OCD is a mental health condition that focuses on obsessions (persistent, intrusive thoughts/doubts/images/impulses that cause anxiety or disgust) and compulsions (repetitive actions or mental acts to try to reduce the anxiety caused by the obsession). Most people think of OCD and think about contamination OCD -people being afraid of germs and washing their hands obsessively. And it is certainly true that can be a common form of OCD, but there are so many other subtypes of OCD that people don’t know about.
So here are some of the different OCD themes that I’ve struggled with at different stages of my life. I had no idea how many different themes of OCD I’d dealt with until I started talking about it in therapy. But regardless of the theme, OCD is all the same - it is the same obsession and compulsion cycle, with compulsions strengthening the obsessions and keeping the cycle going.
My OCD started at primary school, with the obsession that I was going to catch nits and was therefore disgusting. I spent hours compulsively checking my hair, avoiding going near other people in-case they had nits, replaying situations in my head to try to remember if I’d gone close enough to someone else to touch them, and brushing through my hair with conditioner to try to ‘kill’ them - even though I didn’t have nits.
Around the age of 13, I started having intrusive thoughts that something bad was going to happen to my family - be it a car crash, a fire, or someone getting ill. I’d complete compulsions to try and ‘stop’ it happening, for example by touching my books a certain number of times. I’d spend hours engaged in compulsions to try and reduce my anxiety over these worries.
By the age of 14 or 15, contamination OCD was my main theme. I was obsessed with germs and worried that I would get sick and then make someone I loved sick. I’d wash my hands obsessively until they bled, showered a lot and took hand gel everywhere. I’d avoid places that felt dirty and things like eating out became really difficult.
When I was 18 and started my nursing course, harm OCD took over. I worried that I would accidentally cause harm to someone and experienced intrusive images and thoughts of me harming others. (Remember that OCD is ego-dystonic, meaning these thoughts and images are the opposite of someone’s morals, values, or beliefs). I repeatedly checked my actions, analysed situations and sought reassurance.
Around the age of 19, my religious OCD peaked. I obsessed over whether I had sin or was going to sin and worried that I was going to Hell. I pictured myself in a fiery pit of Hell, burning to death. I compulsively prayed, read the Bible, sought repentance and reassurance. This was complicated by the fact that I’d grown up in a religious family and I couldn’t tell the difference between what was OCD and what was me trying to be a good Christian.
When I entered my first - and only - relationship that would last four and a half years, relationship OCD wrecked havoc in my life. I worried that I didn’t love my partner or was I ‘really’ attracted to him. I would check my own bodily feelings repeatedly, check whether I thought I was attracted to him, sought reassurance from him and others that we made a good couple, but ultimately we ended up breaking up. He did his best to understand and help me, but the persistent doubts were all-consuming.
Then when I was 23, I first experienced Pedophile OCD. I was able to rationalise with myself for a while, but when I was 24, it consumed me completely and I was sectioned under the Mental Health Act. Remember that OCD latches on to your worst fears and the things that are most important to you - for example, my job where I worked with children. I worried obsessively about ‘what if I’m a pedophile’ and ‘what if I’ve done something inappropriate without realising it?’. My anxiety and lack of sleep over this meant that it triggered a psychotic episode, and then another one earlier this year. I ‘confessed’ to people, I researched compulsively, I tried to neutralise the thoughts with positive ones and I even donated to dozens of children’s charities to try to ‘prove’ to myself that I wasn’t this awful person.
Throughout all of these themes, Real Event OCD and False Memory OCD also appeared, making me worry that I had done something I couldn’t remember doing (e.g. committing a crime or touching something contaminated by germs) or worrying that a simple action I’d done had been inappropriate without meaning to. I analysed every scenario a thousand times, sought reassurance and wrote things down to try to remember them accurately.
I hope that this gives you a bit of insight into what OCD can look like and how it can shape-shift between different themes at different stages of people’s life. It is a master at shape-shifting, and it is an incredibly cruel and distressing condition to live with.
I am now a team member of Inside Intrusive, an OCD support company, and am hosting an all-themes OCD support group on Monday 2nd November at 6.30pm with Georgia Edwards (counsellor). You can sign up here.
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