As we learned from these two talks each person experience with OCD is quietly different, but as important and tormenting and distressful as much to the person experience it as to their loved ones. In the first talk called Anxiety Disorder and Panic Attack by Alison Sommer, she said that her OCD causes her “to become anxious or frightened when something wrong or unexpected happens.” (Sommer, 2013).
This means that these thoughts are anxiety inducing, since it causes her a lot of anxiety that she wants to reduce it, that is why she performs rituals, compulsions. Obsessions are involuntary, intrusive disturbing and distracting thoughts, images, or impulses that occur repeatedly in her mind that causes her anxiety. She does not want to have these ideas, but she just can’t stop them. So, then she performs compulsions, which are behaviors or rituals that she feels driven to act out again and again, in order to reduce this anxiety, induce by the thoughts or images. Usually, compulsions are performed to make obsessions go away.
Growing up she was an “anxious, awkward obsessive and sometimes depressed girl.” (Sommer, 2013) Like Alison Sommer said, “As long as I can remember, I’ve always been an obsessive-minded child.” Growing up she suffered from anxiety and depression, and obsessions, these symptoms did not cause her great distress, as she met people and get involved socially, she accepted this as part of who she was. But then she got a concussion while playing hockey. This accident increases the intrusive thoughts that cause her major anxiety, depression, and even an eating disorder. Alison Sommer shows a case of comorbid, when she suffers from OCD, panic attacks, and anxiety disorder. Her OCD causes her to become anxious or frightened when something wrong or unexpected happens. That’s when things took a nosedive from me feeling like normal.
That’s when the intrusive thoughts started getting louder and louder. I was angry all the time. It mostly came out at my husband, but my road rage was also epic. While I was being an ass to other people, I was also being an ass to myself. OCD is a vicious cycle, for example, in the case of Alison she stopped eating and even thinking of changing her behavior causes her massive anxiety and this anxiety lead to panic attacks. These obsessive thoughts that she called “the monkey” kept telling her that she was still fat even thought she was down to a size zero. Attempts to ignore or resists these thoughts may cause more anxiety, and therefore they came back more strongly. Her compulsive behaviors often end up causing anxiety themselves as they become more demanding and time-consuming. The constant worrying, fears, anxiety attacks, rituals and obsessions that causes the individuals great distress, affects their daily life and that of other around them.
Like many people with OCD Julia Britz recognized that her actions and intrusive thoughts were not rationales. She felt confused and ashamed of them. But still she felt a strong need to perform rituals or mental compulsions repeatedly such as washing her hands till their bled, counting one, two, three, and four over and over in her mind. She performed these rituals and mental compulsions to ease her distress or anxiety or suppress the thoughts that germs could make their way to her liver through her skin, which she was certain that would make her other organs fail, she could not get these thoughts out of her head so she performed these rituals to tried and ease the anxiety they gave her. Like she said, “that’s the thing about having OCD it’s a disease that demands perfection.” (Britz, Julia, 2014) And getting to this so call “perfection” demands time and causes great anxiety and distress when things don’t go as planned. The most minuscule thing could trigger these thoughts and then the compulsions.
When she was a kid, she felt panic, unsafe. Her obsessions were not so severe then, but they got worse as she got in her teens. Her obsessions went uncheck because she was ashamed of what other would think if she talks about them, which caused her great distress and anxiety. She has a strong fear of germs, which became an obsession when she could not stop thinking about how they could get in her body and cause her harm. These obsessions were repeated thoughts, urges, or mental images that cause her strong anxiety, so in order to ease the anxiety these obsessions bring her, she performs compulsions, repeated behaviors that a person with OCD feels the urge to do in response to an obsessive thought, such as constantly washing her hands until they bleed.
Since she was very young, she always felt as if there was something “different” and “wrong” with her. She felt unsafe, afraid from the word, and couldn’t understand why others were not. This thoughts of feeling different brought her great discomfort and narrow her world. Until she became good at hiring her behaviors, her feeling and her thought which only cause more distress and anxiety. These fears led to constant rituals that I had to do to try to ease the anxiety that they were causing me.
As we see in these stories intense anxiety and even panic can come whenever the person attempts to stop the ritual. The anxiety builds to such an intense degree that they keep giving in to the thoughts or behaviors. The perform of these rituals only brings momentarily relief, which makes them live in a vicious cycle, in which unwanted thoughts, the obsessions, caused great anxiety which forces them to perform rituals, compulsive behaviors, which gives momentarily relief that will ultimately be disturbed by the unwanted thoughts again.
