The first time I had a therapist talk about OCD, it wasn’t a shock, I had put the pieces together and it was pretty obvious that’s what was going on. BUT, I was 18 at the time. I had just started college, I had decided to stay home with my parents and commute to college. It was a weird time, all of my friends were going away to college, I was sort of a mess. Just lonely and trying to figure stuff out. Needless to say the OCD was forefront, I was spiraling, I couldn’t get out of my own way. I wasn’t happy but couldn’t figure out what I wanted and that’s when the OCD tends to be at its worst.

What pushed the need for a therapist was when I had been spending days (sometimes like 4 or 5 days) in a row sleeping in my street clothes on the couch. Then going to school or work in the same clothes as the day before. I remember actually telling my family that it was easier to just stay on the couch in my dirty clothes, all because my routine getting from the couch to the shower to my bedroom to getting into bed would take nearly 2 hours and it was just too exhausting sometimes. At this point I was just a slave to the OCD. There were probably 50 or 60 rituals I needed to complete every night or I wasn’t allowed to sleep. I didn’t deserve to sleep. Every ritual needed to be completed in order to protect everyone before I could sleep. I was even counting and flattening out little rope tassels on the sides of a small rug we had in the kitchen. Because my family walked on that rug a lot, and if there was a twisted tassel, someone could twist an ankle. If there was a bent tassel, someone could break a bone. It was my job to keep that from happening.

At our first meeting, I was giving the overview of who I am, the rituals and behaviors, and I was stopped by the therapist who simply said, without any hesitation, “That sounds like classic Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Congratulations, you’re a statistic.” Huh?? I’m a what?! He explained that most people who are diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder are females between the ages of 18-20. Welp, I fell right into that category…I somehow felt seen but still incredibly alone.

The therapist was cool but I don’t think I fully knew how therapy worked at the time. If there’s one thing to learn about therapy, it’s that you 100% get out of it what you put into it. And I am very much the “I’m fine, everything is fine!” type. Well, how is a therapist supposed to help you if everything is fine? If you’re totally great, then why are you even there??

I did tell him about some of the rituals and he suggested a workbook called Talking Back to OCD by John S. March, MD. It was actually a good tool. It had little exercises to try and take on one little ritual at a time. For example, instead of washing your hands 3 times, try washing them 2 times. Seems simple right? Wrong! I was all for it when I was sitting in a clean office with a therapist, but when I got home where all of my rituals are, it was too overwhelming to try and push back against them. He asked during a session once if I had any triggers within his office that we could try and address and the answer was no. It’s not quite how it works. The deeper triggers and contaminations inevitably appear when I’m in a place for a while. They don’t immediately appear when I enter a space. Yes, surface level germs from his doorknob and chair that others have sat in were something we could talk about. But I could easily just go home and shower. That wouldn’t really help the situation. I couldn’t do the homework, I got defiant. I just kept thinking “Yeah cool, it’s really easy to tell someone to just do these little exercises and activities and everything will be fine. They obviously don’t know!!” Needless to say, I quit therapy after a month or two.