Therapy - 2011 in review

[Please note - This blog post was pre written in advance. I have used a Blogger tool to schedule when these posts appear. Pre written posts will appear once a day until they run out! I may go into labour any day now and am not necessarily monitoring this blog, able to publish or respond to comments or correct errors. Normal service may or may not be resumed depending on how this whole being a mummy thing goes]

So in my last post I reviewed how at the start of 2011 I spent much of my time trimming back my life and my commitments, refocusing my energies on the key areas so that I could focus my remaining strength on my therapy.

Long time readers of this blog will know that my path through Cognitive Behavioural Therapy wasn't straight forward and that I faced frustrations along the way.

Firstly was getting treatment. My G.P was sympathetic and put me forward for treatment straight away and I was quickly assessed by the mental health service and got the green light for treatment. Unfortunately due to an administrative error I fell off the list and ended up not having treatment for some months.

Once I'd got over this hurdle and begun treatment I faced other problems. A surprise pregnancy and the bitch curse that is morning sickness made some of my early sessions very difficult. Also, as previous posts will attest, I found the pace of therapy slow. At times I wondered if my therapist really understood my needs and I had doubts that the process, with its narrow focus on current problems rather then wider general issues, was really going to be of any help to me at all.

However my last sessions, which happened a few months ago, changed all that. The process my therapist taught me started to work. It was a combination of relaxation exercises and techniques coupled with small tiny steps to work through my anxiety problems. I applied the steps to my life and found myself able to do things that OCD had prevented me from doing before. Simple things I couldn't do before like preparing a cup of tea for someone else was now possible.

The sense of liberation and feeling of confidence that I gained from these little victories were highly significant for me. Before this I'd felt a sense of hopelessness about my condition. I'd freely admitted at the start of my therapy that I had serious doubts that it could work. I doubted the process and I doubted myself. I'd struggled with my condition for so many years and found the demon so strong that I couldn't imagine a life without it.

However winning those tiny victories over OCD proved that I now had a working tool I could use against it. I had been given a way to change myself so that the OCD couldn't hurt me as much any more and I could use it to live my life in the way I wanted to. I saw that I could use the same process against my OCD in whatever guise it took on. In short there was a way out.

As a result of this the me who started 2011 is totally different from the person I am now. The difference is striking and as I lay in bed yesterday trying to breath through this horrible cold even I was surprised at the change in myself. I've come to take the 'new' me for granted and I'd forgotten just how much effort and struggle I'd had to put into changing.

Since my therapy ended I've been using the techniques I was given and applying them whenever areas of anxiety or OCD like thoughts and behaviour have occurred with complete success.

Just as the life of the caterpillar must seem almost alien to the butterfly the life of someone crumpled by OCD seems almost alien to me. I'm now a new person with a new life and that's a really good thing.

Next time - Baby shaped wrecking balls.

The year in review

Yesterday was Christmas Day, a day which should normally be spent loafing on the sofa watching mindless TV and eating too much. A day of relaxation and self indulgence, of fun and frolics. Well to be fair that's the non religious British version of Christmas Day - no doubt true Christians view it differently!

My day was different then normal because I was ill with a horrible cold and I spent most of the day in bed. I wasn't in the mood to distract myself with food and I've found this years TV offerings to be dire. I ended up in a reflective mood and started to think about the past year and what I want for 2012.

My first thought was - crikey! It's been a heck of a busy 2011 and things have really really changed!

This time last year I was facing a serious mental health crisis. My undiagnosed OCD and generalised anxiety disorder held my better self firmly in its cold steely grasp. Over the previous decade and more I'd just about survived and limped through the days, but now I was really starting to struggle. The combination of not seeking treatment, not really seeing that I needed help and a combination of other pressures in my life were pushing me down the slippery slope to a complete breakdown.

Funnily enough it was Christmas 2010 and an incident with Christmas cards that got me to see that I truly needed help and needed to make some changes and at the start of 2011 I started on the path to get the help I need.

It was a painful and horrible path on which I have had to face many demons and make many sacrifices. The most painful and difficult thing was acknowledging that I was weak and that I needed to take time out to heal. It's here that I began to see that I'd internalised so many of the prejudices that our society has about people with mental illnesses.  If someone has a serious physical illness no one thinks badly of them if they need to take time out to heal themselves. It's acceptable to retreat and focus on healing. However if you need to do this for a mental illness in many peoples eyes it's 'weakness'.

I realised that I am weak and that if I was ever going to get better I couldn't let the feelings of shame or inadequacy that others tried to impose on me from stopping me getting the help I needed. I needed to refocus my energies inwards rather then outwards and while I was healing I needed to focus what little energy I did have on the areas that mattered.

So over the next few months I retreated on many fronts of my life. I completely surrendered one volunteer position I had and almost completely gave up another; reducing my support down to the one thing I could do  from my own home.  I made the choice to give up working outside the home so that I could focus my remaining energy on helping my husband in his new business. I made the commitment to start treatment and to be open with the people in my life about my illness so that I wasn't wasting energy on hiding it any more.

Now that 2011 is coming to an end and I look back on these decisions I'm really really glad I made them. If I were to write an autobiography the chapter covering 2011 would probably be called 'The breakdown that never was' or 'How I stopped my self falling off the cliff into the abyss by the strength of my fingernails'.

I truly believe that if I'd continued with my life in the way it was shaped at the end of 2010 that I'd have had a full and total breakdown and possibly required hospitalisation. I just couldn't do it. I wasn't just at the end of my tether, my tether was fraying and about to snap in that very dramatic way it does in films when someone is hanging off a cliff. (Not like in 'Cliff hanger' though. That film was rubbish. Who climbs a mountain in a string vest for goodness sake).  At best I would have limped on as I was limping on before, making myself and others around me more and more unhappy until some sort of crisis emerged.

As it was, cutting back and retreating helped to stop all of this. I guess its a bit like spinning plates (sorry I've run out of rope metaphors). I made the choice to keep a few key plates spinning and letting the superfluous ones fall to the ground. Doing this meant that I kept my life going and didn't damage myself or my mental health further. It meant that I could continue to take pleasure in the world while having therapy for my illness at the same time.

I think my Grandma could have summed it up best with a saying she loves. 'A stitch in time saves nine'. (That's practically a rope metaphor by the way, sewing thread is like rope only smaller). 


Next time - Therapy and Baby Shaped Wrecking balls.

OCD Frustration

I've hit a wall with my OCD today. My husband has a friend over and my contamination fears are rearing their ugly heads again.

My thought process goes something like this.

Husband's guest will come over to our house. 


Husbands guest might get sick from something in our house. 


I must clean the house from top to bottom (which I did). 


Husbands guest might get sick if I cook for him or make him a drink (despite the fact I will happily cook for husband and myself and we never get sick). 


I will not cook for him or make him a drink despite the fact that it's dinner time. (Husband has made all the drinks)


I wish husband's guest wasn't here despite him being a lovely person who is helping husbands career. 


I hate this because I know on one level that it is illogical but I can't break the pattern. So I've made my husband order a takeaway which totally contradicts my aim to make cheap meals.

I could have quiet easily made something there is plenty of food in the house but I'm just frozen with fear. I feel so disappointed in myself. What sort of hospitality am I offering to our much loved friends? None.

OCD is a monster.

OCD in the media

In today's Daily Mail is an article about a woman's experience of suffering from OCD. It's a pretty moving and sad article. Of course I'm grateful everytime that the media highlights OCD because I hope that it provides a wake up call for people who might be suffering from OCD but don't know it.

Unfortunately I think the headline is a bit sensationalist and doesn't really match the tone of the article. It's pretty aggressive and accuses Sarah, the OCD sufferer, of nearly destroying her marriage. The title says "Sarah's obsessive, irrational fears have almost destroyed her marriage . . . Would YOU stay with a wife terrified of everyday life?" For a start her partner says that while he's found it hard to cope with her OCD, he has sought help, tried to understand her condition, been supportive and ultimately loves her and doesn't want to leave her. To me, the title suggests that the opposite and that there is something almost miraculous in a person wanting to stay with a person who has OCD.

Daily Mail article

How did I get here?

This is a long story and a topic with many different layers so I'll probably come back to this subject more then once. However here is the essence of it. When I say essence that's somewhat misleading. This is a bloody long post in fact but once I started writing it, I felt I had to lay it all out there properly in one go. You don't have to read it all in one go however. You should probably stop to make a cup of tea or to go to the loo. I will post handy photographs of cups of tea part way through to indicate when you might like to go for a break. You don't have to however and I'm not suggesting it improves the reading experience. I'm generally of the view that tea improves everything - but I'm not bossy - do what you like, but as a general rule you should keep yourself reasonably hydrated.

Anyway . . .

There wasn't one moment or one major life event that led me to becoming a housebod, rather a series of moments of reflection, chain reactions and life circumstances.

I've never really been much of a questioner or a radical. I always, well most of the time, did what I was told. When I was young I went to school and passed my exams and got a place at University while planning to have a career. I did all of these things because I was never presented with any other option. For my generation of women from my social and economic background this is what you did. It's what everyone did. I did it uncomplainingly, willingly and with excitement and enthusiasm. I looked forward to my glittering future without a moments doubt up until around my last year of University.

Up until this point, you see, I'd had a career plan and had mapped out what I wanted to become. Unfortunately through work experience I'd encountered my chosen profession and realised that it wasn't for me. I could have pursued it, I had the talent but the drive to do it was missing. I realised a career in that field would require a huge amount of sacrifice and I began to wonder, what will happen to the rest of my life? The path would have required me to live in the big city amongst the hustle bustle and noise. I yearned to return to my provincial routes. I wanted quiet and simplicity and the charms of the sophisticated metropolis weren't enough to hold my interest. Furthermore I realised I just didn't have the depth of interest that my friends on my degree programme had. My interest was there, but it was a shallow one, not enough to sustain the huge amount of time and effort it would have required for me to be a success.

Biology also played it's role. Around the age of 21 I found myself cooing over babies in prams. As a child I rarely played with dolls, had sworn motherhood didn't interest me and hadn't envisioned myself as a parent but suddenly a switch was flicked in my head and then it was all I wanted. I began to see myself shaping my life in such a way that I could be a wife and mother.

However at that stage in my life I was single, was rapidly coming to the end of my degree programme and had  to find some way to support my chocolate habit.

Cup of tea/loo break. Or simply carry on as you wish. 

I settled on moving back to my home town and working as an administrator and I envisioned myself working my way up in that field. I did this for a few years and it was fun - but somehow unsatisfying. I'd sit through pointless meeting after pointless meeting thinking to myself - is this it? Is this what my life is going to be about?The worst moments were when someone left their post. Each person seemed like such a key part of our world ; as though without them we couldn't possibly go on. However the next day we just went on as normal. It was like they'd never been there, they were not remembered, rarely talked of and nothing they had done seemed to matter any more. I realised that one day this would happen to me. I would leave and it wouldn't matter. I could work in a job for the next 40 years but then I would retire and after a few days none of it would have mattered and no one would remember me.

I turned to volunteer work to try and find something worthwhile and this helped enormously, but it was restricted to the few hours a week I could fit it in. I considered doing this sort of work full time but it was too emotionally draining and I couldn't imagine being able to do it as a full time option.

In the meantime things had shifted dramatically on the personal front - I was now engaged and living with my partner. Going through the process of merging our lives was making me question my priorities. My other half has a more high powered, better paid and more time consuming career. His job could mean that we'd have to move to another city to follow his work. At the same time economic pressures caused by the recession were making my job increasingly difficult and my job security had plummeted to zero. I'd only held one job since graduating and as a result my C.V was distinctly unimpressive. I decided to quit that post and become a temp so that I could gain more experience of working in different places and roles. I'd also began to feel very stressed and unhappy - for reasons I didn't quite understand and I felt a change of work scene would do me good.



Despite these doubts I limped on, doing well in my admin posts but still feeling a bit flat and unhappy. The stress I had thought I would eliminate by taking on a simpler work role had not gone away. I felt just as bad as I ever had. Similarly there were troubles in my relationship. We loved each other very much and were happy together but there were domestic problems. The house was a mess and neither of us had the energy to clean it up. This made the house feel very depressing and I tended to bury my head in a book or online to avoid it. I loved cooking but rarely felt I had the time to plan healthy cheap meals. I tended to use expensive short cuts or just eat takeaway. We also didn't have the time we needed to dedicate to each other. On an evening we'd gobble down a meal while watching TV then, exhausted, watch more TV before crawling into bed. Our quality time together was almost none existent. I gained weight, felt unhealthy and we both felt
somewhat unhappy with our lot. I envisioned the years of our lives speeding by as we'd sit in front of the TV unhappy but too tired to do anything about it. I wanted a better life but I didn't know how to get there.

And another one. Go on go on go on go on.

It all came to a head in the winter. My stress levels were rising and I was dealing with obsessive thoughts and compulsions. I'd had this problem for years and had always been too afraid to confront it. Now it was beginning to dominate my life. I changed my world so that I wouldn't have to face up to these problems and avoided situations that would make me feel uncomfortable. My ignorance about mental health issues made me afraid to seek help and I was convinced that I was the only one who had the difficulties that I had. I began to realise that my issues were getting out of hand and I went to the doctors. To cut a long story short I was diagnosed with OCD which I am currently undergoing treatment for.

I crumbled at work. Luckily everyone was supportive but getting through those weeks post diagnosis was so hard, one of the most difficult things I have ever done. My medication was helping but it was zapping the little remaining energy I had. After work I'd crawl into bed too tired to even watch TV or listen to the radio. My volunteer work had to be abandoned. I was doing nothing and the situation at home was not improving.

My other half was also struggling. Though he was very supportive and kind, his working life was more taxing then ever. He couldn't pick up the slack on the domestic front, he didn't have the time. If anything he needed my help, my administrative skills were just what he was lacking and I knew that if I invested the time with him, I could improve his situation dramatically.

Suddenly after years of not knowing what to do it became clear what I could do. I could abandon work and instead take the decidedly retro decision to devote my life to my home and husband. It was possible we could afford to live on just one salary as much of my salary was eaten up by transport costs and stuff I'd eaten (mmmm chocolate milk, the happy companion of my working life. At £1 plus a bottle you were not cheap but you were worth it baby). Surely two could live as cheaply as one, particularly if one of the two was dedicating their time to budget home cooking.

So we took the mutual decision that I would hand in my notice and take up the position of full time housebod. To quote Kosh 'And so it begins'.