How does a woman live with a pathological passion for cleanliness and order
'14.10.2018'
Source: Lady.mail.ru
Business coach Yevgeny Karelin frankly talks about what it is like to live with obsessive-compulsive disorder and how you can love yourself and live a full life, even being “not like everyone else.”
How it all began
For the first time, the realization that something was wrong with me came about eight years old when my parents divorced, Eugene writes for lady.mail.ru. I think the preceding quarrels and scandals somehow affected my psyche, because it was then that I first had disturbing thoughts and an oppressive feeling that something very bad was coming. In order to somehow drown out the experience, I began to beat off the rhythm of a song with my teeth. Loud, distinct, sometimes to the pain in the jaw.
I can not say why I thought it would help. Compulsions are impossible to explain at all, because they do not come to you in the form of a conscious decision. Just once you find that you have a habit for a long time, say, to beat a rhythm with your teeth. You do not remember when she appeared, but you know for sure one thing - you cannot just take it and stop doing it. After all, this is your protection from the bad that can happen, and no willpower will help here.
Looping
My other fad since childhood is a pathological craving for order and symmetry. An unevenly hanging towel or chair that is not parallel to the table can ruin me. This does not always happen, only during periods of heightened anxiety, but it can reach the point of absurdity.
Once at a business meeting, I was fixated on the fact that one edge of the curtains was bent asymmetrically, and for a few hours I thought only of that. I was embarrassed to get up and fix him, so I just looked at him in a daze and dreamed that someone would correct this damn curtain. In the end, I don’t remember how that meeting took place and what was said on it. I left the office completely exhausted, with a terrible headache and then all day I could not calm down.
As a child, this feature of mine made me very happy. I remember how she proudly said that I got the love of order from my father. Before I started doing my homework, I spent hours spending my stationery in order to achieve their perfectly symmetrical arrangement in the drawer. Sometimes she didn’t have time to go for a walk because she had been in perfect order in the room for too long.
I do not think that mom saw something abnormal in this, especially since I tried to hide a lot. For example, the fact that I immediately throw out a notebook if I made a blot. I perceived the blot as a poisonous ulcer that cannot be touched, and the notebook in which it appeared was infected, in which it could no longer be written if you did not want to get sick.
The problem was that I bought notebooks for a year, and I understood that it would not work out to constantly throw them out, because mom would notice it very soon. Therefore, I was forced to learn to write without blots. Strange as it may sound, my compulsion became a motivating factor for good learning.
Relief
Revelation for me was the film “Magnificent scam”, which I watched while studying at the university. I was surprised that the jumps of the hero Nicolas Cage are very similar to mine. After the film, I reread several reviews and found out that he suffered from OCD. Then I decided to study the question: I read various articles on the Internet and realized that this diagnosis is not uncommon. I have always considered myself strange and “not of this world,” but it turned out that there were a lot of people like me.
It was a real relief, it seemed to me even easier to breathe.
Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) is a mental disorder in which obsessive thoughts (anxious, frightening, sometimes shameful) pursue a person. Special rituals help to get rid of these thoughts - compulsions that a person performs automatically, sometimes even unconsciously. But they also bring only temporary relief, and everything repeats itself again.
Crisis
After university, I began to meet with a young man. These were complex code-dependent relationships that brought me to a mental crisis. There were a lot of misunderstandings and quarrels between us, but none of us had enough spirit to break off relations.
My anxiety reached a peak. Every morning I woke up with the thought that some kind of tragedy was about to happen, that someone close to would get sick or die. New strange compulsions have appeared: when boarding an airplane, pat the trim with your right hand, and take seats exactly on the right in the bus and train - only then you can safely fly or ride.
In particularly acute periods, I had a nervous tic - twitching of the upper eyelid. The rest of the time I was protected from anxiety with the help of cleaning. Most of my free time I cleaned, rubbed, rearranged furniture. But the more I cleaned up, the more infuriated our homes were infuriated - asymmetrical patterns on the wallpaper, folds on the bedspread, unequal spoons ...
Soon my whole life turned into a solid cleaning, and all the money began to go to household goods and household goods. I began to visit a psychologist, it somehow kept me from a nervous breakdown. After five years of marriage, I realized that I no longer find the resources to live in myself and made the painful decision to break off relations.
Opening
A couple of years ago, the book “I want and will be” by Mikhail Labkovsky came into my hands. It happened about a year after breaking up, by that time I was fully recovered and was ready for a new life. I do not remember well the content of the book, but its concept “to do only what I want and not to do what I don’t want to do” became for me the first and main step towards solving my mental problems.
I started working with a psychologist again, studying psychology on my own and, step by step, came to understand that OCD was my salvation. All these symptoms, now aggravating, sometimes weakening, informed me that I was going the wrong way, living not my life. They were a signal to urgently change something.
Now my life is what it should be. I do what I love, lead a comfortable lifestyle, do not communicate with oppressive or negative people, constantly listen to myself and try to live in harmony with my inner world.
Some compulsions disappeared altogether, and those that remained do not prevent me from living, and I got used to them for a long time. Yes, I still stroke the plane trim, occupy the seats on the right and keep the workplace in order. But it rather pleases me. OCD since my childhood with me, this is already a part of me, and I see no reason to deal with it.
Of course, I understand that life is unpredictable and there will be more than once situations when the symptoms will worsen, and I will have hard times again. I may have to go to a psychiatrist and start drinking medicine. And maybe not.
But now I know that OCD is not an enemy to me, but rather an assistant. Perhaps it was only thanks to him that I learned to truly love and accept myself.
