Here is another excerpt from my book “A Life Interrupted – the story of my battle with bullying and obsessive compulsive disorder”:
The first step of this treatment was to learn everything that I could about OCD. Along with starting therapy, I began to read materials pertaining to my illness. What I discovered was how appropriate the diagnosis was for me! As stated on a website called familydoctor.org, OCD is a mental illness that causes people to have unwanted thoughts (obsessions) and to repeat certain behaviors (compulsions) over and over again. Though most people with OCD know their symptoms do not make sense, they strongly feel as though they cannot stop or ignore them.
As I continued reading I learned that obsessions are ideas, images and impulses that run through a person’s mind over and over again. A person with OCD doesn’t want to have these thoughts, finding them intrusive and disturbing. Compulsions, also known as rituals, are the behaviors people perform to rid themselves of these awful feelings. More specifically, they are used to neutralize or cancel out the perceived impact left by the bad thoughts. Some common obsessions, as stated on this website, include the following: fear of dirt or germs; disgust with bodily waste or fluids; concern with order, symmetry (balance) and exactness; worry that a task has been done poorly, even when the person knows this is not true; fear of thinking evil or sinful thoughts; thinking about certain sounds, images, words or numbers all the time; need for constant reassurance; fear of harming a family member or friend.