About a year and a half ago, my youngest was diagnosed with
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. It’s not your garden variety OCD: no hand-washing,
door-checking, thing-counting. In fact, because a year of therapy has had
little effect on her symptoms, she just went in for some more extensive testing
to confirm that the diagnosis is accurate. But all the mental health
professionals she’s worked with seem to feel that’s a good name for what she’s
experiencing, and it rings true to her.
It’s been a very interesting eighteen months learning how my
daughter’s brain works. Essentially, the best we’ve figured out is, she is
unable to make small decisions. Big decisions are not so much of a problem –
where to go to college, what to major in . . . she’s confident on that.
But what to wear this morning . . . what to eat for
breakfast . . . whether to eat breakfast . . . how much to eat for breakfast .
. . how long to watch TV . . . whether to check the notifications on her phone
. . . whether to answer that text . . . when to answer that text . . . how long
to exercise . . . it’s 9am and I’m home all day today and there are fifty
things I could do and ultimately need
to do sometime (shower, school, walk dog, pray, sleep, laundry, clean,
exercise, etc. etc.) so which of those fifty do I choose to do right at this
moment . . . those decisions stymie her.
In the past, she dealt with this by setting up systems for
herself. And frankly, she probably learned that behavior from me because that’s
how I approach my daily tasks. But the systems became more and more complicated,
and more and more rigid, and ultimately more and more illogical to the point where
she is afraid to go that direction again for fear of enslaving herself once
more with her own self-built structures.
So now, her go-to solution is to do what certain people tell
her to do. But that, obviously, has its drawbacks. For one thing, anything I
tell her to do now becomes a compulsion itself. I told her once to finish her
biology worksheets, and in the next 36 hours (before I realized it), she completed two months’
worth of biology. The poor thing feels like she’s living out the “Ella
Enchanted” story sometimes.
At the heart of this, it seems now, is the need for her to
figure out how to narrow down choices and choose. It doesn’t sound difficult,
does it? Do what you need to do first; then do what you want to do. But how do
you know what you really need to do versus what you just think you need to do, or what someone else is trying to convince
you that you need to do? And how do you know what you want to do?
That one made me do a double-take. She has relied on systems
for her decision-making for so long that she does not even know what she wants. And when she does know what she
wants, she can’t determine if she should feel free to do what she wants or if
she should do the things she feels like she should
do – because she’s not always sure if that is actually something she should do
or just something she thinks she
should do.
You see why our heads are spinning.
I’ve always said that our biggest faults are usually the
flip sides of our greatest strengths. I think that principle applies here. She
has been able to accomplish tremendous things in the past that we now realize were the result of this “disorder”.
There’s an amazing strength of will underlying all this that I’d love to see
her harness.
In one therapy session, her counselor gave her a bunch of small
figurines and asked her to create a picture that represented her OCD. She put
herself on one side of a bridge with a giant moose standing in the middle of
the bridge, preventing her from crossing. I told her that my hope for her is
not just that she get the moose out of the way, but that she saddle that moose
and make it carry her across.
We just need someone to show her how to become master of the
moose.
