Lent lessons: Filling in the gaps

This year I gave up two things for Lent: playing solitaire on my phone and getting food out of a snack machine at work.

Maybe I should say I am fasting from them, a term my minister used in his sermon this past Sunday to refer to anything given up in order to prepare ourselves for self-examination and the sacrifice of Jesus.

I am fasting from solitaire because I have days when I spend way too much time playing it. It’s like a nervous habit. When I don’t want to do anything else, or when I’m stressed, I grab the phone and start fiddling with the electronic cards.

I am fasting from the snack machine because I do too much mindless eating at work, out of stress and sometimes boredom. It’s easy to stick my dollar or coins in the machine and have instant “food comfort.” But I’m eating when I’m not hungry, and I’m turning to food rather than more healthy choices to cope with life.

Giving up the snack machine has been the easier of the two. I can always take the time to fix healthier food choices at home to eat at work, and I am trying to eat only when I’m hungry.

It has been more difficult with the phone. I’m not having trouble resisting the call of solitaire. I’m having a difficult time knowing what to do with myself without the game.

My plan was to spend the time with more useful and meaningful pursuits, like reading and writing, or, if I’m at work, with work.

That’s hard for me when I’m tired and feel anxious and I just want to avoid doing anything that takes effort.

During Sunday’s sermon, my minister talked about giving things up for Lent. He said something like, if you’re fasting from food but not praying, then it’s just a holy diet.

Therein lies my problem.

Should I be praying during at least part of the time that I could be playing solitaire? What do I do since I have such a hard time praying, and I haven’t really prayed much since I realized how compulsive I still am with the process?

I’ve written about the obsessions and compulsions I have about praying. I’m working to no longer attend to the compulsive prayer thoughts. How do I bring in real prayer?

That’s my quandary. What other ways can I reach out to the divine?

Meditation is one way, but I’m still at the 10-minutes-at-a-time stage.

I’ve tried prayers that someone else wrote, like the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi. Sometimes I still get lost in the words, though.

I’ve considered writing prayers.

I still think reading and writing are meaningful and have a place in my Lent practice. Prayer is not the only way to learn and grow.

But I want to do some kind of praying too.

Do you have any ideas or suggestions?

OCD: Picking up sticks

It seems like a stick looking straight down, but at an angle, it looks like a nail. When I nudge it with my foot, it rolls a little, but I still can’t tell.

People are coming. I turn and walk in the direction of my original destination, the student services building.

But it might be a nail. Somebody might step on it and get hurt. It would be my fault.

I turn around again, and I walk back the 10 feet. People are passing by.

I lean forward, put my head down and move it around, like I’m looking over the ground below. Maybe they’ll think I’m just looking for something I dropped.

After they pass, I touch the stick/nail again with my shoe. I can’t tell.

I pick it up. It’s a stick. But it’s a hard stick. I can’t break it. Maybe it’s not a stick.

I place it at the edge of the sidewalk, right where the concrete meets the grass, out of the way of walkers.

I take up my journey again.

But someone could still step on it. And it might not be a stick.

I go back and pick up the stick. Maybe if people see me do it, they’ll think it’s something I dropped.

I carry it with me into student services, into the bathroom. I throw it into the trashcan. Then I wash my hands.

That’s a small illustration of one of my harm obsessions. It was strongest when I was in graduate school.

When I walked on the street or on campus or through a parking lot, I checked for things on the ground that could harm someone.



At one point in my life, a walk along here could cause me a lot of anxiety.



I don’t remember ever finding any nails. But I found lots of sticks and rocks that could potentially be harmful. Or so I thought.

Walking somewhere was never a quick trip or a straight journey from A to B when this OCD symptom was at its peak.

I had to check every stick I saw, every little rock and anything that looked like it could be harmful.

I had to stop and examine it. I had to pick up a lot of things to figure out what they were. And sometimes that wasn’t enough.

This harm obsession was sometimes at odds with my contamination obsession. If I picked up a stick or an unknown object, I was contaminating my hands. But I had to pick it up in order to keep other people safe.

That was what it was all about. Keeping other people safe. It was my responsibility.

So harm trumped contamination long enough for me to get to a sink to wash my hands.

When I started taking medication for my OCD and depression, some of my symptoms got a lot better. The picking-up-sticks was one of those.

My eyes are still drawn to potentially harmful objects on the ground, in the driveway, in the parking lot. But now I have a new tool. I can call the obsession for what it is—OCD—and walk on, refocus.

Have you experienced a checking or harm obsession like this?

CBT session #3: Anxiety triangle

Today’s session of cognitive behavior therapy was the best yet. I felt my mind figuratively expand, and lots of bells and lights of recognition went off.

My therapist reviewed the anxiety triangle with me, and it helped me tremendously in understanding my OCD and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD).

I won’t go into nearly the detail that my therapist did, but here’s an overview.



A copy of my therpist's notes. He illustrated his points as he explained the anxiety triangle. All the lines show the connections that the physical, thoughts and behavior have.



The three points of the triangle are the physical components of anxiety, thoughts and behavior.

A big message for me was that we cannot control what thoughts we have, but we can choose what thoughts to attend to and how we behave in response to our thoughts.

So we can control our attention and our behavior.

Another big message was this: the more we learn to tolerate and embrace our anxiety, the more we can appreciate and enjoy the time we have, the people we love and the small moments we live.

We’re going to work on this, my therapist said, a moment at a time.

The physical

As someone with OCD and GAD, I’m sympathetic dominant. I stay in the fight or flight mode a lot of the time.

That means tension, shakiness, fidgeting, difficulty relaxing, numbness, light-headedness and sometimes a feeling of floating.

Yeah, that’s me.

Interestingly, I revealed something about my level of anxiety without even recognizing it myself. I told my therapist about my writing exercise a couple of weeks ago, which I described here.

I told him that during the writing exercise, my anxiety level rose to a six or seven, but after the exercise was over, it quickly went down to a three or four.

“Like you hadn’t even done the exercise?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

Well, what I was saying was that I am nearly always at a level three or four of anxiety. As my therapist put it, I start out at about 5,000 feet on the mountain. My anxiety level rises to about 20,000 feet, and then returns to 5,000 feet. But I’m still at 5,000 feet.

Oh, my, I thought.

Thoughts

Someone like me, a worrier, tends to be biased towards danger. I pay attention to danger and ignore safety.

As an example, my therapist said someone with social anxiety might enter a room with a lot of people and wonder immediately, which ones don’t like me? That person would ignore the people with smiles on their faces and pay attention to the ones with frowns, even though the smiles and frowns had nothing to do with that person.

Along with the bias towards danger goes the tendency to underestimate one’s coping ability. A worrier like me would tend to think, I can’t handle it.

People with OCD also tend to experience meta-cognition, thinking about thinking. We tend to believe we should be able to control our thoughts. We tend to believe that if we think it, it’s as if we acted upon it. (He said you see this in scrupulosity sometimes, where people may have learned that thinking something bad was as sinful as doing it.)

The only things we can control about our thoughts are which ones we attend to and how we respond to them: our attention and our behavior.

Behavior

My therapist said situation A might cause anxiety, but when we practiced a particular behavior that lowered the anxiety, that behavior was reinforced.

OCD offers lots of examples of this. We may be very anxious about our hands being contaminated. But after washing them for 30 minutes, the anxiety lessens. So our brain associates the behavior—washing the hands for 30 minutes—with less anxiety. And that is what the brain is going for—less anxiety. Avoidance can also lessen anxiety.

We get caught up in rituals and avoidances in order to lessen anxiety. But really, we’re perpetuating and reinforcing behavior that causes us much pain and suffering.

What comes next?

My next appointment is in a week. Until then, I’m to work on the writing exercises more. But I’ll also include timed editing sessions and then—the hardest part—I will show the writing to someone.

I also need to self-monitor. When I have the symptoms of anxiety, I need to note what I’m thinking and what I’m doing and share that information at next week’s session.

I am so excited and hopeful!
Does this anxiety triangle make sense to you? Would you agree that the physical symptoms of anxiety, your thoughts and your behavior can feed off each other?

The imaginary shield of prayer

“Please forgive me for anything I did wrong today. Please forgive me for what I did do that I wasn’t supposed to do and for what I didn’t do that I was supposed to do.”

   I wish I were home. I wish I were alone in my bedroom, with the door closed. I’d be able to close my eyes or bury my face into my pile of stuffed animals, be alone with the whirl of prayers in my head.

“Please forgive me for not being happy where I am. Please forgive me for not focusing on you.”

I’m on the van that is carrying me home from school. I have to keep my eyes open so that the other riders won’t know that I’m praying. Everybody is so noisy. I can’t keep the rhythm of the prayer going.

“Please forgive me, Lord. Please forgive me for everything I’ve done wrong. Please forgive me for the mean thought I just had about the kids in the back of the van. Please bless them. Please bless them. Please forgive me for all my sins.”

Those were my prayers when I was a teenager, when I kept the journals that I wrote about in my last post.

I don’t pray like that anymore. I don’t feel like I’m physically straining to get the prayers right anymore.

I’m not all better. But I have begun to understand.

Late last night, or early this morning, as I got ready for bed, I knew I was too keyed up to fall asleep right away. My husband was still up, in another room. I sat in the dark on top of the bed and meditated.

When I meditate, I concentrate on the sounds around me. Starting out, I hear the larger sounds, the furnace running, perhaps, or the train passing through town.

But as I continue to listen, I hear the smaller sounds. The faint tick of something rolling around in the dryer in the basement, in the load I put in before bed. Or one of the cats munching a midnight snack.

Last night, as thoughts distracted me, I pictured myself apart from my thoughts. I pictured my hand holding a globe, with the thoughts swirling around in it, in pictures. I tried to be that Impartial Spectator that Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz writes about in “Brain Lock.”

My thoughts slowed down. I felt calmer. I felt like my mind was empty enough to go to sleep.

I put my head down on the pillow. But my mind wasn’t empty enough, after all.

I don’t remember now what I was thinking. I don’t even remember what I prayed, but I prayed one of the “spurt prayers,” something like, forgive me, God, or help her, God, or oh, Lord, be with him.

They’re not real prayers. They’re not directed at God. They’re compulsive chants. They make me anxious, restless. They’re meaningless, but necessary to quell . . . what?

I wanted to think. I wanted to answer the question. Why did I feel like I had to pray like this?

I’m beginning to understand that it’s because somehow I don’t believe that I will live a good life, in the care of the grace of God, that my loved ones will be safe and well, unless I think these meaningless chants.

It’s not for my salvation from an eternal hell. It’s to build some kind of shield against all that might hurt my family and me.

Somehow, I don’t believe God can take care of it all, that nature will run its course, that life will happen. Somehow, I believe I can control it all with my compulsive thoughts in the form of prayers.

I’ve been working on that shield for most of my life, and it hasn’t done anyone any good.

I feel like I had a brief moment of insight last night. Perhaps it came because of the stillness and quiet that I experienced during meditation.

It’s time for me to work on refocusing, on letting go of the imaginary shield. Do you have any ideas on how to do this? How do you deal with OCD when it’s all happening in your thoughts?

Showing my scrupulosity

I’ve been reading a record of my scrupulosity OCD.

I recently dug out journals that I kept when I was in high school. One covers the period from June 28, 1978 to Dec. 31, 1979. I used the other one more for poetry and stories. That one runs from Dec. 22, 1978 to July 4, 1981.

I was hoping to find some insight into how I was coping with OCD at the time, and what my ideas about life were.

Do you know the writing advice, “show, don’t tell”? It means it’s better to paint a picture of something, or give an illustration of something, rather than telling it.

Well, I didn’t write directly about any of my obsessions or compulsions, but I sure showed them.

On his Psychology Blog, Dr. Steven J. Seay recently wrote about scrupulosity. One of the compulsions that people with this manifestation of OCD may display is “Compulsive writing (e.g., Jesus loves me).”

I exhibited that on many of the pages of my journals. For example, different versions of “I love God” and “Praise God” intersperse entries describing my activities, sometimes for no obvious reason.

But what was most telling was evidence of my cycle of doubt and reassurance.

Part of my scrupulosity when I was young involved the idea of being “saved” in the fundamentalist Christian way. Sometimes I felt saved; sometimes I felt I wasn’t.

And, yes, my doubt and reassurance were based on feelings. I prayed until I felt right. I prayed until I felt saved. I felt fear, sadness and doom when I didn’t feel saved.

In my journals, on Jan. 4, 1979, I wrote, “From this day forth, my life belongs to God. Thanks, Lord!”

On March 4, 1979: “I just surrendered my life to God. Praise the Lord!”

On April 24, 1980: “Tonight God told me that I am saved, was saved May 2, 1975. No more doubts.”

Ah, but on April 27, 1980: “I committed myself to Christ tonight, and I KNOW I’m saved.”

I didn’t ever name my doubt in writing. I suspect it was because I thought I was the problem. I was a sinful person who just couldn’t give myself over to Jesus like I was supposed to. I had no knowledge or understanding of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

I no longer have that kind of scrupulosity. I’ll write more about that part of my journey in future posts.

I learned about myself by reading my journals. It just wasn’t what I expected to learn.

Have you experienced this manifestation of OCD? Do you have old journals that offer a look at your past self?

A year with no meat

Last year, sometime in mid-February, I became a vegetarian.

I don’t remember the exact date that I last ate meat. I had been eating less and less with the idea of going meatless. At some point, after eating no meat for a few days, I decided to keep on going.

I don’t eat animal flesh of any kind, including seafood.

I stopped eating meat chiefly because I just couldn’t eat animals anymore. I’ve done a lot of reading about the meat industry and factory farming, and I don’t like it. It’s not necessary for me to eat meat to live. And the bond with animals that I have makes it unethical for me to eat them.

Vegetable fajita quesadilla at El Cazador

Let me say now that I am a vegetarian for my own reasons, but I don’t think everyone should follow my example. I don’t judge others if they eat meat.

My husband is a true carnivore. He loves steak, pork chops, country ham, etc. I think he eats too much meat, but that’s because I am concerned about the health effects.

Choripollo at El Cazador

I do wish that all those who eat meat would be more mindful about where it comes from. And I think all of us should be mindful of where all of our food comes from and eat it with gratitude.

I thought I would lose more weight than I have being vegetarian, but I’ve learned that calories are calories. I eat too many simple carbohydrates and too much processed food and just . . . too much food.

I’m trying to change that. I’m trying to learn more about what foods to eat to get all the nutrients I need.

I do think my digestive system works better overall without meat.

Anything I do for overall good health is going to help me in dealing with my OCD and depression.

It hasn’t been difficult for me to give up meat. And I’m happy to say that I really haven’t obsessed about it. I’ve ended up ingesting some meat accidentally when it was part of a dish I was eating, and I didn’t panic or think I had to start all over again.

Being vegetarian has been a learning experience. My husband adjusted well. He understands how I feel. When we’re choosing a restaurant to eat at, he kindly considers places where there are choices for me.

Today we had lunch at our favorite Mexican restaurant, El Cazador. I had a vegetable fajita quesadilla. He had choripolla, a dish with chicken and sausage.

We’re eating late tonight. I’m having a frozen dinner that I love: Amy’s Indian Mattar Paneer, which is curried peas and cheese with rice and chana masala, with rice, tomatoes and peas. Larry is having hot wings.

Waiting

When I was a child and teenager, I spent a lot of time waiting.

Some of this waiting happened in actual waiting rooms, places of concentrated calm in the midst of the sadness and fear of hospitals.

I was surrounded by sickness growing up. I’m the youngest of three, with two older brothers. My oldest is 11 years older than me. My next oldest is two years older.

My next oldest brother was born with spina bifada and clubfeet. As a result, he had to have multiple surgeries as a child and spent a lot of time in the hospital.

My father had a major stroke when he was 54. I was 12 at the time. His speech and movement were badly affected, and he had to retire from his job as a rural letter carrier for the post office. Later that same year, he suffered a blood clot in one of his kidneys and almost died before the kidney was removed.

My mother also had her share of illnesses and hospital visits.

So the waiting rooms in the hospitals in the nearby city were very familiar to me.

The nicest one was at the then-private, church-supported hospital. The large main waiting room had real furniture, like you’d find in a private home. Chair railings ran along the wall. Paintings covered the walls.

There were volunteers stationed at a counter who watched over things. They were usually older women who wore the pink-jacket “uniforms” of hospital volunteers. They were called “Pink Ladies.”

Though people came and went, there was a hush over the room. No one spoke loudly or laughed or cried where you could hear. It was like a church.

At that time and in that place, my parents felt safe leaving me alone in the waiting room while they went up to be with my brother.

I always had a book with me, and I would sit and read in one of the nice green armchairs, my always-present purse tucked up against me. Sometimes, I would look up and stare at the paintings or the signs on the wall and on the swinging doors that went back into the main part of the hospital.

I started reading signs and dividing the letters into threes—my counting ritual—in that room.

If I wasn’t in a waiting room, I was usually with a relative. I grew up in the same community with many of my relatives. I stayed a lot with my father’s great-aunt or his cousin, who had two daughters near my age, or my mother’s sister.

My great-aunt made over me, and I felt safe with her. If I stayed overnight, she would sleep in the same bed with me.

I remember waking up in the early mornings. I could look out of the top of a nearby window while I was still lying down, and I’d watch the sky get lighter until my aunt woke up and then got me up.

I brushed my teeth in her bathroom and ate breakfast on her dishes and got on the school bus at the end of her driveway, feeling comfortable and homesick at the same time.

I never knew when a medical emergency would occur and somebody would have to go to the hospital. I got used to waiting somewhere.

My mother told me years ago that one morning when I was a child, I asked her, “Who’s going to keep me today?”

She said it made her feel really bad.

But it couldn’t be helped. The sick person needed her, and she couldn’t be everywhere at once.

I felt guilty sometimes because I didn’t have lots of illnesses. I thought that since I didn’t suffer as a child, God would have me be sick as an adult.

What was ironic was that even though I wasn’t physically sick where anyone would notice, I was beginning to suffer from OCD and depression.

My therapist told me that the content of OCD symptoms can be influenced by different things. I think my scrupulosity was probably affected by my life experiences. My prayers were meant to protect my family from harm and illness. They had to be said a certain way, and I had to be free from sin, or my family would not be under protection.

In a real way, though, I was praying for myself too. Because when my family got sick, I was back to waiting for someone to get well or die, for everything to be back to normal.