Peaceful Co-Existence

    When I was first learning to live with mental illness after my diagnosis, I thought of my OCD and panic disorder as things I needed to control in order to become and then to maintain my wellness. My mindset when it came to my mental health conditions was, "I will fight you, and I will win. I won't let you interfere with my life." I viewed my OCD and panic disorder as some unruly creature that I had to keep on a tight leash, lest it have too much wiggle room and ruin everything I had worked for.

    This "control" approach left me feeling exhausted, hopeless, and miserable more often than not. I was basically just surviving instead of truly thriving and growing because I was constantly on guard, worried that my mental illness was going to break through my carefully held control and undo every little bit of progress I was making. I was never not worried about what my mental illness was doing. (Spoiler: This whole "control" idea I had was really giving my mental illness more control over me and not the other way around.) By always being worried that my control of my mental illness would lapse and result in disaster, I was pretty much consumed by my conditions. This didn't leave enough space for me to nurture my actual self, the person who existed separate from the mental illness that forms who I am as a person with a healthier brain. (Hint: You can't truly heal if you don't nurture your actual self that is separate from the mental illness along with managing the mental illness itself.)

    The thing I realized a little bit later than I should have is that mental illness can't be controlled. None of us can control whether or not we live with mental illness, or whether or not it interferes with our lives from time to time, even with medication. We can, however, control how we interact with our mental illness. This realization prompted a change to a healthier, more accurate way of thinking about and living with my mental health conditions.  

    These days, instead of control, I strive for peaceful co-existence with my OCD and panic disorder. My mindset now is, "You're here. I'm here. Neither of us is going anywhere, so let's figure out how we can have a healthy balance within this space we share." (The shared space is my mind and body.) I allow my anxiety to take up an amount of space that I don't feel is frightening or overwhelming (because your mental illness is going to take up space whether you want it to or not) while I exist and function alongside the mental illness in enough space that allows me to thrive and to grow so that healing can happen. 

    With peaceful co-existence my focus is no longer my mental illness and how it can wreak havoc. My focus now is how I can help myself can feel balanced and "human" all the time, even on a day when I'm experiencing symptoms of my mental health condition. It's a much gentler and kinder way of dealing with my OCD and panic disorder, and it leaves me the space and time I need to learn about my actual self as I heal and grow.

    I'll end with this: When we strive to control our mental illness, the thought seems to be, "This can't be here," which isn't healthy, realistic or kind to ourselves. Life with a mental health condition is hard enough, and we don't need to make it harder by trying to control a thing that isn't controllable. Shifting our thinking so that we strive for peaceful co-existence, where the focus is, "Let's figure out how to find a balance between our actual self and the mental health condition in this shared mind and body," is healthier, more realistic, and kinder to ourselves. 

But...That's Not Real

    Part of living with OCD is dealing with intrusive thoughts and the irrational fears that those intrusive thoughts can cause. And I have a few: demonic possession from the years before I was diagnosed; the whole death by cleaning products issue that I mentioned in a previous post; unknowingly and accidently being the cause of someone's death; and most recently, since we've been living through a major health crisis, contamination. (I'm sure I have more, but let's not go down that rabbit hole today.)

    The pattern is always the same: I have an intrusive thought that is triggered by something, like a situation, a person, an event, or something else external. The intrusive thought leads to an irrational (meaning not based in reality) fear of the thing from the intrusive thoughts. The irrational fear leads to a physical response (AKA my anxiety and panic attacks). Then I'm left in a battle between trying to maintain my healthy patterns or reverting back to old, unhealthy patterns that involve compulsions to make the fear and the physical response stop.

    All the while that I'm experiencing the irrational fear and the anxiety that was caused by my irrational fear, I know it's not rational. I know I don't logically need to be afraid of the thing that I'm afraid of. While my anxiety is building up, even all the way to the tipping point, and sometimes even during a panic attack, I know I don't need to have such fear of the thing. I also know, logically, that I don't need to be anxious about the the thing that I'm anxious about. I am fully aware the whole time I'm lost in the land of irrationality that I'm being irrational, and I hate it. I hate that the fear and the anxiety keep happening anyway even though I know it's not a "real" fear.

    I was talking to my therapist about this very thing in my last phone session with her. I was telling her how much it bothered me to be anxious about a thing, and to know, logically, that I was being irrational while still being unable to stop the anxiety. 

    My therapist was quick to stop me from being too harsh with myself. She explained to me that the brain hasn't yet evolved enough in its most primal areas to be able to tell the difference between a real fear and an imagined fear. The brain just recognizes fear, and then it sounds the alarm so my survival instincts kick in. Then, because I can't run away from or fight my irrational OCD fears, I'm left with anxiety since the extra adrenaline, tense muscles, and all the things that go into the fight or flight response aren't actually put to use.

    So, *I* know my fear is irrational and not a thing that is really likely to happen. My brain, however, does not, and my brain, since it controls what chemicals get released into my body, wins a lot of the time. I can desensitize myself to the fear and lessen the emotional response over time with exposure and response prevention therapy, though, but even with ERP it'll take time for my emotional brain to catch up with my logical brain.

    I'll end with this: Just because somebody knows a fear is irrational doesn't mean that they can just stop having an anxiety response to that fear. A person can be fully aware they're being irrational, and yet they won't be able to stop the fear and the anxiety because the brain doesn't know the difference between a rational (real) and an irrational (not real) fear. The brain only has one blanket response when it comes to fear, and that setting is, "DANGER! DANGER! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!" So, it doesn't matter if the fear isn't actually a "real" thing because the brain treats every fear as real, which can leave a great many of us left to battle anxiety and panic attacks when we can't run from or fight those fears that live inside our heads until we work to desensitize ourselves.

The Child Inside the Grown Up

     Let me start by explaining something about myself. As a child, I had an irrational fear of "chemicals", specifically things like Lysol, Bleach, SOS scrubber pads, floor cleaners, carpet cleaners, toilet cleaners...anything that you would use to clean something besides soap and water or rubbing alcohol or a non-toxic wipe. I was TERRIFIED of them. If I ever accidently stepped on a freshly mopped floor, a freshly shampooed carpet, or touched a freshly bleached dish or countertop, I just knew that was the end of me. I just knew that "chemical" was going to somehow get absorbed into my body through my skin, and that shortly after, I was going to die. (I could even die by showering or bathing in a freshly, chemically-cleaned bathtub because, what if it wasn't rinsed properly, and what if the steam from the hot water made me inhale some toxic fumes from the cleaning products?!) My mom had to rinse our tub multiple times before I would get into it after she cleaned it. 

    (Looking back at things like this, I can see how I may have developed OCD as an adult...)

    Fast-forward to the present, when I decided to be a "real adult" and clean my bathtub myself, with actual cleaning products instead of asking my mom to do it. (My mom knew I had this irrational fear of death by "chemicals" and so was always willing to do it.) Had I grown out of my irrational fear of being exposed to "chemicals"? Apparently not, my friends. I even had gloves on, but that didn't stop the panic that welled up inside me as soon as I was wrist-deep in blue SOS-colored water, trying to scrub my bathtub. I JUST KNEW that "chemical" was going to somehow absorb through my gloves, through my skin, and I was going to die because I had touched it.

    That fear sounds so child-like doesn't it? I never hear of adults being so afraid of things like Lysol, Bleach, SOS scrubber pads, and other cleaning products that they have a panic attack when forced to touch them. I brought that up with my therapist in our phone session this weekend. 

    My therapist was quick to point out that my fear didn't make me childish. She explained that my fear of the cleaning "chemicals" had resulted in traumatic experiences during childhood in which I was sure I was going to die.  As a result of that trauma, the fear part of my brain had sort of unpacked and lived in that young age in which the trauma had occurred. The part that held this fear hadn't grown up along with the rest of me, so to speak, which is often how trauma and fear work inside our minds. So, during this process of cleaning my bathtub, that fear piece of my brain from childhood resurfaced, and I experienced it all over again. 

    Adult me had to meet child me as I completed my triggering task. I had to be kind and understanding with that child self still living inside the adult if I wanted to be able to process my fear. Believing you're going to fall over dead because you accidently got something on your skin is a traumatic experience for anyone, but especially for a child. I made sure not to think to myself that the fear was silly or stupid. (Although I did acknowledge that it was an irrational fear.) I acknowledged that felt like the real fear that my childhood self was sure it was, but then I told myself, "I'm an adult now, and I even have gloves on. I've touched this accidently before and survived. I'll survive this time, too. I don't have to be terrified. I just have to be careful. I've seen my mother use these very cleaning products for years WITHOUT GLOVES, and she's not dead. So, I can be okay."

    I had to meet the fear on it's own level, and then treat it like the developmental age it was frozen in without judgement. Once I did that, and I talked myself through it, I was able to complete the task. By the time I finished, I had stopped crying, at least, and I no longer thought I was going to die. I was still anxious, but I wasn't having a full-on panic attack.

    I'll end with this: As adults, we often judge ourselves for the fears that resulted from trauma (both "small" and "big" traumas) that we experienced as children, especially if that fear plays a part in a mental illness that develops later. We often feel silly or embarrassed if something happens that triggers the memory of that childhood traumatic experience and the fear in our adult lives, and we try to dismiss it. (I felt embarrassed crying into my bathtub as I battled with the fear that I was going to die because of the cleaning products I was using. I felt even worse when I linked the obsessive way I used to worry about that to my OCD diagnosis from adulthood.) Dismissing it won't heal that child-like fear inside us, though. To heal that child-like fear, we have to meet it at the development level it lives in, and we have to be kind to it, to lend it that feeling of adult-like safety before it can heal.