OCD and scary thoughts and dreams

Shadows

Thoughts are powerful. I’m sure you already know that. What we mull over and dwell on in our thoughts can affect our mood and our outlook, our actions. Thoughts are that powerful.

If you have obsessive-compulsive disorder, you know that thoughts can seem especially powerful, and you attach more importance to them than they deserve.

The obsessions of OCD are uncontrolled thoughts about specific things that cause intense anxiety. They revolve around concerns about things such as harm, contamination and morality.

For example, I used to be consumed with thoughts about the safety of others, especially the safety of my loved ones. I worried and agonized over the possibility that harm would come to them, and that I would be the cause of that harm.

I acted out different compulsions to try to assuage the anxiety caused by the obsessions. I washed my hands incessantly to try to avoid passing germs to others and making them sick. I prayed the same words over and over, trying to create a magical safety net around my family. I checked light switches and stovetops repeatedly to make sure I had turned off electrical devices, because I believed if I left them on, a fire might start and hurt or kill others.

Another way thoughts can be troublesome for those of us with OCD is the way they seem to be so true. If I think that I left a lamp on at the office, then it must be true. If that thought comes along with a feeling of anxiety, then it must mean that I left the light on.

I’ve come a long way since the days when thoughts and compulsions like that consumed me. But this week, I’ve been revisited by scary thoughts.

My husband told me about a snippet of a dream he recently had. In the dream, he realized that he had died at a certain age. In real life, he turns that age next year.

After he told me, I was immediately caught up in anxiety, fear and depression.

What if it was a premonition? What if it were true? Why would he dream that? What did it mean that he dreamed it?

I couldn’t let it go. I kept thinking and thinking about it.

I thought about dreams that I had had that I felt were premonitions. I thought about the times that I had awakened from a dream and believed I had learned something.

What if that was the age that he would die? What could I do to stop it, to change it?

If I spoke about it to him, to anyone, would that mean that it would come true?

Some people believe all dreams mean something. Was that true? What did this dream mean?

I finally realized that my thoughts were a manifestation of my OCD. I realized that my fears about the importance of Larry’s dream were very similar to my fears about the importance of my thoughts.

My therapist taught me a lot about my thoughts. He taught me that the brain produces thoughts constantly, many without my intention or permission. Just because I have a thought doesn’t mean it’s true or will come true. It doesn’t mean that I wanted to think it.

And just because I feel anxiety doesn’t mean that there’s a logical reason for it or that I really have something to fear.

Perhaps that is the way I should view Larry’s dream. It’s a dream, produced by some combination of thoughts, emotions, memories and who knows what. I’ll never arrive at an answer for what it means.

And as Larry told me, in trying to comfort me when I expressed concern, no one knows when he or she will die except God.

My thoughts about it, my fear, will not change anything. I will have to do what I have to do with every OCD episode: live with the anxiety until it goes away, focus on other things, and recognize for yet another time that I have to live with uncertainty.

Have you ever been haunted by a dream that you or someone else had? How do you deal with fears about the future?

About birthdays and turning 50

   I’m writing about an upcoming milestone birthday for my Random 5 Friday this week.

I’ve got some trepidation about getting older, but I’m not moaning and groaning about it. I’m grateful for the time I’ve had and for the time I have left.

Random 5 Friday is a weekly meme started by Nancy at A Rural Journal. Link up and join in if you’d like—it’s fun!

One

I will turn 50 years old next Thursday. I have truly mixed feelings about it. I usually enjoy my birthdays and don’t mind getting older. I see a birthday as a new beginning, a new phase. This time, I am not sure. I’m a bit unsettled about it.



Me at age 10.



Two

I remember my mother saying she didn’t mind turning 40. But when 50 came around, it was jarring for her. I remember her saying that my father asked her, “How does it feel to be a half-century old?”

That was almost 36 years ago. Now I’m turning a half-century old. Wow. I can’t quite wrap my head around that.



Me at 26.



Three

I didn’t mind turning 40 either. It was kind of fun, and funny. And 40 really was a new beginning for me. I was planning my marriage to Larry when I turned 40. We got married the November after my birthday in May.

Me and Waddles when I was 40.

Four

It’s not that I want to go back in time. My favorite age is always my current age. I wouldn’t be 20 again, or 30, or even 40 again for anything. I’m healthier, smarter about life, more sure about myself now than I have ever been. That’s a perk of my getting older.

Five

I do have a sense that I should have accomplished more in life by now. But I try to just let those thoughts float on down the river.

My dreams are still going strong on the cusp of 50. I’ve got a lot of writing to do. I’ve got my freelance editing to start. I’ve got a lot of healing left to experience, a lot of spiritual growth to work towards. I’ve got a lot of things to do for others. I’ve got growing older with Larry to look forward to. I’ve still got a lot of living left to do.

What has been your favorite age so far? What do you like about getting older?

OCD and the loss of dreams



The building at Bowling Green State University where I took many classes and taught many classes.



Obsessive-compulsive disorder, a debilitating anxiety disorder, can take a lot away from us. It can take time, money, peace of mind, self-esteem. And dreams.

The dream

When I was a senior in college, I began to worry about what I would do once I graduated.

I wanted to be a writer or a social worker. Those were my two interests. The desire to write had been with me since I was a child. The desire to be a social worker was ignited during one of several sociology classes I took in college.

Basically, I wanted to write, and I wanted to save the world. With a degree in English.

During my last semester, one of my professors talked with me about my future and suggested that I go to graduate school. I could teach and become a professor and write important literary papers and books.

I liked the idea, and I liked the thought of having a definite place to go after graduation from college.

So I applied and got accepted into Bowling Green State University in Ohio. They gave me a graduate assistantship, which meant they paid my tuition and gave me a stipend in exchange for teaching while I worked on my master’s degree in English.

I took classes and taught classes for two years, writing a thesis during my last semester (which is a story in itself that I will have to tell you one day). And I finished. I got my M.A. in English.

The next step, if I hoped to become a college professor, was to get a Ph.D. I chose to stay at BGSU for my doctoral work.

For the next two or so years, I took classes, put together a doctoral committee, chose a genre and time period to focus on, created a reading list for my doctoral exams, studied for my exams, took my written and oral exams, chose a dissertation topic, did preliminary research, put together a proposal for my dissertation, and gave a public presentation of that proposal.

I passed everything and ended up being in ABD status: All But Dissertation.

In other words, all I had left to do before receiving my doctorate was to write my dissertation. As my dissertation chair told me, “All you have left to do is to write a very long paper.”

One more step. One more task.

The OCD

What I haven’t told you yet is how OCD was a part of those years that I worked so hard.

I had reading OCD, which grew worse as I moved into the doctoral program. There were many books on my reading list that I was never able to finish because of OCD.

I had OCD about my writing, which made me obsessed with the possibility of plagiarizing, making it difficult for me to research and to then write a coherent paper.

I had contamination OCD, which made me clean my bathroom for hours, vacuum my apartment repeatedly, wipe down my kitchen counters. I spent literally hours doing these compulsions.

I had checking OCD. For example, I could spend huge chunks of time checking the stove in my apartment, making sure it was off, even if I hadn’t used it.

I had hit-and-run OCD. I drove the streets of Bowling Green looking for bodies that I imagined could be there.

The loss

The OCD affected my performance in graduate school from the beginning, but it got worse as time went by. It became especially difficult to cope as I faced what seemed to be the monumental task of writing a dissertation in spite of not being able to properly read, research and write.

Even though I started medication treatment during my third year in my doctoral program, it didn’t help enough, or help in time, for me to finish the dissertation by the time my fellowship ran out.

I moved back to Virginia, with vague hopes of finishing my dissertation there. But the OCD, though drastically improved, still fed into my academic work.

I never finished my dissertation. I never finished my Ph.D.

The vow

It may sound strange, but I don’t wish I was a college professor. The writing I wanted to do had nothing to do with the study of contemporary fiction. I don’t miss teaching.

I don’t believe I wasted the time leading up to the dissertation because education is never wasted.

I don’t dwell on it like I used to. I don’t know that my life would have been better or more productive with a Ph.D.

What I do regret, though, is not finishing a goal after coming so close.

I regret the fact that OCD was so strong then that it affected me reaching my goal, my dream.

But with all my tools to fight OCD that I’ve gained through treatment, with all my intent to live a full life, I won’t let OCD take away any more dreams.

What ways have you protected your dreams and reached your goals?

A poem: What happens to our dreams?

I’m posting something different today: a poem that I wrote many years ago about my father.

He died in 1997 at age 76. A few years prior to that, I began to talk with him about his childhood and his life and encouraged him to write down his stories. He wrote down many of the stories of his life in ruled notebooks.

This poem was a yearning to understand the dreams that my father had and how they were changed by his life circumstances.

Tomorrow, I will post about how my own dreams were changed by obsessive-compulsive disorder and depression.

On my father being 72

I.

I watched my father walk through the cows.

Black Angus cows. They snorted, shifted, chewed.

He didn’t run when they knocked against him.

He never ran from them.

He climbed atop the dull red tractor,

settled into the old pillow tied to the metal seat.

He pulled away from the herd, headed to the stable,

the wagon following, me on the wagon. I was 8.

I dragged a tobacco stick in the dust below.

II.

Last week I saw a man at the park

moving slower than the power walkers pumping by.

He wore brown slacks, was bent over like he needed a cane,

like he had left it on the bleachers to try just one lap.

I glanced up as I jogged by:

white hair, not gray,

the white of my father’s hair, his father’s.

IV.

If I listened to your quiet talk, would I hear your dreams?

V.

The war, I used to think, did something to my father’s dreams,

Something that marred the surface

of his war stories of New Guinea, Peleliu, Japan.

As a child, I’d ask, did it hurt when you were shot?

Now, I’d ask, where did it hurt?

Was it deep inside to the little boy

who never missed church choir practice,

who whirled round and round in a wooden toy car,

who worked the fields instead of going to school?

The young soldier who dreamed his medic’s bag

was a doctor’s bag full of the right medicine,

enough suture for the ripped battlefields?

I wonder what dreams he had that night underneath the Jeep,

huddled with his friend, his lifelong friend

who wrapped his arm again and again with narrow bandages.

He could have gone to college, to medical school,

walked the halls of the hospitals.

But he came back to the tobacco fields,

to the sticks and twine and stained hands,

to pastures with cows.

He walked down the meadow strip into the corn,

into shady tunnels.

  Have you ever wondered what happened to the dreams of a parent or someone else in your life?