What is OCD

I know it has been a long time since I wrote here. We have been busy learning a lot about OCD, a lot about our daughter. Our OCD days are fewer and less extreme. Why? Well once we realized OCD was really a byproduct of stress, it became more manageable. We do have high OCD times, but by charting the stress in our daughter’s life we can predict when the OCD will be worse. Just this week we had a high OCD week, why? She was stressing over getting her retainer. If we can manage the stress in her life we can manage the OCD. No, not all of it, just like me there are things that just gross me out, things that I just can’t live with, that is OCD!

We can not avoid all stress for her, but we can help her manage it. We talk it through, when we recognize it. We acknowledge her feelings, her desire to grow up but yet her fears about growing up. We allow her to take ownership of her feelings.

For a child who couldn’t hardly stand to walk into a barn, she is now working with horses, and riding. We had to convince her that the outcome was worth her worry of dirt under her feat, or the smell of the barn, what ever it was that was causing her OCD. I guess I am saying do not give up it is possible. OCD is really only stress, once you can understand that stress the better you can help your child or yourself. No, it is not easy but it can happen.
It takes time, patience, and the willingness to try to listen and understand.

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.

Why Did We Switch Psychologists?

Yes, you are reading the title correctly. We did switch psychologists. We personally liked Dr. Callies, his demeanor, caring personality, and knowledge of children was all wonderful, but when it came to OCD, he lacked something. We didn’t understand it ourselves at first, but we also knew that this just wasn’t the fit for our family we were looking for.  After receiving numerous recommendations, trying to search out their qualifications on the Internet, and seeing everything that Dr. Callies was asking us to do that seemed to making our home a complete war zone, and leaving Sunshine spinning from one panic attack to the next, I finally just picked up the phone and made one simple phone call. A call that I am so glad I made.

We met with Ms Hicks on Wednesday. While we were not suppose to bring Sunshine to this appointment I had no choice but to take her. Ms Hicks at first offered to set her up with some toys in the waiting room, but I felt that would not be quite a fit for her and assured Ms Hicks it would be fine to have her in the office. With Sunshine sat up with a tub of sand and a bin of dinosaurs we set out to discuss why we were there. I have to first of say that for the first time in a while I was observing the Sunshine that I am use to taking places. She engrossed herself into the toys before her and never once moved nor interrupted us.

It was explained to me that one of the reason we were having problems with the things Dr. Callies wanted us to do was due to 2 factors, the first being that he specializes in behavior therapy, and the second, to take that approach is actually working backwards in the OCD cycle. She then asked that we read Talking Back To OCD by John S. March, MD. The book starts out by giving a complete but very understandable look at what OCD is and breaks it down so that even the child has more of an understanding. My favorite part was how the book pointed out that OCD is truly a brain illness, it went on to talk about how it does make a child feel like they are so different from their peers, creating the idea of shutting themselves off from social events. Did you know that 1 in 200 children suffer from OCD, this means that your child isn’t the only one in their school, or probably in their classroom dealing with OCD. While OCD takes on many forms, sometimes two people with OCD will be so opposite that they actually clash, and their seems like there is no way to get these two people to get along, no matter how much they tend to like each other.

What was Sunshine’s favorite part about the book so far? She thought it was quite funny when the book explained OCD as a hiccup of the brain. She felt her head and said it wasn’t jumping up and down like a hiccup. Pretty soon though she did tell me her brain hiccupped. Great for some laughs to lighten the evening up from all the tension we had been feeling in our home.

Stay tuned I will be sharing more of the book as we read on, as well as what and how we are using this book in therapy.

 

Just a cute little picture of Sunshine and her very first corsage, given to her from the neighbors. She wore this corsage all afternoon out playing while Papa mowed the grass. After hours of playing she came running in crying as her corsage had began to fall apart, I couldn’t believe it had lasted as long as it did. With a little reassurance and then showing her that the neighbor, bless her heart had given Sunshine two of these, so yes, we kept the other and pressed it. She will always have her first corsage to remember all the fun she had, and how pretty she felt wearing it though it was worn on a sweat shirt, out playing in the dirt and hay, feeding the horse, riding her bike, and so much more. Now wouldn’t it had been hilarious if the horse would have reached over the fence in an attempt to eat this corsage? 

Sometimes You Just Have To Listen

As we have been working with some of the techniques that Sunshine’s Psychologist suggested to us to try (you can rediscover some of these here) we began to realize that many of his ideas just seemed to spin Sunshine from one panic attack to the next until she got to the point she was giving up and not even trying. I can’t say I blame her since everything just seemed to be so based on her behaviors and truly not addressing her anxieties. One thing I have to say is that Sunshine is a well behaved child so long as her anxiety level is low or she stays calm. We finally just backed off quite a bit from what he wanted us to do and began to ask Sunshine what she felt would help her.

Last night as I was tucking her in bed she told me that she wanted to make an anxiety chart. I asked her what she imagined this chart to look like. She explained it to me by saying, “So many times my anxieties run at 130, at church they are mostly at 110, but I need them to be empty or at 0.” The thought that came to my mind was a thermometer. I promised her that we would put something together. This morning we set out to do just that. (I hope to get some pictures of our chart for you soon, but wouldn’t you know it my camera batteries are dead.)

To make this chart have more meaning I created a journal for Sunshine to write the information she was gathering from her chart. This has proven to be very interesting. She woke up too early this morning and was very crabby, I asked her what she would rate her anxiety level at. She answered with a 40. I drew a small thermometer on the page and we marked it with a value of 40. Then she had to answer several questions: 1. Why do you feel your anxieties are at a 40? 2. What might bring your anxieties down? 3. How do you feel with your anxieties at this level, happy, sad, mad, or anxious? 4. How is this affecting your behaviors? After all the questions were answered and the data entered into her journal we were ready to move on to taking action to improve her overall anxiety level. Since she decided her anxieties were up due to lack of sleep, she chose to take a short nap or rest to bring her anxiety level down. We did just that took a short rest. When we got up we again made a new journal entry with all the same steps above. At one point she got in trouble, so I made her enter this data in her journal. We then ended our day by re-examining where she was on her chart before bed, as well as looking back over the day. At the bottom of the page I wrote two sentences describing her BEST moments or accomplishments of the day.

I know this is kind of hard to follow as I try to explain it without pictures. I will be doing another post down the road here complete with pictures as to our progress. I truly believe sometimes the answers lay inside our child, they know how they want to feel, as well as have great ideas to make this happen, but sometimes we just need to stop and listen and allow them to express themselves. I truly believe that Sunshine learned a lot about her own anxieties today, and she definitely took away a sense of empowerment over them or ownership to some of the reasons they maybe occurring, and an understanding that she does have the power to do something about them.

Music and School Work

One of the things that I discovered through our path of homeschooling is the fact that when it is too quiet in the house Sunshine fidgets more, constantly is kicking the bar on her desk, makes noises, overall has a hard time concentrating even when I am discussing something with her. I’ve researched and read many articles about music and it’s role in calming the brain from all outside distractions while completing the daily tasks of homework to office work. This is often referred to the Mozart Effect. Many Universities have researched this idea, and while there are still a lot of skeptics and those who say that music distracts the brain creating for lower grade scores, I lean towards if it helps my child then we shall have some music playing softly in the background. I found this article to support what I see in our home during studying.

It doesn’t surprise me any that Sunshine would find having music playing in the background to be soothing and to help her concentrate better, since even I myself as a kid couldn’t stand the silence in the classroom during intense study or taking a test. I reflect back and music was always a huge part of our home. Even my father could not get through the day without humming or singing while he worked. Did his humming and singing have an affect on the quality of work he did? I believe it did, I believe it kept the outside world out and allowed him to completely concentrate on the task before him. He use to preach, “Sing while you Work!” He always said, “If you have a song in your heart you will be a happier person, leading toward a happier worker, producing more.” I always found this advice to help me get through some of the most dull jobs I have ever had.

I often find Sunshine sitting in her bedroom with her radio turned on, her nose buried in a book, or sitting and quietly playing pretend with her toys. This made me want to try to see what bringing music into our classroom would do for her. We started school this morning without music, the legs started kicking, the focus just didn’t seem to be there, even the concept I was trying to teach just was not being absorbed. She fidgeted, often to glance off to another corner of the room, and even her writing seemed sloppy. I stopped school and turned on some music leaving the volume low. The kicking stopped, the fidgeting stopped, she listened and hung on every word I said as we discussed the new concepts. Her reading improved, and her ability to copy different patterns became simpler then ever before.

While the research may still be out on the idea of music helping some people to be more affective students, this mom is totally sold on the idea that it helps her student. Of course I will not play heavy metal music, or head banging music, but we will be continuing to experiment with the types of soft music that will help Sunshine to stay focused and improving her concentration.

A Tiny Taste of Therapy

After I met with Sunshine’s Psychologist, we determined that when we first started we pushed too much at her at one time. Upon her first visit with him he spent almost an entire hour with her one on one, playing games and talking. His first and foremost rule for the child is that if they need their parent at anytime they just need to say so. For Sunshine though this would have meant a weakness to ask for me, so instead of speaking up she endured the panic attack that she was going through. Upon our second visit which was with Papa, myself and her, she was in a panic attack even before we went into his office. When he didn’t pick up on what was truly going on he suggested some ideas to use here in the home that actually made her anxieties worse. She began to do things that made us believe she was truly trying to tell us how she felt. Let’s just say it was not a pretty few days in our home, she was angry, trying to get us to listen to her nonverbal cues, and not understanding why we were not catching on.

Now we feel we have a system in place which will allow us to take smaller steps with her, move a little slower while exposing her to these things that cause such anxieties for her, but most important a way to communicate her feelings so we can then come and talk about them in a more appropriate manner. One of the first things we did was have Sunshine create her own Feelings Chart. She came up with the design and decided what colors would represent the different feelings on her own. All I did was draw the circles for her.

The larger the circle the more intense the feeling is. We also decided that it is alright for her to feel more then one feeling at a time. Does she use it, oh yes you bet she does, it is nothing for her to go directly to it and let you know how she is feeling.

The other part was to have Sunshine respond to our requests with only one verbal cue from us. She must respond the first time we ask her to stop doing something or to do something. If she doesn’t there are no chances to respond, she looses a privilege. These privileges can be anything from loosing a toy she might be playing inappropriately with to her TV or Computer time. She has to have a consequence of some sort. Then she has the right to earn her privileges back. We  brainstormed on how this would look. While the Psychologist gave me several ideas, I again wanted it to be something that Sunshine worked on with me.

We chose to use all the bottle caps we have saved for math over the years. When she responds the first time we ask of her she earns a bottle cap which she picks out and places in the pretty jar with the purple lid. When she has earned 5 bottle caps she then receives the privilege back. For instance right now she is trying to earn a couple of toys, her TV time and her Computer time back. We get to choose what she will earn back. She understands that just because she earns 5 caps does not necessarily mean she will get back what she wants, but what we choose to allow her to have. She is thrilled right now because she only has one more to earn to reap her reward. It is our hope that as we move on she will lose less privileges, and be able to earn things like craft kits, small toys, and books. Over time this will become a habit of responding when first asked and we will no longer need this tool to help her.

Our visits will change now with the Psychologist to be a family session where we will be able to talk about the things Sunshine is feeling anxious over or what bothers her. She will still have the opportunity to spend 5 to 10 minutes with him alone to play a fun game and build from there the amount of time she is able to tolerate. It is important that she is pushed to some point to do the things that causes anxieties but we do not want to push to hard to the point of panic attacks. 

Other Tips When Looking at Specialists

We met with Selena’s Psychologist last week to go over the numerous questionnaires we all had to fill out. The results were truly what we expected with Anxiety Disorders the main source of her problems. She was very different in his office from the calm we seen in the waiting room. We mentioned several times that her anxiety was high but the Psychologist misinterpreted her behaviors as not having the attention. He gave us a few things to try here at home to help her through the calming process.

We fully expected her to reject some of these things at first and that their would be other behavioral issues we would see. What we got though was not what any of us expected. I called and made an appointment for just him and I to meet. The morning of that appointment Selena was pretty anxious even though she was not going with me. She finally admitted to having panic attacks or in her words “Funny feelings in her heart.”

Her psychologist felt horrible that he had not picked up on how bad her anxieties truly are and misread her behaviors. He literally grabbed the information about the other psychologists there in the office. We could switch if we wanted to. Of course that was not something I wanted to do so I asked him to put the information back on his desk and just talk with me first. As we talked and I shared more about what behaviors we had seen, and about her panic attacks, he realized I was not in there as a mom under attack mode but more of a mom just saying you need to understand her more, listen to us more, and we need a new direction.

I can’t emphasize enough when ever you are looking for a specialist for your child first do your homework. You need someone who is going to be willing to say I am  human and do make mistakes, but we can still change. To often specialists just take the attitude that they know it all, but remember not any one  method will work for everybody especially when your dealing with a child.

Find someone who wants a relationship with you the parent, while their main job is to help the child, who knows that child better then anyone else…you the parent. They should always make time to listen, talk, and brainstorm with you the parent the options that will best fit the needs of your child.

We are glad that we took the extra time to meet one on one with our psychologist to discuss our concerns especially when we truly did not feel he was perceiving the whole picture of who Sunshine is and how she ticks.

My next posts will be on what we are doing, how they are or are not working. Just consider this as the beginning to a new life for Sunshine.