We are making progress, Jackie and I. Week after week, she tightens the limits on my compulsive rituals, and week after week, I learn I can survive with that much less checking and rechecking of everything around me. We pore over charts of my time spent ritualizing and plots of the intensity levels of my various obsessions. There’s no question things are moving in the right direction. “But it’s time to notch up your discomfort level,” Jackie tells me one morning in late December, four months after our first session together. “I want you to start tackling some serious exposure/response-prevention exercises.”
I stare at her and shake my head. “You’re kidding, right?”
“No. And don’t look surprised. We talked about this. You need to start exposing yourself to more of your fears.”
“Why? They seem to find me just fine on their own.”
“But that’s the point,” Jackie says. “You’ll only be ready to deal with them when they hit if you’ve conditioned yourself first.”
“And I do that by … ?” I know the answer.
“Learning to sit with the fear. If driving down narrow streets still gives you the creeps, then we need to send you down five of them a day and keep you from looping back for a look at the damage. Do this enough and you’ll desensitize to the fear. Trust me.”
Trust is not the issue here. I am exhausted—physically, mentally, emotionally—in ways I didn’t even know were possible. I’m in no mood to pick fights with Doubt. I tell Jackie that her timing stinks, that I’m just starting to feel as if life is getting back to normal.
“Normal, huh? You really think so?”
“Yeah,” I say, but I see the trap I’m walking into. I know she thinks I’m in denial about the extent of my challenges.
“Okay, then let’s take a little inventory, shall we.”
Jackie is all smiles now as she scribbles a note on my weekly homework sheet. She always takes such pleasure in calling my bluffs.
“Here’s the deal,” she says. “I want you to keep a log of every OCD episode you battle over the next seven days.”
“That’s it?” I smart off, knowing it’s not.
“Almost. I also want you to go over your list when you’re done, then try to make sense of it relative to everything we’ve been talking about.”
Over the course of our work together, Jackie sent me home with dozens of assignments—far too many of which I blew off entirely without ever confessing as much to her. This particular logging exercise, however, was one I gave my full attention to. And today, with the benefit of hindsight, I can see how significant it proved to be, largely because of what it made me face: the reality of just how much of my life Doubt had stolen from me.
I’ll spare you the tedious details of my journal entries for that week (you’re welcome), but I can’t help thinking that a quick overview here might prove as helpful to you as Jackie’s exercise was for me—at least in understanding the complexity of my day-to-day life in the mid-1990s. Really, it all boiled down to six sets of time-gobbling compulsions, each one leading back to a single all-too-familiar obsession.
The Obsession. I can’t speak for all obsessive-compulsives, but among my own circle of OC friends, we each have a root obsession—the heart of every other obsession we might ever have, and the driving force behind all our rituals. I sometimes think of it as the calculated work of our internal bully, the single most effective weapon our nemesis, Doubt, can conjure up to taunt us with. For me that root obsession has always been this: What if, through my negligence, I unknowingly harmed, or might harm, someone or something? The boat incident, the road cone episode, the Hawaii hubcap, the disappearing homeless guy—all fit this boilerplate to a tee, wouldn’t you agree?
Most obsessions are triggered by particular events, and my notes from Jackie’s logging exercise are filled with those: lane changes, spilled liquids, mysterious sounds, and so on. But as I also noted that week, some taunting thoughts are really more like “envelope obsessions.”
I can’t remember now if that’s a Jackie term or one I’ve coined along the way. In either case, I’ve come to use it to describe those rotating intrusive thoughts that seem to lurk at the outer envelope of my consciousness. They’re always right there, quietly waiting for a lull in the chaos of daily triggers, ready to strike at a moment’s notice. The end of the day, first thing in the morning, the middle of the night: all are prime times for their attacks, as are vacations and traditionally “happy” occasions of any kind. When they hit, they hit hard—no matter how many times they’ve hit before—and they always lodge themselves front and center until a new, more pressing thought is ready to take over. This could be minutes, hours, or even days.
By the time of this logging exercise, most of the episodes you’ve read about had slipped into such an envelope mode, each demanding far less of my attention than it initially did, but each still packing every bit of its original punch.
Mental Checking. I know that by now you’ve got the gist of this one. The virtual tape reviews. The constant mental re-creations of one event after another, always in some futile attempt to un-stick some stuck thought about harm. Play. Rewind. Play. Rewind. You get it. But there’s one other layer to this compulsion you should also know about. I call it “life reviewing,” and it stems from Doubt’s most unsolvable question: What if you’re just a horrible person? Only one way to be sure, it tells me, and that’s to look back on my life and rule out the possibility that I am, in fact, truly despicable.
Conveniently enough, this introduces a lifetime’s worth of tapes, and back in the mid-1990s, I spent countless hours going through them, attempting to ferret out the evidence tapes—like the Potato Bug sequence that haunted me many a night. I am five years old in this tape, playing by myself in my parents’ backyard planter box. I am pulling a potato bug apart into two even sections, as I learned to do from a group of kids on the kindergarten playground just hours before. With the fascination of a scientist, I am observing the phenomenon that the other kids had noted: that the two separated halves continue to move about independently.
Then at once there’s a woman’s voice. A familiar voice. It is my mother’s.
“What on earth are you doing? How would you like it if someone did that to you?”
The tape ends here. But another one picks things up many hours later in the middle of the night. In this one, I am hiding beneath my covers, fighting off a persistent image of some elephant-like creature tearing my body in two. Mom’s sweet voice is providing a soundtrack, with her words looping like a toy train on the smallest of tracks: How would you like it if someone did that to you? How would you like it if someone did that to you? How would you like it …? I am at the same time ashamed and terrified.
The two tapes offer few details beyond these, but reviewing them as an adult, I always needed more. I wanted to back up the first tape to the schoolyard scene and verify that someone else was leading this cruel and unusual experiment. Was I really only following their lead, or was mine the twisted mind that invented the idea?
I would replay the sequences again and again until, out of frustration, I’d switch to another time in my life and yet another tape I couldn’t stop myself from reviewing.
Physical Checking. This is both the most common compulsion of an OCD checker, and the one that my normal friends tell me they can most relate to. “I’ve doubled back to my car to check the parking brake,” one of them will say.
“Yeah, but have you ever walked back for a second look? Or a third, fourth, or fifth?” I’ll ask them.
And that’s when the inevitable raised eyebrows confirm for me the difference between people like them and people like me.
As is typical with OCD, a good many of my checking drills quickly morphed into checking rituals—that is, especially repetitive and predictable compulsions. By the time of Jackie’s exercise, I had compiled quite a long list of these: inspecting my car from bumper to bumper after every trip; returning to the location of nearly every pothole I hit; diagramming on paper every problematic lane change, turn, or other driving challenge; checking and rechecking every door and appliance at home before leaving for a weekend; and combing the papers for crimes and accidents I might be responsible for. (Pretty ironic for a guy in the news biz, eh?)
Reassurance Seeking. “But are you sure …?” Good God, did I use those four words ad nauseam! But are you sure we locked the front door? But are you sure that was just a pothole? But are you sure I had nothing to do with the sirens?
The questions were usually directed at Samantha, often over the phone in one of so many embarrassing calls from work. “I’ve already told you I think it’s fine,” she’d tell me, trying to walk that fine line between helping me cope, and counterproductively enabling my checking. “Yeah, but are you sure?” I’d plead. One assurance was never enough. I can think of no checking compulsion more shame-producing for me, or more tiring and challenging for Samantha. Jackie would later guide us both in bringing this under control.
Confessing. I’m sure Freud and his colleagues could offer plenty of explanations as to why OCs like me always feel so compelled to confess; all I know is that, at the time of this logging exercise, I could seldom stop myself. My confessing was a compulsion in every sense of the term, and it mattered not how inconsequential my “wrongdoing” might have been, or how convinced I might have grown that the other party really wouldn’t care. Confessions always offered me quick, if only temporary, relief, since they robbed Doubt of an opportunity to suggest I would need to come clean. Take the dripping umbrella incident I noted on my log during this week: I’d been in a supermarket checkout line when I’d happened to notice two or three dime-sized drops of water by my feet. This was my fault, and people could slip and die if I didn’t tell someone, so I apologized to the checkout clerk, who thanked me for telling him and called for a “Code seven in aisle three.” Things got pretty embarrassing, as I recall, when the cleanup guy couldn’t even find my “puddle.”
Fixing/Reporting. Close cousins of confessing, these two particular compulsions have always been the domain of my alter ego, Captain Hazard, doing his all to save the world from itself. A real crowd-pleaser for those lucky enough to see this superhero in action.
In the early days, I was only responsible for those hazards I’d actually created, like the supermarket umbrella puddle, or the dangerous “chocolate mine” I’d set that same week, when I dropped a piece of my Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup while walking through downtown San Francisco. (I kid you not: I spent five minutes hunched over in pouring rain, combing a busy street corner, determined to find the remnants so no one could be hurt by them. Just how, even I can’t begin to fathom.) But somewhere along the way, Captain Hazard expanded his scope to include any possible trouble spot with which he’d had contact. From then on, if I’d step on a single shard from a broken bottle, I’d need to get a broom and clean up every other piece up and down the street. Glass is usually easy enough to avoid, but twigs and rocks are also potential hazards—a bike tire could always hit one and lose its traction—and this meant dealing with just about everything I’d step on, short of the concrete itself. Sadly, walking soon presented almost as many challenges as getting behind the wheel of a car.
My direct-contact criterion also lead to my responsibility for every wobbly or broken chair I sat in—and man, did I have a knack for finding the one chair in a theater with half its hinge missing. Restaurant managers and theater ushers heard from me frequently.
And then, when I got too damn good at avoiding contact with even the smallest of hazards, I managed to begin obsessing about those I just happened to spot. I mean, who was I to pretend I didn’t see that nail lying there? So now I’d have to fix these potential dangers too—or at least report them to someone.
No rest for Captain Hazard.
Avoiding. Technically, I suppose, this is not so much a compulsion as a consistent by-product of many of them. An OC grows to hate his obsessive-compulsive cycles so much that he’ll do anything to steer clear of them. So while a trip to a McDonald’s Playland might have made my daughters, and therefore me, very happy in those days, it usually wasn’t worth the price I’d have to pay if I had to get near other kids I might harm. Stay away and I could avoid the inevitable What if I hurt the kids? thoughts and the various mental and physical checking drills that would surely follow. Unfortunately, avoidance is what psychologists call a negative reinforcement. Flee at the peak of fear, and you can’t help but reinforce its power.
Good avoidance, I learned, takes a great deal of planning. Certain bad things are bound to happen in the future. Things like homeless people’s deaths, unexplained accidents, and mysterious fires. Ironically, in my chosen profession, I hear about, and often report on, a great many routine tragedies. The odds are pretty good that a fair number of them will fall within the geographic and time “proximities”—many blocks and several hours, respectively—of my various car trips, thereby making me a possible suspect.
But wait, there’s more. Like potential hazard issues, these issues managed to grow in breadth and scope, and it wasn’t long before they extended far beyond driving. Soon structure fires on a block I’d walked down could become the result of my negligence (perhaps I’d kicked a gas main by accident). Heart attacks within a building I’d visited might later prove to be the result of something I’d said or done. No situation was outside my ability to have brought about harm, and reasonable association was all the proof I’d need. Bottom line: it was always best to protect myself from future trouble by avoiding the homeless and high-crime areas, and by checking on any situations that could become news down the road. Best possible approach: leave the house as seldom as possible.
Looking back, it’s hard to say just how much of all this I managed to put together for myself during the seven days of my logging assignment. I do know that the whole thing had the sobering impact of a hot shower gone cold, and that it would prove the perfect precursor for the exercise Jackie had waiting for me next.