Realising You Are Ready To Tackle Your Oldest Enemy
I have Obsessive
Compulsive Disorder. You need to know that for this post to make
sense. It’s an anxiety disorder which brings obsessions into the
mind of the sufferer (maybe “Is the door locked?” for example).
These cause anxiety, which then leads to the sufferer carrying out
compulsions to make the anxiety go way (checking the door is locked).
The trap is that in checking that the door is locked, the sufferer
embeds the obsession anxiety cycle even more deeply. That’s a
simplistic view of a complex issue, but it will serve for now.
I have suffered with
computer/internet-based OCD from the time that I first had the net way
back in 1998. These have taken many forms but nearly all of them
relate to security/maintenance fears: Is the security software I
installed working, does Windows confirm that it's working, did I log
out of that website, has that icon on my desktop changed or moved
since I last booted, did my PC shut down or did I accidentally put it
into Sleep mode? I could sit here for an hour coming up with all
kinds of examples and that is no exaggeration, I’ve done it before
as an exposure exercise.
To a non-sufferer, it
might all seem quite baffling or even silly, and I can understand
that. The thing is, an anxious mind can twist anything into an
“issue”, and even if you know something is silly or not really
worth worrying about, a body flooded with anxiety has a funny way of
convincing you otherwise. Periods of external stress can make this
even more pronounced, so you are always at the mercy of life (who
isn’t), even in the midst of trying to recover.
I had a bout of PC
related OCD this morning, something that thankfully has become only
occasional rather than daily. There are always the little niggles but
not usually the stuff that causes outright heart-pounding anxiety.
This morning was somewhere in the middle on that scale, not a niggle
but bad enough to make me feel drained and like I was slipping. I
could feel my mind branching off into “Do I check again, do I check
this too, when do I do it, do I delay it?” etc. While I took time
out to rest on my bed, I came to an important realisation: I actually
felt ready to eradicate this variant of OCD from my life once and for
all.
In the last few years,
I have found a number of techniques and approaches that actually help
me shift my mental states without being avoidance-based or
reassurance seeking. I won’t go into them here as this is turning
into an unintended essay as it is. It’s taken twenty or so years
for me to get to this point, by way of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy,
counselling, applying the principles of Acceptance and Commitment
Therapy, Mindfulness, my own adapted version of Yoga nidra,
self-compassion and other things I may be forgetting. My OCD reaches
into many areas of my life, but to date I have gotten on top of my
lock checking, tap tweaking, gas oven checking to name only a few. It
was overcoming the little things, the almost inconsequential things,
that helped me gain a momentum in living with my fears and slowly
accepting that this is how things are for now, and before I knew it,
I had passed through those too.
The biggest areas left
to overcome are my PC/Net-based issues and issues around writing and
being a freelancer. As I rested on my bed awhile ago, I realised that
even after this morning’s flare up, I felt able to go the other
way, to turn away from the compulsions that threatened to drag me
down paths that I didn’t want to go (again) and head the other way,
to overcoming all of the little niggles and rituals that make up my
computer use. My god the energy that would save me! Even if it didn’t
save energy, it would make one hell of a difference to my mental
health and creativity. There is always a fear attached to my use of
a computer, something I live with day in day out, something that I
unintentionally feed with tidbits of respectful fear, rather than the
compassion to bring it along with me while I work, and to let whatever happens, happen.
So that’s what this
post signifies. It’s a way of putting into form something I intend
to act on, to make it more concrete than a passing rush of adrenaline
or a temporary mood. I want to reclaim some mental power and full
productive use of my brain once more, rather than it chugging along like a
computer running a 100 simultaneous anti-virus scans at once. Maybe I
can get back to being myself in the process too.
