The Many Faces of OCD

As we move forward in our reading and working with the psychologist we are beginning to see so much more about what makes Sunshine tick. We have identified so many of her OCD monsters, yes, that is right the term used is monster when identifying the different voices that tell her things are wrong. She is then suppose to give them silly names. It is this area though that I am keeping private, only to her and us, these names make sense to her, and carry meaning that even we do not always understand, but since that is how she identifies them so we know who is speaking at any given time is all that matters. For those who do not have OCD can you imagine having this going on in your world all the time?

Just think of it this way, the more we play the game of allowing her rituals to control her comfort level, the more she feeds the monsters and the larger they become. The other term, I believe I mentioned in my previous post is that these monsters create what we call brain hiccups. In a healthy brain we might have scary thoughts that come through our mind, but we can easily dismiss these thoughts by identifying them as just that a thought, nothing real, but in OCD the brain doesn’t read them that way, our brain:

Then we perform something either mentally or outward that attempts to assure that this thought does not come true. A good example is that Sunshine is given a worried thought that something bad will happen to papa or myself when we are ready to leave, so her hiccup tells her to delay our leaving in any manner she can think of. Over time this becomes a ritual, especially when we do not allow her to perform her ritual, her world suddenly falls apart.

A few of the monsters we have identified minus their nicknames and too much information is:

1. She has a monster that tells her she can not learn and sits on her desk making school work impossible to do.
2. She can only have 6 of anything, anymore then that is too many, including the number of people in a room.
3. Everything is dirty unless she identifies a dishwasher or observes how it is cleaned.

There are many more, but some are very private in their context so I will not be identifying those.

One way that she can battle these is to blow them away. She has developed her own imaginary key that locks the back door, when the monsters start in, she asks one of us on her team to help her blow them out the back door, then she uses her key to lock them out. The idea here is for her to gain control and tell them to shut up, go away and to leave her alone.

She also learned a very valuable lesson, in that now that we are fighting back, these monsters are playing huge games with her by telling her all sorts of lies, such as “I will behave and be your best friend.” She is learning that there is no way she can trust them, and no way they can be her best friend. We still have a long journey ahead of us, but it is a journey worth going down just knowing that Sunshine is beginning to understand, we are beginning to understand, and it is fun to watch her gain control. It seems silly at times, but hey if it is going to work and help her then that is what we will do.

After her session she came home and got to play Queen the rest of the evening. Just so you know we will not participate in Halloween in the traditional manner, but we will have fun as Queen Sunshine with a lot of fun activities.