OCD Youth

invisiblelegacy said 6 years, 4 months ago:

Hello,

I have recently been coming to terms with my childhood abuse and started to share my experiences via a website and forums, as I feel it is helpful to me but hopefully will be helpful to others should they gain any type of support or advice from my story. Here is is…

I was sexually abused from at least the age of 3 and developed OCD as my brain was protecting me from the experiences for which I dissociated most of the time.

However with my memories that I did have and my recent flashbacks and confirmation from my mother of things happening, I am slowly piecing things today and sharing is now my coping mechanism since I cannot work due to severe ill health caused by the abuse.

I was OK up until the age of around 27 / 28 when my programming started to fail and physical manifestations of the abuse began to come out.

However on the positive side I managed to beat OCD! I would like to share how I achieved this and much more hopefully to help others and also to help myself as I have to keep my mind active since I cannot go out to work.

My body physically may have health problems but my brain still works!

Looking back, my first memory of doing OCD was when I was about 10 years old. It was at Brownie Camp. We had gone away for a week and, as an older member of the group, I was chosen to be one of about five Group Leaders and given various younger members to supervise.

I was very proud, although I only felt it internally and didn’t express it outwardly as I was so painfully shy.

I remember my Brownies initiation. We were sitting in a circle and me and a couple of other girls were due to be brought into the middle and the initiation undertaken in front of everyone.

To give an indication of how shy I was, during the ceremony I needed to cough but was so shy I didn’t want to make a noise.

I don’t know if any of you have ever tried to suppress a cough but it is increasingly painful. The tickle grew more irritated in the back of my throat and my eyes began to stream with water.

I tried to let out little coughs that wouldn’t draw attention but it wasn’t enough, I needed a full cough.

It seemed to last forever and people began to stare. The Brownie Group Leader eventually came and got me and moved me to a private area where she gave me water and I coughed and began to return to normal again.

The relief was amazing. I returned to my space on the floor where I had been sitting.

Back to Brownie camp and my first memory of OCD; I was raised a Christian. I was Christened and went to Sunday school every weekend. I attended a Church of England school and we had regular church services and events for which I participated willingly absorbing and believing everything that was told to me.

My OCD ritual at that time was to take my hand straight out and slightly touch my nose upwards, then right to left forming the Cross Jesus died upon. It had to be done perfectly.

My OCD was always based around numbers and I had to do the Cross ritual a certain amount of times, and correctly, before I could get on with whatever I was doing i.e. my life.

I remember doing this at dinner time at Brownies when everyone else was eating and I was waiting to eat. I was a vegetarian by this point and had Anorexia. I believe sitting in front of everyone with food to eat in front of me caused mass anxiety which led to the OCD Cross ritual. I barely ate my food and my feeling of pride at being a Group Leader soon went as embarrassment and shyness took over.

I reverted to my usual self of an introverted shadow.

It wasn’t until I was 19 that I found out that the rituals and intrusive thoughts I had been having over the years actually had a name and was a ‘thing’. It was called Obsessive Compulsive Disorder – OCD.

My partner at the time was a Care Worker and had confided in his boss about things I was doing and she had told him some tests to do on me, without me knowing, in order to confirm it, although they were both pretty sure from what he had said.

I passed the tests. I have OCD he told me as I continued to not make eye contact. He explained it all to me and everything that makes up the definition of OCD I knew was in me. I couldn’t believe it though. It had just been things I do, part of me, just me.

I stopped pretending to myself and admitted it I understood. A relief swept through me so deep. The mental prison I was in had a name and I started to cry little. I soon suppressed it.

I visited my doctor and it was all confirmed officially along with the eating disorder.

Numbers was my OCD game and they went like the below, with whatever OCD ritual I was doing:

1 = nothing (so can’t stop)

2 = bad

3 = good

4 = bad (because 2 is bad and 2 + 2 = 4)

5 = nothing & need to start again if reached (because 2 is bad and 3 is good, so 2 + 3 = 5, so one bad and one good cancels it out)

Then if I hadn’t managed to complete my ritual successfully on 3 – because that would be good, great, I could stop and continue on with my life – then I had to start again, which went like this (although note I would have to go through the below sequence but couldn’t stop the ritual on 8 because it would be during the 2nd sequence which is bad because it’s 2):

6 = nothing (so can’t stop, because 1 and 5 are nothing, 1 + 5 = 6, so it’s nothing)

7 = bad (because 5 is nothing and 2 is bad, 5 + 2 = 7, so it’s bad)

8 = good (because 5 is nothing and 3 is good – 5 + 3 = 8, so it’s good)

9 = bad (because 5 is nothing and 4 is bad because 2 is bad and 2 + 2 = 4, 4 + 5 + 9, so it’s bad)

10 = nothing & need to start again if reached…

… and do the above sequence again and hope so much I managed to finish on the 13th time (5 (nothing) + 5 (nothing) + 3 (good) = 13 in the third sequence.

If I didn’t manage to achieve it on the first 3 or the third ‘3’ (i.e. 13), then it would go on for a long time. I couldn’t finish on the fourth sequence but perhaps could do so on the fifth depending on whether I could justify that the five sequence, meaning ‘nothing / cancel out’, could mean it could be good and therefore I could finish on the 3rd of the fifth sequence.

This number sequence dominated my life and everything I would do. The rituals themselves would be in a state of flux, changing gradually over the months and years. From blinking, the way I exhale or inhale to lights being switched on and off, the way I move my feet, moving zips up and down, pulling sleeves down, touching things.

OCD would control the way I put away clothes or place items down, like books, where everything had to be in order of size, nothing big could be put on something small otherwise I would feel suffocated. I believe this stemmed from the sexual abuse; someone big on someone small, me.

I have always had a feeling of suffocation with my OCD or being unable to breathe when thinking about memories from the past. I believe large grown-up hands were placed over my small face making it difficult to breathe. All this translated into my OCD.

I went through a stage of having 5 wishes (1, 3 or 5 had to be used) and 1 main big wish each day. The main wish always had to be the same thing though; that our house would not catch fire and kill all my family. The other wishes were mainly used so that I could get out of the number sequences without something bad happening to my family.

The running theme was that ‘nothing bad would ever happen to anyone I love or care about’.

I used to have to write it at the end of my diary entry each day otherwise something bad would happen.

The OCD rituals would be controlled by the threat that if I didn’t do it them something bad would happen to someone I love or care about and it was such a deep, meaningful, determined threat that I would just have to do it.

Many times I would end up crying, my arms exhausted, my mind confused, lost with the numbers if it went on for too long and occasionally I would break-down hitting my head, pleading with it to stop or to let me stop and not have to do it but for it not to mean anything bad would happen.

Occasionally I ‘would be allowed’ – but on the basis it would be made up for the next day. I basically would then ‘owe’ a ritual.

After finding out that it was a mental health disorder I started to see counselors and psychiatrists.

I remember my mum attending once upon the request of a counselor who I was seeing. The counselor asked my mum whether she knew any reason why I could have OCD, Anorexia, Depression and be self-harming as she told my mum it just isn’t something a girl would be born with to the deep extent I was experiencing it all.

My mum said she knew of no reason.

Two years later I would confront my mum with a similar question – albeit it via telephone – saying I had memories from years ago, plus was having flashbacks. By this time I was with my life partner, my loving spiritual guide, who encouraged me to find out a definite answer for closure on my part if nothing else. I asked her if the memory – my first memory from around 3 years old – of having been sexually abused, was real or not.

She said yes it was real.

She confirmed who and that it was more than one member of the family who had partaken and that it happened with others within the family as well. She had divorced my dad by that point and was with a new partner.

I now know my mum lied to the counselor when she could have helped me. More importantly, she could have helped me when I was a little girl but she didn’t. She enabled it. She let the family members ‘stay’, ‘baby sit’ and for me to be taken to ‘visit’ family members. I was being sexually trafficked. She knew exactly what caused my mental health issues and did nothing to help.

Some of you may think she was in a difficult position to stop things; however when one of my Uncles who was ‘staying’ for a while at the house, attempted to rape her in the kitchen, she had him thrown out immediately. Instead I got taken to ‘visit’ him.

The irony is all my OCD rituals and internal mantras were based around making sure nothing bad happened to my family and, other than my siblings, they were the ones who had caused the OCD.

The need to protect my family and anyone I love and care about, must have been scared into me during the abuse, but the dissociation ensure I didn’t remember, just like not knowing what made me nearly die at an earlier point in my life.

I was in a cultic traveler family, where family is everything. You don’t leave the family. and family means everything.

So how did I beat it?

I had tried everything. SRIs, CBT, the works.

My spiritual partner worked so hard with me to beat the OCD. It was so hard to live with him, having the OCD as he is very sensitive to his surroundings and very well read on all subjects including psychology.

He introduced me to the book ‘The Golden Bough’ by Sir James George Frazer, a study in comparative ritual magic and mythology from around the world and dating back to the dawn of man, and I highly recommend it.

My partner had a second edition from around 1890, with an embossed cover, which felt special to just hold.

It can be read for free online here. It may seem a bit heavy but the introduction on forms of ‘magic’ is great and you can ‘dip into it’ to sample the array of beliefs from human history.

The introduction to the two forms of magic discussed in the book are as follows:

“IF we analyse the principles of thought on which magic is based, they will probably be found to resolve themselves into two: first, that like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause; and, second, that things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed. The former principle may be called the Law of Similarity, the latter the Law of Contact or Contagion.”

I believe that many OCD readers will recognise this. However, the book goes on to describe their effect on everyone from ancient European Corn-God worshipers to African Tribes who believed in Tree-Spirit dwellers, and everything imaginable inbetween, detailing the multiple irrational, either highly amusing or highly disturbing rituals that needed to be done by entire tribes, in order to appease these spirits with often resulted in severe harm.

I was terrified of the book at first because he had read parts to me about the rituals of various tribes and how they appeased their various deities with their supposed magical powers, which have now been proven wrong by science, and I would recognise their behaviour and actions in myself doing my OCD.

He helped me to understand cause and effect and how it can be misattributed.

I began to accept the content, and how it related to my OCD; I started to understand the history of ritual magic, and my OCD seemed very archaic, and like I thought I could, in doing my rituals, effectively do ‘magic’ or more importantly, thought I could change the order of the universe, when it is only God’s choice what happens in people’s life journeys.

So, I decided what was the most frightening part of my OCD. It was knives.

My biggest problem had always been with knives. When I washed them they had to be wiped in a certain way and put away in the same direction (pointing to the right). I couldn’t think about them and if I had to touch them I had to touch the handle only otherwise someone I cared about would be killed.

I deeply feel that I was either threatened or tortured with knives to keep me from speaking about my abuse, and for ‘their’ sadistic pleasure – this is a type of silence programming of the folk version of the MKUltra Monarch-type programming and the ‘traditional’ folk-variety handed down by the traveler Romany community, from which I come.

In fact, such programming is supposed to date back to the roots of Romany culture in Ancient Egypt, from rituals in The Egyptian Book of the Dead, so it may have been passed down for centuries.

At this point I had managed to escape from my violent extended family to a safe refuge with my very protective boyfriend (who is very large and assertive!) who dared to stand up to them when they came to try and get me back, with shot guns in the back of the jeep (to be told in another post).

I was living with someone I actually cared about now, so it was very different to impose upon his life with the complications of the rituals, and is even difficult to write the words now. Time helps.

It helped he was encouraging me to fight the OCD and desperately wanted it to stop for me and him. He hated seeing me punishing and hurting myself over things that were done to me that I now know were no fault of my own, although at the time I still harboured irrational guilt and had misguided love for them (trauma bonding aka Stockholm Syndrome to be told in another post).

My essence was in a prison and I was hurting it. The little girl in me was still being hurt and she needed me to stop the OCD to allow her to be free. How I realised and met my ‘essence’ will be related in another post.

He made me realise this hurt by repeating it to me over and over again, that I was hurting ‘her’ by doing something that ‘they’ had made me do and had inflicted upon me, so by logical extension ‘they’ were still hurting ‘her’.

Accepting this made me feel responsible for ‘her’ safety, and also the happiness of my relationship with my partner, so my priorities shifted from ‘protecting my family’ (which I thought I was doing through the OCD rituals) and I came up with a plan to battle and finally beat the OCD, which had been present in every single waking moment of my life for 25 years, a quarter of a century!

So, I thought to myself, if I dare to disobey and disregard the OCD and touch the knives in no particular way (safely of course), whilst washing them up, washing over them just as needed, and then put them away casually, pointing in any direction in the cutlery draw (albeit very quickly!), saying to myself all the while that ‘it doesn’t mean anything, I’m just putting knives away not performing magic spells, nothing will happen if they are put in pointing the wrong way’.

Therefore, after that, I couldn’t do any other OCD ritual, because that would have made me completely wrong with what I had said to myself with the knives, and it would mean people would be killed, which of course I did not want to happen. So for that not to happen I can’t do anymore OCD!

It was check-mate and I haven’t done it since.

Slowly the need to remind myself of why I shouldn’t carry out the OCD urges have passed and now increasingly I can do most activities without intrusive thoughts.

As a result I have got my mind, my brain back and I can retain knowledge where I couldn’t before. I notice the world around me instead, for the first time effectively, and life has become wonderful and every minor detail is a joy to learn and behold.

I am not ashamed that I have had to go back and learn things from scratch, even general knowledge I should have remembered from school but the abuse amnesia cut huge chunks of my memory out, and my partner has helped me, but gradually my head is beginning to fill up with not rituals, but knowledge as I devour books and documentaries and recall all of every single part of everything beautiful.

If anyone needs any advice, help or support, I would be very pleased to communicate with positive and genuine connections.

Best wishes,
Invisible Legacy