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Soon after my daughter was born, and then more after her brother came along, I started becoming very concerned with keeping everything they could possibly touch, very clean. Especially after 9/11 and all the news stories about weaponized viruses escaping from military labs, I was scared that maybe someone arriving on a plane from the other side of the planet would transfer a new illness to someone who would then travel to the nearby town and then when we went to the store the children would touch something this person had coughed on and they'd put their hands in their mouth and become ill and die. I knew this was extremely unlikely but my reasoning was, hey it could happen, and better make sure to keep their hands clean, it was a small cost relative to having them die. The problem was that this small relative cost vs death grew into a large one relative to having ease in everyday life. I would wash every last thing which was brought into the house from someplace where there was people (nature was fine, i.e. the garden, the beach and the forest, because there was nobody there so no killer man-made disease), and either I'd insist that people change clothes when coming in (family) or I would meticulously clean afterwards and during this time the children were forbidden from touching anything in the room where the visitors had been. This eventually became the second thing that got my ex-wife very frustrated, because it became very difficult to have her friends or the children's friends over (the main disagreement we had was about sending them to school, and I wasn't easy to discuss with because at the time I was full-on FDR righteous). This went on for years, and no matter how hard I tried to relax and stop myself from cleaning everything, I couldn't do it. It's only recently, as I'm getting more proficient with NVC and as something that a friend helped me understand has been sinking in, that this compulsion has been going away. I understood that it was my need for safety that was driving me to act that way, because if anything happened to my children that I could possibly have prevented by being more careful, then others would disapprove of me, and for me not having the approval of people around me meant my safety was at risk. I guess that's a strategy I came to depend on in childhood, growing up in a family where I could get attacked for doing things that my dad interpreted as attacks, from his own childhood. Also if I failed my children that way, I wouldn't be able to respect myself at all, because I would be such a failure as a parent. So understanding that it was my need for safety and for self-respect that was at risk here, because of the reasoning I was using without having consciously thought about it, helped me realize that what I was doing made perfect sense, given the premises I had. Also, learning the NVC perspective has allowed me no longer see people as enemies but instead understand that just like me they're trying to get similar needs met, often with as convoluted strategies as my own, and the result is that I no longer fear that crazy military scientists will create killer diseases, and even if they do I can now think more clearly about this without getting overwhelmed by fear and I recognize that I can't possibly protect my children from every disaster I can imagine. So the result of learning all this is that now I don't get so stressed about cleaning everything, for example I feel fine now when my son takes his headphones out of his school backpack and plugs them in the computer, I don't jump in and wipe them with alcohol anymore. I'm still careful about washing hands before preparing food and eating, I didn't go completely the opposite way, and even though it's a gradual process for me I'm confident that soon I won't be bothered by this problem anymore. Thanks for your time, I hope this story may have some value to others.