Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

Harm O.C.D.

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Starting around the late spring, early summer of 2015, when my ex and I were talking seriously about and then actually searching for a house to buy in the Bay Area, I noticed something odd.

It happened first with writing. Or, to be more precise: It happened when I was editing a client’s book. I am both a writer and a developmental book editor. (A structural or “substantive” editor, focusing on novels and memoir, zooming in on structure, plot, characters, voice, dialogue, setting, ARC, etc.) One day—I think it was early afternoon—sitting in my little upstairs studio apartment on Rand Street in Lake Merritt, in Oakland, California, I found myself feeling compelled to reread a client’s sentence over a few times.

Now, as an editor, it did in fact sometimes happen that, yes, I’d reread sentences a few times, just to make sure I fully comprehended the intent, context, etc. But this felt different. I understood the sentence right away. It wasn’t a difficult line to understand. Yet there was a sincere compulsion, a basic need, to read the line again. And again. And again.

This started out slow: A line here, a line there. But as we got a real estate agent, and started looking at houses—quickly realizing the glaringly obvious truth that we couldn’t afford either San Francisco, Oakland or Berkeley—the obsessive feelings grew worse. It morphed from simply being sentences to all kinds of things. I worried that I left the oven on at home after I’d left. Or that I hadn’t locked the door. I felt a compulsion to wash my hands religiously. Sometimes I forced myself to go home and check: The door was always locked, the oven was always off.

I got distracted for a while in the search for a house. In July we found one in the little town ten minutes north of Berkely called El Cerrito. It was bordering the fairly violent, crime-ridden town of Richmond, but there was a police department and fire department down the road and it was between two BART train stops. We put a bid down, and we’d been lucky and had magically met the owner on accident; the old man and I’d connected immediately and had chatted for half an hour or so. In addition I’d written a very person letter about why we wanted the house. We expected to lose out: In 2015 bidding wars were common and often prices shot up hundreds of thousands of dollars above the asking price. But this one was a lucky find and a lucky catch. We got the place.

*

Things were okay at first but then, around fall of 2015, in our new place, the obsessions returned with a vengeance. This time they happened with a new fun flare: I had violent thoughts, violent cognitive compulsions. The thoughts were entangled and menacing; they rose up and within me like DNA double-helixes (it’s the only way I can think of to explain it). The thoughts would rise up, and I’d try in vain to dispose of them, not think about them, ignore them, eventually plead and even pray for them to go away…all to no avail. In fact, and this is one of the key features of O.C.D.: The harder I tried to push them away, the worse they got; the bigger they grew; the more they pounced.

Sometimes the thoughts were conventional and normal: Sentences again, maybe, or thinking about something I’d said or done in the past and worrying I’d done or said the wrong thing. I worried about the past, the present, the future. The oven. The door being locked. The usual.

But other times the thoughts were terrible. Taboo. Thoughts of throwing a brick at my ex’s head. I don’t know why the brick came into my mind; it seems random and strange, but so did all of these violent, intrusive, unwanted cognitive distortions. Wanting to harm random people. Kill them. Wanting to harm animals, even, and I’ve always loved animals. (And have several.) These thoughts were the worst for obvious reasons:

1.    I worried that I was a moral monster and was a terrible human being

2.    I worried that, if I thought these things, maybe I’d actually act on them and do real-life harm

3.    I couldn’t stop thinking about them

No matter how hard I tried, the thoughts kept coming back. They circled and circled and circled, endlessly, looping forever, making me feel at times like I was going crazy. At one point I thought, If I could get access to a gun, and place the muzzle of that gun to my head, and pull the trigger, the noise, the ceaseless cognitive chatter, would terminate. I craved a deep, black, lush silence. Silence like when you’re backpacking and it’s the middle of the night and you wake up and you’re alone and there’s no sound and the sky is midnight black with white stars bursting above and you just stand there, in awe of anti-noise. That, then, felt to me like God.

But I knew I wouldn’t kill myself. I didn’t actually want to kill myself. What I wanted was silence; peace. Inner calm. Relief. Relief like AA had given me for alcoholism. Like love had given me for loneliness. Like running had given me for my wild-horse worry. Like travel had given me for perspective. Like meditation had given me for internal calm.

I tried many of these things again then, in late 2015, early 2016. Some of them worked briefly—temporarily—but the ruthless thoughts always returned.

*

On January 1^st, 2018—the day after my 35^th birthday—my ex and I broke up. She left. I stayed. Long story. A year later I moved to New York City. During that year I had little of the obsessions because I was deeply grieving the loss of my partner. Four-and-a-half years. A house. A cat. Trips abroad. Backpacking adventures. You name it. I felt distracted. I got, for better and worse, on the online dating apps. I worked hard and saved up money. I cleared out her stuff. I wrote. I planned for Manhattan.

By March 26^th, 2019, I was in The Big Apple. I’d rented my house out. For the first couple months I felt great. Distracted again. I worked for myself, writing and editing, and I’d moved with a $10,000 travel purse from a big book project I’d worked on tirelessly. So I explored religiously. Walked around Central Park. I was staying in an Air BnB on 2^nd Avenue and 105^th in lower East Harlem. I rode subway trains all over the island. I walked everywhere. I saw live Jazz at Smalls in the Village. I went to live comedy at The Comedy Cellar. I people-watched at Washington Square Park. I ogled up at the New York Times building. I stared at the Statue of Liberty from Battery Park. Etc.

But after a while I got comfortable. I was alone again. Living by myself. I didn’t know a soul in town. I was a California Boy at heart. I’d never been cut out for the big city; even in my decade in the Bay Area I’d been in the suburbs; even in San Francisco I’d stuck to the Sunset District burbs near the beach. And yet here I was: In the diurnal heart of chaos.

The obsessive thoughts returned. The frantic, glittery lights and people and business and energy of NYC didn’t help. I constantly worried, yet again, about the oven and my door being locked. My cat had come with me from California and I worried that I hadn’t left him food and water, that he’d somehow magically get out of the apartment and out onto the wild churning streets of the city. My brain forced me to consider terrible scenarios: My cat, out on the streets, run over by a car, no one caring, people even laughing. I imagined, for some reason, my cat being forcibly taken away from me. Lucius, my tuxedo cat, was the closest thing I had (and have) to a son. It sounds silly but it’s true. He’s my baby.

I worried about women—that, in the era of #MeToo, I’d be spurned publicly by a gaggle of women saying I’d done terrible things to them, treated them horribly, back in the day, when I was still drinking, in my teens and twenties. Because I had done some terrible things to women; I had treated many women badly. I’d gotten sober, changed my life, did the 12 steps, made amends with as many of these women as possible. Almost a decade had passed by the time 2019 rolled around, since I’d quit the bottle. I’d “done the work” of changing. I’d treated women much better since then. I’d learned a lot. I respected women now. Yet I still hadn’t been and wasn’t now perfect. I was a man. A deeply wounded, flawed man, probably some type of sex-addict, seriously in need of love, with a Mommy Complex. Sometimes change doesn’t come as completely or as quickly as we’d like.

But of course I wasn’t famous. The things I’d done had been in my teens and early twenties, mostly. No one had been recording anything. Nothing exactly criminal had happened. Or had it? I worried about this. I obsessed about old experiences and interactions. What if? I kept asking myself. What if.

Again, that white noise chatter, the cognitive DNA helixes in the mind, swirling and entangling and interacting like mental poison. I felt like a prisoner in my own brain. I felt trapped. I wanted out. Out of what? My own mind? My own body? My life? Again, it wasn’t death I craved but inner calm, peace, relief, freedom.

*

I got a therapist in NYC. Specifically for O.C.D. Her office was near Columbus Circle, on 52^nd between 8^th and Broadway. I took the 2-3 train down there each week. She was up on the 31^st floor. Very tall, floor-to-ceiling windows exposing the city below, the Columbus statue, the edge of Central Park. She was very nice. Experienced. She’d been a PhD psychologist for 35 years. She was in her late 50s, short, thin, with short gray hair and green eyes. She was eminently calm, kind and reasonable. She had a little lapdog and sometimes the dog sat on my lap as we talked.

Like every therapist I’ve had over the past almost-13 years of sobriety, she didn’t help with my actual problem. There was by now a familiar dynamic. Every therapist I’d had—and in almost 13 years I’ve probably had 25 of them for varying reasons and varying lengths of time and in various cities and towns—fell into the same rough pattern: They swore they’d help me; they mostly listened and I mostly talked; they told me I was great and right and just needed to try this or that; the end. I’m not saying I’ve never gotten anything from therapy: I absolutely have. Deep, wise insight. Courage. The relief of being seen and heard and listened to. Someone to bounce my insanity off of. A sound voice of reason. Actual coping tools to deal with my problems. Advice. (Which supposedly therapists aren’t supposed to give, but there are all kinds of therapists.) Strategies. Lists. Etc.

But the truth is, at the end of the day, when push came to shove: I’d always felt like, more or less, I was my own therapist. I’d always been a little too smart for my own good. I could talk the ears off a donkey. I read voraciously, including Freud, Jung, Dostoevsky (considered by many to be the father of psychology, born decades before Freud), Nietzsche, books by contemporary MFTs and psychologists, mindfulness books, etc. I was also waist-deep in the Bay Area meditation/Buddhism/mindfulness community. I meditated regularly, on and off. I’d done this since 2010, when I got sober.

All of this had helped. None of it had resolved my major life problems. One issue I’d always seen with therapy, and this is profoundly basic, is: It’s a monetary transaction. And this in itself seems problematic to me. Not that this means you can’t get genuine help because they ask for money, but that they want to keep you coming back. Of course they do: That’s the business model. They’re like doctors: Keep that money flowing in. I’m not blaming them. It’s no different than being a writer or book editor. We want money, to survive. But to some degree, when dealing with deeply personal psychological issues, mixing money into the equation, for me, equals questionable.

But this therapist in NYC broke the mold, and for one simple reason. One day, when we were yet again discussing my obsessive thoughts—by then she’d helped me understand that I in fact had “legitimate, diagnosable” O.C.D.—she finally threw her hands up into the air and said, “Have you ever thought of trying medication?”

Now, the answer is: Yes. I had. My mother had had her own experience with meds as a suicidal teen in the 1960s and they’d saved her life. Ditto my father. And my uncle. And my cousin. Etc. But there was something about this woman specifically, right then, in 2019, when I was 36 and on my own in Manhattan, that cracked the walls. In fact: The walls crumbled completely. I couldn’t fight the cognitive battles anymore. I was tired. I needed help.

*

Six weeks later I was doing much better, at last. My therapist had recommended Columbia Presbyterian up in Washington Heights, on Broadway between 165^th and 166^th. I took the bus up there and then walked. It was all free. I was given an assessment and then saw an intern. They agreed that I had O.C.D. and they prescribed me several meds but in the end it was the usual that “worked” (some argue it’s the placebo affect): Prozac. It didn’t “fix” the problem. I still experienced obsessive, ruthlessly circling thoughts, the DNA helixes…except they weren’t as diabolically intense now, and, crucially, I was able to make a conscious decision when they got bad: I could stay in the obsession, or, for the very first time, since that first rereading of the sentence in summer, 2015, I could say NO, and shift my mind to something else. It felt fucking glorious. And also, generally, the volume of the thoughts overall was turned way down.

Then, of course, Covid hit and the lockdowns came in mid-March, 2020. My O.C.D. increased, predictably, but it was manageable as long as I did AA zoom meetings, got exercise every day, stayed connected with friends via the phone, etc. Had I not been a few months into the meds, when the lockdowns hit NYC my guess is I wouldn’t have made it. The volume would have been turned up so high it's nearly impossible to imagine I’d have survived. I’d have leapt off the Brooklyn Bridge. Or walked into traffic on the FDR highway.

But I got through the Covid period.

In June, 2021, I flew to California for the first time in 18 months. It was only a month later that my father was diagnosed with stage four Melanoma and that whole ride/journey unfolded. (A ride I am very much still on.) The O.C.D. died way down for much of the past 18 months due to one simple thing: Distraction. Caring for my father. Focusing on his needs.

But, as before in the past, eventually the obsessive thoughts returned. They’re back with me now. The thoughts range in style and content, from violent and taboo to ordinary and boring, even humorous. The volume is not too high, nor too low. I was but am not currently seeing a therapist. I am doing zoom AA meetings. I stay connected to friends but not as much as I should. Two books lately have been very helpful: Brain Lock, by Jefferey M. Schwartz, M.D. (ironically a book recommended to me by a fellow sober AA member in NYC in 2019 who shared often about his O.C.D. past), and Overcoming Harm O.C.D.: Mindfulness and CBT Tools for Coping With Unwanted Violent Thoughts (Jon Hershfield, MFT).

These books make me feel incredibly un-alone. I think part of the insanity of the O.C.D.—and of Harm O.C.D. especially—is that you feel like you’re somehow completely on your own; that you’re a total and complete circus freak; that you’re some sort of moral monster; that no one will or could ever understand your maddening, crazy, wild, lucid-yet-nutty thoughts. But the truth is: Many, many people struggle with these obsessive-compulsive cognitive distortions. I am not alone. You are not alone. There is help out there. Another great book is Feeling Good, The New Mood Therapy by David D. Burns, M.D. He also explores the arena of CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) and of how to contradict, criticize, and prove false your own limiting cognitive distortions.

I don’t know what your path will be. Meds. No meds. Meditation. Therapy. CBT or not. Nothing. Exercise. Even alcohol. Drugs. Etc. Or maybe it’s writing, reading, general creativity. I’m not here to lecture, preach, or tell you what your path could or should be. I don’t know what it could or should be. All I know is what worked for me. For me, medication and therapy-focused books seem to have, for now, done the trick. And all the other tools I possess, which I’ve already shared with you.

I hope your journey, if it’s anything like mine, will find a landing place, at least for a while. There’s no one-size-fits-all magic bullet or magic pill that fixes everything. At least not in my experience.