Posted by Cindy W on June 16, 2000, at 10:33:25
In reply to ? for Cindy W, posted by Andre Allard on June 16, 2000, at 2:21:14
> You have mentioned in some of your posts that you have OCD. I would appreciate it if you could tell me about some of your experiences while having OCD.
>
> You see, I have many physical habits as well as obsessive thoughts. I bite my nails for a good hour a day and I play with my hair all the time even though I am not nervous.
>
> As for the obsessive thoughts, I have been obsessing about a particular girl for about a year now. There have been other girls since her and I still find myself fantasising over her for hours on end, ever single day. And I mean for hours.
>
> Also, when I was with a girl who lived across from me in residence, I had to constantly check or look at the front of her house. I finally had to keep the curtains shut or I could not watch tv because I was so preocupied with watching her house. I did not know why I had to look at her house but I just did. It drove me nuts.
>
> For any of you who have OCD I would like to know about your experiences please.
Andre, I've had OCD since I was a kid. I used to worry that my parents would be killed, and so had to wave goodbye to my father every morning in exactly the same way saying, "I hope he'll be OK," over and over. I organized my books as a kid in alphabetical order, with pretend "library cards" inside. I was a social phobic, and kept all the curtains and windows closed and worried constantly about other people. I couldn't step on cracks in sidewalks, and worried about walking in the grass because I didn't want to step on ants. (Now BTW I hate ants!). As an adolescent, I was anorexic, and when I got down to 90 lbs, I still felt totally obese. I've always had body dysmorphic disorder, and still feel like I'm deformed/funny looking. As an adult, I started "checking" things constantly ("is the heater really off?" "did I lock the front door?") and would check over and over and over and over. When I see an accident, I have to say over and over for several minutes, "I hope nobody got hurt." I used to worry about hitting somebody or an animal, and would go back over and over to make sure there was no body in the road. For a while, I was afraid while driving that I would deliberately swerve into oncoming traffic. Then I got into "counting" and when anxious (e.g., walking into the prison where I work in the morning), would count "l2345678" over and over and over, often in time to the songs I hear over and over (for hours and hours, same song) in my head. For a while, I had hundreds and hundreds of house plants; then thousands of guinea pigs; most recently, I was obsessed with frogs, and had hundreds, for a while (raised from tadpoles), and would spend all my waking hours taking care of, observing, and learning about frogs. I also worried about throwing away plastic bags (they might have a frog in them), stepping on frogs outside inadvertently, and frogs getting into the refrigerator (there are treefrogs in my house who come in from outside). Now, the worst thing is the collecting/hoarding. My kitchen is filled with stuff I really don't need (multiples of everything possible, so I don't 'run out'), I have dozens and dozens of bottles of shampoo in the bathroom, and I have trouble parting with junk mail, newspapers, utility bills, etc. I like to go to thrift stores and buy clothes, in hopes of camouflaging my imagined ugliness, and have enough now to start my own thrift store. Slowly, I'm getting over a lot of this (for example, my mind is "quiet" now) with Effexor-XR and CBT (my goal today is to fill more trash bags with clothes that don't even fit and which I would never even wear and return them to a thrift store). At times, I've had fixations on people ("crushes" in high school, college, and even now, fantasizing about having sex with people I find interesting or attractive...even though I can't even talk to them!). Hope this helps.
poster:Cindy W
thread:37483
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20000610/msgs/37520.html