Episode 3: Not Everybody’s Out Birdwatching
In the last episode, I mentioned that hearing other people’s OCD stories can help transform the painful emotions associated with the disorder, like guilt, shame, fear, and resentment. So I was running along the Charles River in Boston last summer while I was visiting my family—well, more than visiting, because I stayed for six months and worked at Trader Joe’s—and I was listening to Stuart Ralph’s “OCD Stories” podcast. A relapse following a period of relative freedom from severe symptoms had led me to plug into the extensive OCD community for the first time. In the past, I’d listened mostly to podcasts on things like balancing the vata dosha in Ayurveda, the magical powers of ghee, PMS, cortisol, attachment theory, Narcissistic abuse, near death experiences, and other related topics. However, I hadn’t found anything like Stuart Ralph’s “OCD Stories.” So in the episode I was listening to on that run, the guy being interviewed described how he used to have a particular contamination-related obsession that was exactly like the one troubling me at the time. His inner monologue and the behavior surrounding his intrusive thoughts were uncannily identical to mine.
While I was new to “The OCD stories,” I wasn’t new to the disorder and how it worked. I was even brainstorming ideas for my own podcast on the topic and planned to put the episodes together once I got myself together, not yet understanding that making my own podcast would help ground me. Yet until I heard this guy’s story on my run, my brain had me convinced that I was the only one weird and “disordered” enough to have the particular thoughts and to engage in the specific compulsions he described. And, by the way, I’m not talking about touching something in public and then repeatedly hand-washing—what people tend to think about when they think about contamination OCD and OCD in general.
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