Emotional Support Sisters

Depression was my main focus for a long time. I was on antidepressants, went to therapy for depression, and experienced seasonal depression on top of normal depression. Anxiety was a comorbidity that tagged along. For the most part, what will help depression will also help anxiety. 

In my mid-20s, I again found myself struggling with life. It wasn’t anything acute or particularly awful, but it was recurring and my normal solutions weren’t particularly effective. Medicine changes weren’t helping much and I’d gone to a couple of different therapists without feeling like they really helped me. My mom suggested that perhaps I go to therapy specifically for anxiety, rather than depression. One therapist I had gone to had suggested that I was exhibiting some OCD tendencies, so it seemed reasonable that therapy specific to anxiety might be beneficial to me.

I went to a clinic that specialized in OCD and anxiety. I entered this clinic planning to focus on my anxiety, maybe even anxiety that sometimes looked a bit like OCD. I left the evaluation with an OCD diagnosis. Let me tell you, I was not expecting that. I’d had a pretty stable diagnosis throughout my adolescence–and that’s a time when nothing is stable! And yet, this new diagnosis made sense. 

Shortly (I actually have no idea when, it could’ve been weeks before or years before) before this, one of my sisters and I had an interesting conversation in which we discussed our experiences with anxiety. We were both under the assumption that we shared the diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). As I said, most of my mental health problems were depression related, with anxiety playing a supporting role. Her experience was reversed–anxiety with depression. It was informative to see how our symptoms overlapped and how they differed. We were going back and forth with, “Do you ever…?” and “You know how…?” type questions. The answers frequently were, “Oh yeah, I’ve experienced that, but not very often” or “Oh my gosh! I know exactly what you mean!”. We were finding common ground even among our differences. That is until I asked her if her racing thoughts tended to be about specific themes. The flow of conversation halted as she thought about it and responded, “No. My racing thoughts are about all sorts of things. There’s no pattern to them.” I tried to expound on what I meant. Still, with each detail or explanation I added, thinking that something I said would clearly communicate what we surely had in common, she more and more confirmed that we did not have this thing in common.

Turns out, that’s an OCD type of thing. 

Even after my diagnosis, it has never been a main focus, so I still have much to learn. Here are a few things that I learned from therapy at this time.

OCD is, unsurprisingly, comprised of obsessions and compulsions Obsessions are the things that cause anxious feelings and can generally be boiled down to the inability to tolerate uncertainty regarding XYZ thing. Compulsions are what you do to mitigate those feelings, or how you try to eliminate the uncertainty. (Fun fact: compulsions aren’t always observable behaviors, they can also be internal behaviors. Yeah. That still messes with my head.) People with OCD tend to have specific themes or subtypes to their obsessions. The easiest example to think of is an obsession with contamination. Honestly, I get sick of people thinking that OCD is all about cleaning. So please: if you are the kind of person who automatically links cleanliness/neatness with OCD, just stop. There are a lot of others themes. A quick Google search pulls up a list including harm, relationship, religion, and perfectionism.   

At this particular point in time, I have yet to tell anyone the whole story of my obsessions. They are deeply personal and I’m pretty darn good at hiding them. I’m not going to open up to the internet before I open up with my own family, so this is not going to be a tell-all thing. I am willing to say that one of my themes is perfectionism. And it shows up in a lot of different ways. I still don’t have much of a handle on all of it yet.