It’s not fair. Fighting the Just Right OCD flea feels like a never-ending game of whack-a-mole where the stakes are my son’s happiness, acceptance, safety and future.
On Tuesday after Wes got home I noticed he was acting almost manic. He couldn’t barely look at me and when he did he was so alive it was if he was electrically charged. After his bath he puffed his chest out, dug his feet in the floor and stated as if announcing the start of a show at the theater that he wasn’t going to watch TV. Instead, he wanted to do exposures. He started calling OCD flea names and saying he was going to beat him. He ran into my office and started fidgeting around. He asked me immediately to set the timer and he was going to stare at the drawers in my desk for 59 minutes or something ridiculous like that.
His eyes darted around. Then, eventually he’d settle on the desk drawers with an intensity that exceeded any attempt at exposure therapy I’d seen from him. Drawers are a trigger, OCD screams at him to the point that he’s so uncomfortable and has to address the compulsion with such intensity that nothing else matters. Nothing.
Then I realized what I had done. Paul typically gives Wes his medication each morning. That morning he’d left early. And I forgot it.
After staring at drawers I convinced him to switch to something else which he decided was drawing pictures of the OCD Flea. He raced to my shelf and grabbed the entire stack of papers and started fidgeting through my drawer for a pencil. He had to find the ‘just right’ writing utencil. I coaxed and urged him to settle on one. Then, he started to draw this picture of OCD Flea in jail. He carefully drew bars on it and drew a picture of another creature outside of the jail cell at the ready to torture OCD flea.
It’s part of therapy to villainize OCD. Call him names. He’s a bully after all. So, I thought it was actually a good thing and part of his healing to see him drawing these pictures. He drew another one. It looked the same yet a little different. Then another one, again slightly different. Finally I had to convince him to stop. He wanted to wake up early the next day to do exposures and draw pictures of OCD flea. It was like a broken record. He was stuck. And, I felt terrible. On top of it, in those moments getting him to sleep and staying asleep can be almost impossible. We prepared for a very long night with no sleep.
A few days after this incident we were with his child psychologist for an exposure therapy session. I shared some of the recent challenges and she shared that I need to recognize that repeated drawing as another compulsion. He will not be allowed to draw that picture anymore. The picture. Another place OCD is showing up. Ugh.
The OCD Flea is everywhere. It bullies him on what he can put on in the morning, how the clothes need to fall on his body. It bullies him to ask the time repeatedly even when the answer has already been given repeatedly. On what breakfast foods he should eat. When he should eat. How things need to sit on the table. Responses of things I need to say when certain things happen. How things need to be picked up. How school worksheets need to be completed. How he needs to touch and look at certain things that he worries about on repeat in a certain way. Reading. Writing. Every. Single. Thing.
The OCD Flea is our Trojan Horse. It sneaks into our lives in some benign way, sometimes unbeknownst to us. It seeks to destroy our joy, our progress. And, slowly we’re building a taller, stronger gate to protect us, protect him.
His psychologist shared that he was severe OCD when we started ERP. Now, moderate. Now, we have walls. We’ll keep going, keep building and keep watching out for those trojan horses that sneak past.
Peace & Victory
JM
Defeating the OCD Flea 