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.
