SignofLazarus, I am not at all against taking meds if you need them or want them, I am just glad I wasn't given anything as a young child because I really needed them and used them when I had postpartum so bad. I have a friend who also has pure O who has been on meds since she was 12 or so (she had a much later onset than me) and from what I can remember her telling me, she has had trouble with them working. I think the brain can get too used to them or become less sensitive to them so you have to keep increasing the dose, etc. I just think that if I had been on them since age 4 then they might have been completely useless when I got that postpartum. But then maybe it wouldn't have happened to begin with. And they don't know how these things affect brain development in children. I am glad they work for you. I have heard that pure O is notoriously resistant to treatment.
I had such bad contamination and pure O OCD in seventh and eighth grade that I should have been hospitalized and if I had had other parents, looking at other parents and how they handled their kids and things, I know they would have taken me straight to the hospital. I begged to be taken to the hospital; I wanted to be sedated so that I could sleep and not feel anything, so I could rest. It was one of the worst experiences of my life. I cannot explain it all. I can't describe it to make anyone else grasp the severity of it. It's one of those things where I wouldn't want someone to take the experience away from me because I learned a lot about myself and about God, but you couldn't pay me to do it again. It haunted me for years, always afraid that something like it would happen again and interfere with adult life activities, like marriage and stuff. I had no counseling by anyone in the mental health field and very little support at home. I didn't talk much at all and was often in my own little world, like I had been when I was four, like I had turned into a different child and that scared my mom. She said so. I internalized a lot of guilt and took a huge hit to my self-esteem over the years following because I was still processing it all, I lost some of that connection with God and how the problems I had would continue to affect my life and how I had to keep it from people and keep it under control to avoid hurting people emotionally by not being available or rejecting their touches. Nobody ever seemed to consider how it was affecting me and my psyche. I wish I had had more help and more acceptance with it from people. Punishment and guilt-tripping only make OCD worse. I probably could have used the meds but I didn't have that option.
I totally get the bizarreness of it. There are things I can't even explain, things I won't explain, and things that I cannot even understand that I have thought. I have had that thing where when driving on a dark road at night, I think about how people hit and run, and then I start to worry that I hit someone and have actually gone back a few times in one night to make sure I didn't hit anyone. There was ño one there, ever, but that fear and that pathological doubt they call it, I couldn't convince myself I hadn't hit anyone. It's the same thought pattern or thought twist as comes with the checking.
Often times, my pure O things are like yours, I think, if I am interpreting the gist of what you meant when you said "I am certain to tell you the most devastating thing you have ever heard" but won't say any more than that for the sake of avoiding triggers.
BuyerBeware, I think, from my perspective as an outsider and an observer of what you have said, I think one place to start is to forgive yourself for your imperfections and to accept yourself as a legitimate person. You are a valid person and you can do whatever it is you might need to do to get through this.
12 Oct 2014, 9:23 pm
