Facing fear

I can’t help but be glad that January is over. I spent a good part of it sick with various ailments and took three different antibiotics trying to get over everything.

The good news is that February started out wonderfully: I faced a fear.

You know that I love animals, especially cats. Over the years I have become more passionate about animal welfare, especially with companion animals like cats and dogs. I have read a lot and thought a lot and talked a lot and written a lot. I have taken care of four different cats. But I didn’t believe I was doing enough.

I have talked about volunteering with the local shelter, but I haven’t done anything about it besides inquiring about opportunities by email.

The Campbell County shelter. It's a dreary looking building. The county government is discussing whether to renovate or build a new facility.

In Campbell County, the Animal Control Care Center is separate from the humane society that operates in the county. Animal Control has to accept every animal brought to it—stray or surrendered by owner. And it is not a no-kill shelter.

Some caring people formed a group called Friends of Campbell County Control. The mission of the group “is to provide support for the animals of Campbell County and reduce the euthanasia rate.”

I follow the group on Facebook and have been so impressed at the all-volunteer efforts to care for animals and try to get them fostered or adopted.

Fern, one of the cats in the shelter. 

I never moved forward with my efforts to volunteer because I was afraid.

One of these fears is an OCD fear: fear of responsibility, that I would hurt an animal because I would shirk in my responsibilities and do something wrong. I would obsess over safety and health issues and compulsively do unnecessary things to try to make my anxiety go away.

My thought process was that if I avoided responsibility, I wouldn’t have the obsessions.

Adopting Waddles helped me a lot with this fear. But taking care of more animals, more than we ever had in our house, raised the fears again.

Honey Bee loved being held and cuddled. She wanted me to continue paying attention to her.

And I was afraid because of my anxiety. I tend to take the suffering of others to heart, sometimes to the degree that I get very emotional. I was afraid of what I would see and experience in the shelter. I was afraid of how I would feel when I had to leave the homeless animals behind when I went to my own home.

I used to put much more value on my feelings about something than I should have. That’s an OCD problem, too. If I feel like something is wrong, then something must be wrong and I better check it, fix it, repeat it, or avoid it.

Turbo has a loud purr when he's held.

But the more I spend in the quiet, thinking and writing about my values and beliefs, the better I understand that fear is a natural response to doing something different. I have to push through such fears and the accompanying feelings and at least give things a chance.

Kittens surrendered to the shelter by the owner. The yellow ones are boys and the black ones are girls. It's hard to get a still photo of a moving kitten!

This boy is new to the shelter and doesn't have a name yet. He seemed frightened. But when I opened the cage and talked to him and rubbed him, he started purring and rolling around.

This past Friday night, I sent the Friends a message on Facebook asking about the next orientation date. They wrote back that it was on Sunday. I told them I planned to attend.

I was excited and afraid. Believe me, I thought of excuses not to go. I didn’t feel 100 percent physically. I felt guilty leaving Chase Bird to go help care for other animals.

But I got in the car and drove to the shelter. I exposed myself to my fear.

When I left 90 minutes later, I felt joy and contentment.

I will be spending most of my time with the cats, which I was told was good because most volunteers want to walk the dogs.

I loved on the animals and talked to them and helped with some simple assessments on whether certain cats were OK with dogs and/or other cats.

Barbe, the leader of the volunteers, knew I was thinking of getting another cat, and she insisted on taking a photo of me and Bastet, a lovely tortoise kitty. Then she texted the photo to Larry.

Me and Bastet. She is in a purple cage in the waiting area, acting as "greeter" to visitors.

No, we’ve not made a decision to adopt yet. But I plan to go back soon and whenever I can to volunteer and love on those cats and let them know that humans can be kind to them.

What a great day it was!

I am still waiting on word about the job. The person in charge of hiring was out of town three days last week but told me he would be in touch with me this week. So I wait. Thank you for your good wishes!

What has been your favorite volunteer activity?

Waiting for an OCD rescue

The other night I was folding some laundry leftover from the weekend.

More laundry was in the washer and dryer. Larry had started washing cat blankets and beds, and I followed him with a load of clothes.

As I folded the laundry, I thought that the last of the kitty laundry was dry. It was time to empty the dryer and fill it with a new load, the clothes.

So I started to ask Larry to empty the dryer for me.

After all, that way I could avoid having to clean the dryer filter “good enough.” I wouldn’t have to worry about stray pieces of lint floating around and causing a fire. I wouldn’t have to worry about finding the dryer sheet hidden in the laundry, just waiting to ride upstairs in the laundry basket, ready for the cats to pounce on and eat and get sick from.

Yes, those are some of the things I worry about when it comes to laundry. And there are even more things I worry about when doing laundry.

But the other night, as I was folding laundry, it hit me.

I needed to take the kitty laundry out of the dryer myself.

I needed to stop waiting to be rescued.

I needed to stop depending on Larry to do the tasks that I didn’t want to do because of OCD. I needed to stop avoiding what I was afraid of.

I went downstairs and took care of the laundry myself.

I’m still avoiding certain tasks and situations because of OCD. And I’ve been expecting Larry to do some of those tasks and take care of some of those situations.

For example, I leave several cat care duties to Larry because of my OCD.

I don’t like to change the water in their bowls because if I have to wash the bowls first, then I’ll worry about getting all of the soap residue off before I fill it up with cold water for drinking. And I will have to check over and over to make sure it’s cold water and not hot water that I leave in the bowl.

I avoid washing the cat food bowls for similar reasons: I might not rinse them well enough and soap residue might make the cats sick.

I don’t clean the litter boxes because it’s just too messy and sometimes hard to look at.

Yes, OCD is a strange disorder.

I’m depending on Larry to carry a chunk of my OCD load for me. That’s not fair to him. And it’s not fair to me in that I won’t get better in those areas if I don’t try to push through the anxiety related to them.

I’m going to have to study my routines to find other things that I’m relying on Larry to take care of because of OCD. And I’m going to have to start helping with those tasks.

And stop expecting an OCD rescue.

Have you ever leaned too much on someone else to carry the load because of OCD, depression or some other issue?

OCD and cleaning off the table

This weekend I finished something that I’ve been working on periodically for months. I cleaned off the table in our dining area.

It had been literally piled up with mail and other paperwork—old bills, receipts, bank statements, health insurance statements, etc.

  I wrote about the table back in March. My therapist thought I was avoiding facing the clutter because of the anxiety involved in going through the paperwork. He was right.

Every time I worked on even just a little bit of the clutter, my anxiety would go up to about an 85 or 90 on the SUDs scale.

I was afraid of what I would find—an unpaid bill I had forgotten about, an important notice I had ignored.

And I didn’t want to deal with the decisions of what to do with the paperwork after I cleaned it up.

As I wrote in my March post, my therapist told me it was all about the OCD. It was about my scrupulosity.

So I continued to avoid cleaning up the pile.

I would throw away a piece of junk mail every now and then, but I avoided any deep or methodical cleaning. I just let the paper pile up even more.

The pile had been on the table for a few years. I had gotten into the habit of putting my mail on the table. After I opened it, I left it there.

  If someone was coming to the house, I could sweep it into presentable piles at one end of the table. I managed.

  But the anxiety of having the mess as well as the anxiety of not knowing exactly what was in the pile was always there, sometimes under the surface, sometimes front and center.

So what helped me to finally face the paper?

The approaching Christmas season helped. I wanted to put up a second, smaller tree and use different colors than we used on the main tree in the den. The table was a good place to put the tree.

But I think the lessons I’m learning as I work on my OCD have been the biggest help.

I’ve been learning that facing the fears usually has good results. I’ve been learning that nothing is gained by continual avoidance. I’ve been learning that any anxiety over facing a fear is usually short-lived, and it certainly doesn’t do irreparable harm.

So one evening last week I worked a bit on it. Then I saved the bulk for this past Saturday. I sat down with a trash bag and a couple of banker’s boxes and some file folders and went at it.

I was surprised at how much stuff I could just throw away, and how willing I was to throw the stuff away.

And I was surprised at how quickly the process went after I had a routine going. It took me about an hour to clear the table.

My SUDs score was probably at about a 70 when I started. It quickly dissipated as I finished up the job.

When I had the table completely cleared—that was a good feeling. Then I had a whole space to do with what I wanted. So I decorated the tree and put it on the table.

I don’t have a “before” photo to compare with the “after” photo. I was too embarrassed by how bad the table looked.

But the “after” picture, though a long time coming, is beautiful to me.

  How do you push through resistance to accomplish something that you’ve been putting off?

OCD and why I don't cook

I actually own some cookbooks and have a couple of my mother's recipe boxes.

It’s messy and there’s the whole stove thing.

I don’t cook because cleaning up during and afterwards brings out my contamination and cleaning obsessive-compulsive disorder symptoms.

No matter how careful I am, I sometimes spill food onto the kitchen counter when I mix together ingredients. Or I put down a bowl that held one of the ingredients and it leaves behind a ring of sauce, milk or whatever.

If I have to use the can opener, then I have to carefully wipe that off after I finish using it.

I worry that in cleaning off the counter, I may miss a spot and then ants or bugs might come around.

I don’t cook because a lot of cooking requires the stove. I can turn on the stove OK, but turning it off brings checking behavior with it. Is the stove really off, or do I just think it is? If I leave it on, a fire could start, or my husband might lay his hand on the stovetop, not knowing it was on, and burn himself. So goes my thinking.

Pans on the stovetop can also lead to food on the stovetop, leaving another surface to carefully clean and worry about.

Cooking anxiety

I have all this anxiety even though I’ve come a long way in my contamination and checking OCD symptoms.

I used to wipe the counter over and over, leaning down to view the countertop from different angles to make sure every bit was covered with cleaner. Then I’d clean it again. And again.

I used to check the stove for literally hours, staring at the on/off button, turning it on and off again and again, trying to get to the place where it felt “right” that the stove was off.

I no longer take so much time cleaning and checking the stove. I don’t follow through with all my compulsive urges. I can actually clean fairly quickly and turn off the stove in one attempt.

But the obsessions about cooking are still there, and it’s hard to face them every time I want something to eat.

So I avoid cooking.

Oh, I’ll put something in the microwave. But it’s rare that I mix ingredients and cook them on a conventional stove.

When I do cook, it’s a burden. There are so many things to worry about.

And I just don’t like to cook. I don’t read recipes with the same enthusiasm as my mother, who was a wonderful cook when she was still able to do it, and many friends, who discuss cooking like I would discuss a good book or movie.

I wonder if my dislike of cooking is directly related to my fear of cooking. I would guess that there’s at least a partial connection.

So how do we eat?

Breakfast is easy enough with oatmeal or grits cooked in the microwave, cold cereal, fruit or yogurt. I can eat sandwiches or snacks for lunch. My husband and I eat out for lunch sometimes, for dinner a lot.

We fix a couple of meals at home each week, usually using the microwave. We usually cook things separately, since I’m a vegetarian and Larry is not.

Sometimes my husband fixes spaghetti, with one pot of meat sauce and one pot of meatless sauce for me.

I want to cook

I want to cook more. I want to make food so we eat at home more often than we eat out. Cooking would result in healthier meals for me and for my husband. It would save money.

I want to enjoy cooking, because I feel like I’m missing out on something. I even recently bought a new vegetarian cookbook.

And I want to stop avoiding cooking. I want to stop giving in to the OCD and just push through and cook.

  Do you have any suggestions on how to do that? Do you like to cook? What about cooking do you enjoy? How did you get to that place of enjoying cooking?

CBASP at work

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Brooklyn_Museum_-_Blue_2_-_Georgia_O%27Keeffe.jpg

I’m a mind reader.

Don’t worry. I’m not claiming to know what you’re thinking right this moment, while you’re reading this.

But if you and I were talking with each other, I would be able to interpret the true meaning behind everything you said.

I would not need to nor would I want to ask you what you meant by something you said.

Because I’m a mind reader. Or, rather, I practice mind reading.

That’s one of the lessons that was brought home to me in today’s session of Cognitive Behavioral Analysis System of Psychotherapy, or CBASP.

I first wrote about my therapist using CBASP to treat my chronic depression here.

During our first two sessions of this new (to me) therapy, we discussed my significant other histories, the stories of the people in my life who have had big influences on me and on how I view other people and myself.

Today we completed our first situational analysis questionnaire, which is a form that guided us through analysis of “an interpersonal problematic event.” The analysis included role-playing to give me the opportunity to practice new coping skills.

Before the session, my assignment was to select the interpersonal event—an exchange between another person and me—that troubled me and write a brief “slice of time,” with a beginning, an end and a short story in between.

Then working with my therapist, I did the following:

  *Described my interpretation of what happened, or how I “read” the situation.

  *Described what I did during the situation, which included what I said and how I said it. This was what someone else would have observed if he or she had been able to see me during the situation.

*Described how the event came out for me. This is called the actual outcome. Outcome has to do with the last thing I did, not what the other person did.

*Described how I wanted the event to come out for me, which is called the desired outcome. I arrived at that description by considering the end point of the situation and what would have been the best I could have done at that point.

*Answered whether or not the desired outcome was achieved and why.

What I discovered was that I tend to assume I know what the other person means when he or she says something. I don’t ask. I just assume. And I tend to read a situation with my past rather than staying in the moment and dealing with what is.

I didn’t do the very simple but very important thing that would have changed the whole dynamic of the “interpersonal problematic event.” I didn’t ask, “What do you mean when you say that?”

I was trying to avoid conflict. I am afraid of conflict. But when I avoid it, when I avoid asking questions because I’m afraid of the answers, I stuff my feelings. The more I stuff my feelings, the more they fuel my depression.

There is no guarantee that if I ask the question, I will get the answer I want. But I will have something real to cope with, instead of something that may or may not be true.

My therapist likes to use the example of the baseball player who is petrified of not hitting the ball. There is no guarantee that if he swings at the ball, he will hit it. But it is guaranteed that if he does not even go up to bat and try, he will not hit the ball.

People with chronic depression tend to not even try, to think there is no use in trying, because we’ll just fail.

So why should I explore the meaning behind what another person tells me that upsets me? I already know what he meant, right?

Well, no, I don’t. I am going to need to practice staying in the present and tackling what is, not letting the past dictate how I interact with others.

This therapy is not particularly pretty or easy. I had to face some things about myself, and I cried. That box of tissues on the therapist’s bookcase is going to come in handy.

But I feel heartened by it, too. My therapist and I are not spending time analyzing why I interact with others like I do. As he said, what happened in the past can’t be changed. I can learn how to act with more strength and assertiveness now.

I may sometimes believe I’m helpless, but I’m not.

You don’t have to have chronic depression to sometimes make assumptions about the meaning of the other person’s words. Are you a mind reader? Do you sometimes let the past dictate how you act today?

My paper battle

I started to throw down the old bill and run away from the table, literally run away from it.

I could feel the anxiety build to probably an eight, and I told myself that I had to stay until it went down.

That was last Monday as I worked on my pile of mail and paperwork on our dining room table.

I have written about my problem with the stack of paperwork and the way my therapist is leading me to confront it as a part of my cognitive behavioral therapy.

So I stayed and forged ahead. I didn’t clear the table, but I made some headway. I also learned a lot about my reasons for keeping some of the paperwork.

Examples

 Bills: I had to have minor surgery last August, and bills come with surgery. You don’t just pay one person. You pay the hospital, the doctor who performed the surgery, the anesthesiologist and the lab.

The bills are all paid. They’ve been paid. But I haven’t filed the bills and my notes of when I mailed the payments because I like to check afterwards and make sure the payments were received.

I haven’t called. And those papers have been lying on the table. I’ve used the excuse that they’re serving as a reminder that I need to call.

On Monday I thought about that: I wanted to check to see if the payments had been received. I wanted to check. Was that OCD checking?

I think maybe it is in my case. I have not received any notices of nonpayment or phone calls asking for money. My checks have gone through at the bank. That most likely means the payments were received.

So I decided I would not check. I would file all the paperwork in a file folder relating to the August 2011 surgery.

 Requests: I’ve been periodically receiving notices from a national animal welfare organization that I’ve sent donations to in the past, asking me to renew my membership.

This is a wonderful organization, and I don’t fault them for asking me to renew. They depend on donations.

However, I have made a decision, for the time being, to support organizations in my local area. I’ve held onto those renewal notices, though, thinking, I’ll read this and think about it later.

Monday night I considered this: if I’ve decided not to renew the membership right now, there’s no need to keep the notices. When I decide to pick back up, I can find them easily online and send in the money.

So the notices went into the trash.

 It's called avoidance

To aid in the cleanup, I bought some extra file folders and a pack of banker boxes for storage.

I know that waiting to buy what I think are necessary accessories before tackling more of the paperwork is clearly avoidance on my part.

I will do more this week. I need to report back to my therapist. Most importantly, I need to face this.

I don’t officially have my next CBT session until May because my therapist is so booked up, but I’m on the cancellation list, and my therapist told me to call every week to ask about canceled appointments.

Have you ever realized, in the middle of an exposure, some of the OCD thinking that has led you to that place? What did you discover?

Even if you don’t have OCD, have you had to face down tasks that seemed insurmountable? How did you do it?

OCD: Perfectionism

A public safety agency in our town periodically puts up interesting sayings on a sign in front of its facility. Right now the sign says something like the following: “IF YOU DON’T M3SS UP SOMETIMES, IT MEANS YOU’RE NOT DOING ANYTHING.”

I laugh a bit when I drive by the facility and read the sign, but I also understand the truth in what it says.

Perfectionism is part of my obsessive-compulsive disorder. I believe that it sometimes keeps me from doing anything.

I avoid writing because it might not be perfect. I avoid doing more artwork because I won’t do a perfect job.

I also have a hard time letting tasks go. For example, I have a hard time letting go of assigned stories on the job.

I read and reread and revise and proof over and over before I finally turn in a story to my editor. This process takes a lot of time, more time than it should, and it leaves me dreading writing and even avoiding starting writing assignments until the last minute.

I really hate to mess up. I fear that others will think I’m incompetent or unintelligent. I am afraid that I’ll make a mistake with terrible consequences, especially in my writing for the newspaper.

Perfectionism is not always a bad thing, and not all perfectionists have OCD.

In a post called “Perfectionism in OCD: When the pursuit of success turns toxic,” on Dr. Steven Seay’s Psychology Blog, Seay wrote about adaptive and maladaptive perfectionism.

Seay described the adaptive perfectionist as “the prototypical workaholic student/employee who goes above and beyond expectations. This person is intelligent, hard-working, dependable, and passionate about meeting or beating deadlines. He or she sets high personal standards of performance and has an attention to detail that is appreciated by (and often draws accolades from) others.”

Seay wrote that the maladaptive perfectionist also believed in hard work and tended to be intelligent and have high standards. But he “often misses deadlines and fails to deliver an exceptional work product (or, in some cases, any work at all).”

This was because a person with maladaptive perfectionism “often gets stuck in repeating tasks and has difficulty finishing projects. He or she may repeatedly recheck or revise their work. However, despite these efforts, the product never quite feels ‘good enough,’” Seay wrote.

He said maladaptive perfectionists may also practice avoidance: “Alternatively, the person may suffer from intellectual paralysis due to an over-concern with living up to their own potential, fear of failure, or a fear of disappointing others (e.g., teachers, parents, loved ones). This intellectual paralysis may lead to complete avoidance, and this avoidance often becomes chronic and difficult to change.”

On Friday, my therapist and I discussed my tendency towards perfectionism and how it played a part in my avoidance of going through my piles of papers.

The cognitive behavioral therapy exercise I did Friday was one way of fighting through the avoidance caused in part by perfectionism.

OCD Chicago offers other ways of fighting perfectionism in an article called “The Search for Imperfection: Strategies for Coping with the Need to be Perfect,” by Andrew M. Jacobs, Psy.D. and Martin M. Antony, Ph.D., ABPP.

An example of a strategy was testing your beliefs about perfectionism. Make a typo in an email to your boss, the authors suggested, and see if your fears come true. If they come true, consider how you were able to deal with them.

Other strategies include putting your sense of perfection into perspective and think about areas of your life where imperfection is OK; attempting to define perfect; considering how you have different standards for others; and finding out the standards of people you admire.

The authors also encouraged exposure response prevention therapy. That is basically what I did Friday night: I worked on my piles of papers for 20 minutes, but I didn’t allow myself to get caught up in a never-ending session of trying to make everything perfect. I also didn’t allow myself to continue to avoid going through the papers.

Are you a perfectionist? Do you also have OCD? How has perfectionism affected you? What strategies do you use to fight against the negative effects of perfectionism?

Now I am going to stop rereading and revising this post and use it as an exposure exercise. I really want to read it again, but I’ve done my best, and it’s time to let it go.