Thanks
Lizinlondon,
I've received a mail from the practice today. There's an appointment planned with a psychologist, an intake for me, on the 14th of October. It's still weeks away, but I'm excited. Also scared, but I think I will be alright. I was able to do all kinds of stuff last weekend, also on the Stage 9 day, when I rewatched a few episodes of the favorite thing and went running and bought some stuff in the city. I'm looking forward to doing more soon. Finally a way to break out of this! :>
Slow steps and steady progress is still more reliable than following a pace that doesn't suit you, the latter of which could even cause you to trip and fall. So it's good that you're doing things at your own tempo. It's the safest way to reach the goal.
--
Torrent, this is going to be a bit long, so I've saved you for last.
I had no idea that emotional contamination OCD was a thing, let alone what it was called, up until somewhere around the 8th or 9th of September, two weeks ago. Three different psychologists and an additional 3 psychiatrists could only tell me that I was a 'complex case', telling me they had never seen anything like it, and all refrained from diagnosing me past Asperger's. They didn't start treatment like CBT, only asking how I was doing for years upon years, while giving me medication that works against OCD and psychosis. When I found out it was a thing, it was only because that day and week the circumstances were terror, and my mind was too. I googled 'perfectionism', read a few wikipedia articles, and afterwards googled 'maladaptive perfectionism'. I found an article on the website of the International OCD Foundation, and because it informed me well I browsed on there a little until I randomly got to the 'Expert Opinions' tab. There was an article called 'Emotional Contamination', and it sounded like what I had from the title, but I didn't expect much. Reading the article though, I recognized almost everything, so I started calling it that way when I made this thread a few days later.
I've linked to the article in the OP, but unfortunately, the link is now broken. It seems the article's link was changed when they reformed the site, which I assume has only happened very recently. I assume you've read it, but if you haven't:
http://iocdf.org/expert-opinions/emotio ... amination/I can talk about myself as an additional example I guess. Maybe you recognize stuff?
You don't have to read it if you don't want to though! I'm only writing it so you will have the option possible. I'm horrible at summarizing, and I haven't defeated the OCD yet (the real-life example in the article has). It's like 8 pages in Word so ehmm...
-scrapes throat-
My situation:2005/2006
I've had ticks for as long as I can remember, but it wasn't until a trip to a faraway country at 12 years old that it aggravated and became entwined with fear to form my problem. My father has several severe personality disorders I'm going to refrain from naming. Name or no name, he broke down the world to only leave himself standing. Being a kid, I held him in high regard. While I wasn't very consciously aware of it up until back then, I had been affected by his unhealthy sides. The first time I opposed him was at that trip. He called me egocentric, and said that no one could truly like me for my character, but that he would still forgive me for being me if I did what he had asked (I don't remember what it was). I objected, and he told me he never wanted to see me again. Upon hearing that I ran away, but it being in a faraway country, my sister soon came after me to get me back to the hotel room. I felt out of place for the rest of the trip's week, cried when nobody was looking, and wrote a little confused bit about it in a traveling diary. I didn't know that this would end up being the beginning of the end.
When I got home (I refer to my mother's place as home, my parents have been divorced since I was 5 years old and she actually took care of us and nurtured us), my room didn't feel the same anymore. I don't know how long it stayed in limbo, but I remember not being able to sleep until my mother did the hocus-pocus spiritual Reiki cleaning stuff. I didn't feel good with all the stuff from pre-trip me being there. It didn't feel like me anymore. I didn't want to be the pre-trip me, because the pre-trip me admired my father and had become egocentric in my eyes. I rejected pre-trip me and my father, which quickly turned radical, because I considered everything associated with pre-trip me and my father to be part of the 'threat', who I didn't want to love and be. I don't know exactly when, but at some point I got rid of all my stuff. I turned against the stuff pre-trip me liked too, and instead chose other things. I changed everything, from favorite food to music taste, and tried to consciously make a new me.
I still had to visit my father in the weekends though, and that caused a lot of terror. My father and pre-trip me had become the OCD-antagonists in my life, and I didn't want to have anything to do with them. I chose different, contaminateable things to do at my father's place, which quickly started 'attacking' me alongside the things I associated with pre-trip me when I got back home. I wanted to keep everything strictly separated, but this was very difficult, especially when thoughts of it were hard to control. Encountering such the associated things felt like an attack, so I chose to fight them. But by fighting the things, I only aggravated the fear and idea that they were wrong. It mixed with a rhythmic tick, and eventually it got to the point where I had to do everything 4 times, even mental battles. Sometimes I could break the physical compulsions down with 'logic' though, which meant I still had to do them, but I could do them seemingly unnoticed due to simplifying them. It lengthened the time I was able to keep fighting like that while it kept aggravating.
Meanwhile I had broken off contact with the friends from primary school. I deliberately acted cold, and spread rumors that I didn't remember anything from before the trip (in order to get them to stop asking). I even convinced my mother and sister of this, so they were less inclined to bring up memories. They didn't understand, because the only thing my father had 'done' was bark at me. I didn't understand either. It wasn't enough to cause a trauma, right?
I tried to be part of a group of girls from my new class. Unfortunately, they didn't include me in the group, and just kept me around like some sort of pet, never telling me to my face that I wasn't accepted. I didn't notice, or didn't want to notice, and I mentally repeated that I wasn't worth anything because of my selfishness, like a mantra. I quit doing my homework. After all, pre-trip me loved school, and I didn't want to be like that. Additionally, everyone around me always 'bragged' that they hadn't done their homework, or hated the teachers, or hadn't learned their stuff before a test. I took them seriously, and thought I should do that too. Maybe I also unconsciously noticed that I didn't fit in, and wanted to fit in by fitting out. After all, rules wouldn't exist if nobody broke them, so it gave me a function. I rather did something wrong the right way, then do something right the wrong way. So I started acting like the school rebel, defying every authority. They sent me to a social worker after I made an authority figure cry. The social worker told my mother that I was suicidal over a ######6 e-mail, without my consent (excuse: 'she was his colleague'). My mother freaked out against the social worker, and she sent me to a practice that did tests and concluded that I had Asperger's.
2006/2007
My father denied it, and also denied that I didn't have a super high IQ like him, the test saying I was a casual above average. He couldn't accept anything being wrong or imperfect about me. He preached endlessly, called the psychologists slurs and also held his speech about how they should all receive a 'bullet through their brains' (something he also said about my mother, but it wasn't uncommon for him to say such things). He forced me to go on websites for high IQ people with problems, saying that those were the only problems I had. I knew it wasn't just Asperger's that bothered me, but I feared everyone would think I was crazy if I told them what was really going on in my mind. If they reacted this bad about something that didn't even seem to be bothering me, I did not want to know how they would react to the actual problem.
After much talking with the principles and headmasters, they decided that I had to go to another school. If I didn't, they would kick me off their school. So I chose another school, dropped a level, and started going there. There has always been a sort of rivalry between the two secondary schools, and because I had heard the pair of girls talk about them negatively (they talked negatively about anyone who wasn't them, but I didn't want to notice the pattern), I started to resent the new school. I rebelled again, and was bullied by the classmates and random students that needed a black sheep. My grades stayed low (except for biology because it was interesting, and the teacher was nice to me), despite the clean slate and the chance to do something about my marks that the principles on the new school had given me.
I was contemplating about whether I wanted to kill myself or my father. The thing that stopped me was the idea that my sister would either be very sad, hate me or still be in the house while I turned on the gas and sneaked away, possibly dying along with the OCD-antagonist. Maybe the idea of reincarnation also scared me from actually doing anything at my lowest point. I wouldn't want to be afraid of someone that could be anyone. Maybe I even had morals, but my point here is that I was very desperate and this became an actual consideration, even though I would have never pulled through with it. Either way, I knew I wasn't able to continue like this. I was lifeless. Being at my father's place had turned into a torture. He was rarely physical, so most of the disciplining was endless preaching, manipulating, etc. It didn't help that he was depressed and that there was never food in the house. I wasn't able to sleep or eat anyway though, due to compulsions. I could only sit on the couch, look at the clock, and even that was a battle. If I blinked, I had to do it four times with the same thoughts. If I gulped, that too. I wasn't allowed to move. Every thought I thought, I had to think four times. I wasn't allowed to think of the things that made me happy, in fear of contaminating it. I didn't want to do anything but sit on the couch, because everything would haunt me at home afterwards. Even back at home it was a struggle, because the memories plagued me and his speeches felt like being brainwashed. I felt filthy and everything related to my father was an enemy. I battled everything that had to do with him, food that was associated with him, his music, games, etc. Because even if I stopped doing stuff at his place, he just continued his depressive life there.
The battles usually involved countering stuff with neutrals, in order to 'undo' their damage. It was usually doing the same thing 3 additional times, but with something neutral in the category. If I had listened to a bad song, I had to listen to 3 different neutral songs when I got home, in order to counter it. If I had touched something bad, I had to touch 3 neutral things. If I had thought about something bad, I had to think of 3 other things. But the compulsions also included doing the things I loved to do 4 times in the same way, because that would mean it was 'undone', and I wouldn’t have affected it (I was feeling unworthy). This last one was also used at moments when I didn't want to exist. Anyway, it was horrible, and heavily inhibited my life. Luckily, at some point my father talked to my mother over the phone and said: "With pleasure, or not at all." My mother took that chance to say: "In that case it's not at all." I didn't have to go there anymore. I was 14 years old at that time.
2007/2009
In that same season, I had to start repeating the previous school year. All my grades had been insufficient, except for biology, which had been very high. My new class was decent. They tried to befriend me, but out of a misplaced sense of 'loyalty' to the pair of girls on the other school, I kept a big distance. I still tried to act nice to them though, except when they tried to touch me, because that would result in me kicking them. They were okay I guess, but I also feared them, in an obsessive kind of way. In my mind the world was divided into elements. It was not psychotic, because I knew it wasn't real, but it still felt secure or something (magical thinking?). I was water. My father and sister (because she continued to go there, I didn't know about what sacrifices she was making for the physical safety of my mother and me back then) were earth. The two girls were fire. The new school and everyone in it were air. Again, I knew it wasn't normal, but it helped with visualizing or organizing the world according to the OCD rules.
A few years went by, and I continued struggling in a slightly different way. My grades went up a little, even though I still refused to learn or do stuff at home. I passed the two following years on the second difficulty level (which was still higher than average). My main OCD-antagonist was still my father, but the new school's people were more commonly resulting me in doing compulsions, because it was there that my most recent experiences with perceived sub-threats were formed.
2009/2010
When I was close to 16 years old, I met my (now ex-) boyfriend. He has Asperger's, the only thing I was officially diagnosed with at the time, and we were both very awkward punk kids. He was nice to me, and I noticed a big contrast between how he treated me and how the pair of girls treated me. The physical love hormone also seemed to work when he was around, which made me feel more courageous. Unfortunately, I caved in when he wasn't in the vicinity. The attacks got a million times worse, especially now that I had something new to deeply care about, which hadn't happened in years (oddly, I cared more about securing my experiences with him and my memories and objects associated than about securing the guy himself... for some reason my OCD doesn't really apply to people, maybe because I don't feel responsible for their perfection). When he went to a summer camp, I became a wreck. I could only sleep when I had taken valium, I shook and cramped up out of fear, battled and kept battling and engaging in every compulsion, not being able to do anything that could distract me. I couldn't even put my clothes on without hours of my mother's assistance.
I played bass guitar in the two girls' band. I had stopped playing the piano years before, because I had enjoyed it a lot pre-trip. I think I had even enjoyed playing the piano after the trip, but it was something I cared about, so after the trip, there had become many compulsions attached to it in order to secure it. Anyway, I had ended up isolating it (one of the first things I isolated). I didn't feel worthy enough, there had become too much pressure and too many compulsions attached to it, and I rather locked it away OC-correct, than risk making unworthy experiences. Anyway, I played bass-guitar at the time. I tried to tell the two girls that I wouldn't be able to go to band practice that week, because I was a wreck due to the boyfriend's absence. They didn't accept it, and were convinced I was only putting up a show, or abandoning them or stuff like that. I explained how I felt at that moment, but they didn't understand, or didn't want to understand, eventually even calling me slurs. They became a new OCD-antagonistic duo.
I moved in with my boyfriend's family, under a foster family agreement. I let go of the elements a little when my boyfriend told me that they weren't realistic and that I had to quit them. He also told me he couldn't live with me if I had compulsions after I had told him personal stuff, so I started going to a psychiatrist and psychologist, and started taking clomipramine. They couldn't pinpoint exactly what I had though, so they only kept an eye on my condition and guided me in the direction of a life without fear without really telling me how and what (one woman even thought it was just puberty). My main fear shifted from my father to the pair of girls. I had rejected them after breaking with them. I had also rejected the me prior to the break, because I didn't want to be that person anymore, regarding her as wrong. It also included radically rejecting and fearing everything related. I was able to make a few new experiences with certain things when my boyfriend was with me though, which helped relativize some fears/put them into a rational perspective. When I was at the foster home, I occasionally felt safe enough to regress to primary school behavior, which felt innocent and relieving to me, but scared the foster family. I could control it, but didn't like shifting back to adolescent just to reassure them, because that felt like 'breaking the fourth wall' and ruining the experience. It helped a lot to see a father just care about his family there though.
I changed back to the first secondary school I had been to, where the boyfriend was doing his last year and I had to choose a profile. It was difficult, because I couldn't go to school if he wasn't there, but the pair of girls and their friends still went to that school too. When he graduated, his mother decided that I had to go to a 'special' school, for mentally complicated students, in order to complete my last year. Unfortunately, I wasn't very consciously included in that decision, or maybe I just wasn't mentally healthy enough to realize the implications, or I was too insecure to propose something they hadn't considered yet. Anyway, it turned out they didn't have any teachers there at the second difficulty level, only for average, below average, and low. They didn't have the complete set of books to learn from for me either, and could barely inform me about how I was supposed to learn things on my level there, because they didn't even officially provide it. They only had one teacher per group, and she seemed to have the intelligence of a potato... but she probably meant well. I stopped going to school, because I thought it wasn't worth my time. I tried to learn by filling in graduation tests from previous years which I had found online, and trying to learn from my mistakes in them for maybe a week. I soon gave up though, I had a difficult time being independent, especially when I didn't know what was required of me, and didn't feel like things were going reliably or according to society's plan.
2010/2011
There was friction between me and the foster family, including my boyfriend. I had been able to reduce the amount of compulsions by a bit, and was gradually doing better, expressing and acting like myself more. They didn't understand what was going on in my mind though, and could not see my progress. They also thought I was doing the OCD stuff on purpose (maybe that gave them hope, believing I could just press a mental button and turn it off). Especially his mother became very angry at me, believing I had intentionally caused her son's depression by choosing to believe in my fears. I just wanted to be normal, so I decided to quit taking clomipramine.
Eventually I decided I had to leave my depressed boyfriend (I'm still under the impression he had always been depressed) and the foster family. My mother took me back in, and my sister had trouble accepting to avoid the content on my long list of triggers, but accepted too. I was still discontinuing clomipramine, and unfortunately, I found a lot of new things to love. Music, films, anime, art… Eventually the price (in mental currency) became too high. I wanted everything to be secure, so I fought endless battles in order to have it OC-correct. I wanted to watch and listen to everything with the right thought, have the right thoughts when saving it to the hard drive, wanted my environment to be OC-correct, wanted to enjoy everything in the best way possible, etc. Whenever I wasn't OC-correct, I spent hours thinking and researching, trying to create logical theories about how something could be safe independently. Or I just tried to do the same thing over and over again until I thought it was good enough.
I thought I had found something that I could rely on when I thought of the definition that 'everything is different'. I secured it with OC-correct thoughts and realization, and obsessively started believing it. I still wasn't able to act like it though, unless I compulsively realized that it was true. Fortunately it could also help ease my mind when I had failed. I continued using counters to everything that wasn't OC-correct, being more radical with my rules every time. I put a very unhealthy amount of pressure on myself and manipulated the way I experienced the things I loved and how they were stored. It all became too much when the rhythmic compulsions came back with the number 3, followed by nightmares about the two bad girls. I couldn't counter nightmares, because I could not control my thoughts when I slept. I tried, but it didn't work. Fearing the day following the night with the nightmare had become contaminated, I wasn't allowed to do anything. I often felt too unworthy to be in my room (which had been cleaned of all the stuff from before I had moved in with the foster family), so I started spending increasingly more time downstairs. The fear became worse, and the days and nights inside the computer chair there were spent tense and shaking again. Eventually, I standardly felt too unworthy to sleep in my room, so I isolated it, along with everything in it.
I started over again in a small room that had been used for storage. My mother had another mattress lying around there that she sometimes slept on, so I used that. I bought new products for a lot of everyday stuff, and things for the computer downstairs. I allowed myself to 'take the leap', and ignore the compulsions (except for the isolation of course). Eventually, I ended up loving the new things I had found during that time, and started doing a lot of compulsions again. My mother sent me to another psychiatrist because the old one went away and she wanted me to start considering medication again. I also talked to a psychiatric nurse, but he triggered my philosophical side, causing me to question my definition and path towards freedom, which was the only positive thing I dared to rely on and did not want to lose. I stopped going there, but continued seeing the psychiatrist. He told me he thought it seemed similar to OCD and also seemed a bit like psychosis, so he prescribed clomipramine again and added risperidone. I almost went knock out from the first milligram, but eventually got used to it. He slowly increased the dose of both, until clomipramine had reached its max (150 mg for me), and risperidone was at 3.5 mg. The problem stayed.
A few months ago, my psychiatrist told me that he did not try to get me into a mental institute because he thought I was too fragile for therapy. I guess I was.
2011/2012
I had been disqualified for labor, and without guidance it was only natural that I didn't graduate entirely. But I still managed to attain part-certificates for a few subjects, like Dutch and English (OCD had inhibited me from choosing biology in my profile the year prior to the graduation year, unfortunately, I didn't make a conscious choice when I chose my profile and ended up with the one that appealed to me the least). I tried again the following year, where I managed to work through my math A book on my own. It was the only subject that didn't have a high trigger risk. Triggers seemed to be everywhere at that point. I had already stopped watching TV and listening to the radio, but contact between other people and going outside or to the city became difficult too, and some things weren't avoidable. The next year I graduated with a complete secondary (high?) school certificate, even though I hadn't gone to school in two years, and had only learned math A's full content. The rest was finished with the knowledge still left from that one year of attending profile determined classes at the regular (first secondary) school a few years before, along with high marks for English and math A, which pulled up the average just enough for me to graduate through the eye of the needle.
I guess I made progress, because I stopped shaking and cramping up. But mental battles and countering were still part of every day.
It was that year that tension rose between my father and sister. I had started appreciating my sister again since the time when my ex-foster family hadn't understood me. She had been raised in the same environment as me, so she could understand me well. She had proven to be reliable back when I was having a hard time, and the same can be said about my mother. They still understand me the best, despite my complexity. Anyway, my sister couldn't handle the pressure of periodically living with my father anymore (she had a two weeks here <> two weeks there agreement). Like I said, he broke down the world, while she was 17 years old, almost 18 (one and a half year younger than me), ready to be set free into that same world he hated. I’m not going to write the details, because it concerns them too, but eventually it got to the point where the incident happened.
2012/2013
My father is now in jail for attempt at murder, but he went into higher appeal, even though he was only facing 3 years jail and 1 year clinical (stupid Dutch justice system with their focus on 'rehabilitation' and mild sentences). Anyway, I discovered something in the turmoil. When under heavy stress, I get adrenaline, and when I have a lot of it in my body, for some reason taking realistic actions suddenly gets priority over OCD inclined behavior. So that means it was possible for me to act realistically. I was mainly focused on keeping an eye on my sister and mother, answering questions etc. I could function reasonably well, and was able to push away any obsessive thought.
After the adrenaline had decreased to normal levels, it came back though. I started isolating and taking 'leaps' more often to release the pressure, but not as drastic as the one back then with my room. It did take the pressure off, but I always fell for the OCD tricks again when I started loving the new stuff, and I had to isolate again as a result. We moved to a different city, away from my father's place (which had only been a few blocks away). I started thinking more, always trying to understand my problem and find a way out. Unfortunately, all that thinking was only good until it had reached a certain point, and from there on it only led to more insecurity. Eventually I even lost the definition that had helped me through the years up until then. I tried to find something, anything I would be able to rely on with minimum security again, but I couldn’t find anything.
2014
But my mother thought it was progress. The definition was obsessive, because I had to realize its meaning with compulsory thoughts whenever I tried to rely on it. She also didn't think it was reality, because humans just naturally need to generalize some things in order to understand stuff, while differentiating other stuff. It's a balance I can't make sense of, but it's still part of the normal world. There was also the bread in the oven example which I hadn't thought about yet, which was the final nail on the coffin that caused me to give up on trying to decide that I believed the former definition again. I guess it was the first step in stopping to care, because I really couldn't figure an OC-correct way out anymore, and gave that up. I fully focused on 'realistic' (no one in real life would analyze this stuff but still) logic instead, trying to understand perception and objective reality, along with the structures of my past, perfectionism, restrictions and its implications, minimum security and why, along with a lot of whys in general.
Criticism increased. Before, I had held the (thought to be OC-correct) past in high regard. I abided by the isolation as if it was sacred. But continuous criticism broke down my belief in its correctness, my memories of it got corrupted and my appreciation for it faded. I was still desperately searching for something OC-correct that made life permanently worth living, so I could give up the OCD and start doing stuff. The more I searched for that, the more I lost. Eventually, I had nothing thought-to-be perfect, safe, and reliable to love left.
I forgot to mention that the emotional contamination had gradually been mixed with a germophobia, which caused a new kind of compulsions. 'B-days' and 'C-days' are days on which the circumstances aren't clean enough for me to be allowed to do the stuff I liked the most. Occasionally I am not allowed to do anything nice at all, especially because the circumstances increase the bad thoughts/attacks. It has also made me obsessively afraid of a certain kind of bugs that are more common and more annoying than arachnids.
Anyway, it seemed like a lost cause trying to be OC-correct. I lost hope. I gave up. I stopped searching, because my life felt void without being able to appreciate the past I had thought I had enjoyed, the stuff I had isolated, the things I had experienced. I wasn't complete. Maybe I had never been complete.
Every day was lifeless. But sometimes I caught myself smiling, when I was doing stuff and didn't care that it wasn't perfect. But I kept seeing the flaws afterwards, and that lessened its value more quickly than ever. On some hopeful moments I tried to put the past behind me and create new OC-correct experiences. Sometimes it almost seemed like I succeeded. But never really. Maybe it’s weak of me to give up on the possibility of perfection. But I'm tired of trying, I'm tired of rejecting and criticizing, I'm tired of only seeing the flaws. I'm tired of sitting still, I'm tired of being afraid all the time, I'm tired of feeling inferior. I'm tired of gaining hope just to have it broken down again. I'm tired of loving things, feeling the magic of life, only to have it trampled on by the OCD. I'm tired of this endless war, the battlefields I've created, the things that have been lost and sacrificed. I've lost all innocence, every connection to natural life. I've turned into a monster, and I hate it.
And that's where I am now. Finally able to let go of the OCD I guess, which is a good thing. I feel bad though, and trapped, unless I have distraction and/or I don't care.Sorry, I'm still working on a happy ending
But maybe this can be useful somehow? Despite it's length? I hope I haven't overloaded you with personal info...
--
Right now I'm staying at my grandmother's place. She has been contaminated for years, but not an OCD-antagonist. It's going reasonably well given the circumstances. There are workers repairing our own house, which means the doors are open, the bugs are inside and it's a complete mess, and that's why I'm staying at my grandmother's place (even though there's bugs like that here too, fml). I spent the entire day writing my story down, but I wouldn't have been able to do much anyway, because I'm here. I have no idea what I'll do tomorrow. I've put all kinds of B/C-day music on my MP3-player, so at least that will be good. Maybe I'll walk for a while. Or watch a series I can't get into. Or read a newspaper. Or lurk somewhere on the web. I had to buy a new mouse for my laptop today, which was a bit of a challenge, because then it's being introduced into my life in a contaminated situation. But I kinda like it. I accidentally chose the pretty one, which was white with several black lines that seem to be forming an abstract motherboard-like pattern on the lowest third. It's pretty obedient for a mouse. Perhaps that is because it still has a leash.
(just kidding)
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