxiety in me, but not so much that I was unwilling to do the exposure. Then I moved on to choosing something that didn't feel "perfect." If you find yourself thinking your therapist is crazy for suggesting certain exposures, you need to talk about it--and that in itself is an exposure, if you fear even verbalizing what you are really afraid of. If my therapist yelled at me, or goaded me into an exposure, I wouldn't get the benefit of treatment, because I don't respond well to this style. People with OCD have a range of temperaments, just like all humans.

The irony is that all things considered, if the participants in the OCD Project aren't scared off, and stay in therapy, and do the exposures and don't secretly do rituals to "undo" them, they will be better off than if they went to a traditional therapist who wants to talk about the reasons for the content of their fears. Arine's story is particularly poignant, with her fear of harming someone while driving, after her father and grandfather were killed in horrific car crashes, but making the link between this event in her life history and the manifestation of her OCD is not enough in and of itself to help her break free of the anxiety. There are many ways in which each of us can cause harm to our fellow beings, but to consistently eliminate all risk is both impossible and the attempt erodes our ability to do good in the world.