Editor and Founder Vrinda Pendred discusses what it’s like to be a child with OCD, and examples of things to look out for in your child
Welcome back! Last time, we talked about what OCD really is, versus the media stereotypes, and I promised we’d spend the coming months exploring this subject further. This time, we’ll be looking at what it’s like to have OCD as a child, and some ways to recognise if your child has it. Rather than attempt to give an exhaustive list of things your child might do, I thought I’d share some of my personal experiences. Remember: every child is unique and will have his/her own unique obsessions and compulsions. That said, when I was in my 20s I started talking to others with OCD and realised we had a lot of childhood experiences in common – things you don’t typically hear about in OCD documentaries, so you might not realise they’re part of the disorder.
My Earliest OCD Memories
My OCD may have started younger, but my first memories of it are from when I was around 6 or 7. I decided the ‘correct’ way to walk was in a left-right pattern, which meant that when I stopped walking, I had to finish on my right foot. If I was stopped on my left foot, it felt so wrong. It is impossible to describe the sensation to anyone who hasn’t felt it for themselves. It was genuine distress – not just emotional or psychological but physical, too. It was almost as if I had bugs crawling all over me and I had to get them off. I was overtaken with a combination of terror, deepening dread, and physical revulsion. I’d attempt to fix things by taking a step with my right foot – but it was unnatural, an unnecessary step taken while standing in place. My brain knew the step was forced, and so it didn’t feel like ‘enough’. I would then stamp my right foot over and over until I felt a sort of ‘click’ in my brain that allowed me to relax again. I had cleared the bugs from my skin, so to speak. There was no way for me to explain any of this to those around me, not even my parents. Believe me, I tried, but I could see the confusion on their faces, hear it in their voices, and I recall growing frustrated to the point of anger – not with them but with myself for so obviously being ‘weird’ in a way that others just didn’t get, and having no way to explain myself to them.
Hoarding
Also around 6 or 7, I hoarded like crazy. For example, I saved every single empty toilet paper tube and any other cardboard I could find, in a big paper bag in my wardrobe. I liked to glue and tape them together to build telescopes and binoculars. It’s a standard childhood activity, except my collection grew a bit extreme. I couldn’t throw any cardboard away. One day, my mother found my collection and threw it out. It took me years to forgive her for that. It wasn’t really about the cardboard – it was the emotional distress it caused me to see it go.
When I was 9, I had moved onto other types of paper – namely, homework assignments. I went through a phase where I resented a certain teacher so much that I went on a homework striking and repeatedly told her I’d lost the worksheets. She would give me new ones (looking back on this, although I had good reason not to like her, she was also immensely patient with me, tolerating those excuses and giving me new copies of the work), and I would throw them in my wardrobe. Some years later, I found them all, still in there – hundreds of sheets of paper I didn’t need, and to throw them out even long after the incident felt somehow wrong.
Hoarding can also be invisible. I have been hoarding memories since I was about 7, when I got my very first diary. For years, I felt compelled to document every last detail of each day of my life. I don’t know just how many diaries I filled up, but they are still in my loft, taking up multiple large cardboard boxes. (I often consider typing them up, in case something happens to the originals.) By the time I was in high school, it felt like there was just so much to document that I didn’t have the time or energy for it anymore. I was overwhelmed and frequently missed days or even whole months. This was a source of great anxiety and distress for me for many years, as I thought of how many memories I had let slip by without being recorded. See, I was convinced one day I’d get in some terrible accident and get amnesia, and that my diaries would be my only link to who I was. I was terrified that my identity might be lost forever. (This also tied in tightly with an intense fear of death.) My mother once asked, ‘What if you forgot you had a diary?’ which didn’t help. I considered leaving myself reminders about this, too, to tackle every possible eventuality. (Incidentally, things like Alzheimer’s petrify me too. I suppose that’s scary to everyone, but I recognise that to worry about it as much as I do, at 37, is a little extreme.)
Similarly, I used to keep logs of things like…every time I cried and how many minutes it went on…my favourite song for each day, with the date…every film I’d ever seen and how many times I’d seen it, and so on. (It is still hard to explain to people why I know I’ve seen Aladdin more than 80 times. The only reason that figure isn’t precise is that I made a conscious effort to stop counting after 66. I can’t tell you how hard that was. I imagine it’s all a little like quitting cigarettes – no exaggeration.)
I also continue to have an obsession with taking photographs. I got my first camera with my own allowance money when I was 9 and I just never stopped. When my external hard drive broke a few years ago and I lost 7 years’ worth of home videos, I experienced a period of grief that was identical to the grief I felt when a loved one passed away. Bear in mind that it’s never just about the lost videos, for example. After some deep contemplation, I came to see that particular incident was about me being forced to face my own mortality (we’ll explore this idea in a future article).
Monsters Under the Bed
I think all children go through periods of fearing the dark, or worrying there’s a monster under the bed. But I never knew anyone who had any of this as bad as I did. Sometimes I still struggle with it. In some ways, I think my children are more together than I am.
For years, I felt a presence following me around the house, trying to get me. (Occasionally, I still sense it watching me from the bottom of the stairs, if I get up in the middle of the night.) I would run into my room and shut and lock the door to get away. I would check that lock over and over and over and over and over again before I was convinced I was safely hidden away. (In fact, I did this in the daytime, too. I kept my door locked every time I went into my bedroom, for no real reason at all other than that it gave me comfort.) Keep in mind that the obsession was the worry that I was being followed. The compulsion was me running and hiding, and checking that lock. It’s important to keep these distinctions clear. In retrospect, I can see that every time I ran and hid, I was feeding the fear and allowing it to grow bigger. I was making the problem worse.
But when you’re 8 years old, you don’t understand this, and I’m not sure what amount of reasoning would have got that message through to me – particularly because even once hidden in my room, I didn’t feel safe. Somehow he (it was always a he) would suddenly be in my room with me. Maybe he could walk through walls – or maybe he was waiting for me in the room, all along. Remember, this was the obsession. The compulsion (the action I took to feel better) was to hide in my bed. Then he was under the bed, waiting to grab me, so I couldn’t let any part of my body dangle over the edge. I also couldn’t let my ears show – I don’t know why, but it was imperative that I keep the blanket over my ears or he would get me. (I didn’t stop doing this until I was in my 20s. To this day, the act of sleeping without the blanket over my ear feels like a tremendous feat of daring.) I had to sleep with my back to the wall, so that I could face the room and see him there, and be better able to dodge and run. I used to plan my escape, so I’d know exactly how to get away when he came at me with the axe I was certain he held. All of these scenes ran through my head in meticulous detail, as if it were really happening to me. I frequently opened my eyes to check for him. All of this meant it took me ages to get to sleep. (Tourette’s didn’t help!)
I also obsessively prayed that no harm would come to me or any of my loved ones. I never felt these prayers were precise enough or covered enough people, so they would get longer and more detailed every night, until again it just kept me up for ages. I’d have to do this in my head at sleepovers – I couldn’t just not do it. I felt responsible for everyone’s lives. If I missed those prayers for just one night, someone would die and it would be all my fault.
Wide Open Space
When I was around 9 or 10, I started having showers, and this became a new source of distress for me. I had an almost physical sense that someone was about to grab me from behind. I’d turn in circles to make sure I could see what was coming and run before I got caught. Even when I could see I was absolutely alone in that shower, I feared hands would burst through the shower walls and get me anyway. I’d wash and get out and run from the bathroom as quickly as possible. Similarly, I couldn’t bear being in an open field. Again, I thought someone would get me from behind. For the same reason, I couldn’t sit in an aisle seat, such as in a cinema. In exams, they separated the desks to prevent cheating and there was so much space around me that I couldn’t focus on the test. My mother had to speak to my teachers, to allow me to sit the test in another environment. (I remember my extremely understanding maths teacher Mr Wittevrongel allowing me to do the test in his adjoining office, with him standing in the doorway to make sure I wasn’t cheating. The clutter of his office gave me immense comfort.)
Media Influence
When I was 7, I saw a documentary about tornados and was convinced they were a very real danger to me (despite living in Arizona at the time, where they are extremely rare and don’t do much damage). I had endless nightmares about them (there were usually several tornados all coming for me at once). This went behind normal childhood fear. I visualised intensely and ran over my survival plan over and over again in my head, night after night after night. I knew exactly which items I would take with me in the event of evacuation, and where I would go to hide from the storm. I kept those chosen belongings next to me in bed every night. This ritual continued for years.
I also saw a bit of Unsolved Mysteries around that time (why I was allowed to watch this at age 7, I will never know!) where they talked about a 9-year-old girl who had gone home with a stranger and been discovered in pieces in his fridge. This continues to haunt me today as a mother. Naturally, this would scare any child, but I took it several steps further, involuntarily imagining myself as that little girl, going through every single moment of it in vivid detail – and not just once, but multiple times a day, every single day for an incredibly long time. It’s good to be wary of strangers, but I was terrified of talking to just about anyone.
Self-Harm and Other Coping Strategies
There are lots of ways to hurt oneself. I never slashed my wrists, but I still pick at scabs, and it used to be much worse. I have a deep scar on the left side of my nose due to picking too many times at one particular scab. Thankfully, no one can see it, but it took me many years to come to terms with the fact that I had done that to myself and that it was permanent. (Cue yet another period of coming to terms with my own mortality…!) I also would twist my hair around my finger until it turned into a knot, and then yank it out of my head. This falls into the category of ‘stimming’, a common feature of autism, but it also crosses over with OCD, because I did it to relieve myself of intense anxiety. My bedroom floor used to be covered in knots of my hair (well, sort of – I hid them under a big rug, out of shame). It’s a good thing my hair has always grown so quickly, or I would have been bald (which does happen to people with the same compulsion – it’s a common one). I also constantly picked (and still pick) at my fingernails and cuticles. It really goes way beyond normal nail biting (I managed to quit that years ago). I can’t go anywhere without nail clippers and a file, because the slightest crack or jagged edge gives me so much anxiety and physical discomfort that I can’t focus on anything else until I deal with the problem. It’s not vanity – it’s horrible.
I also spent a lot of time straightening out my books so they were all even, organising them in height order, things like that. In school, my handwriting needed to be in perfect even strokes. I hated pens (compared to pencils) because there would be breaks in the strokes, and then I had to press really hard to fill in the gaps, to make that ‘click’ in my head. Then the letters would look uneven in depth of colour and I just couldn’t stand it. When I was 11, I earned myself the ‘friendly nickname’ of Psycho Woman because I spent a lot of class time frantically erasing the tiny pencil marks left on my desk from when we switched classrooms and someone else used my desk. Then the eraser marks would show up whiter than the natural grain of the wood, and I’d spent yet more time rubbing at it with my fingers to make the colouring even.
Social Life
Other students would draw on my desk on purpose, right in front of me, to laugh at my response. That might sound like bullying, but I don’t hold it against those kids. They weren’t really doing anything anyone would typically class as hostile. They thought I was being silly and it was all a game. I played up to this image by over-dramatising my reactions and laughing along with the other kids. I didn’t want to admit just how serious it was for me, because by that age I was old enough to know something was very wrong and what I was doing was not ‘normal’. I sincerely believe that if I had taken the time to explain to those kids what I was going through, and shown them just how much pain it actually caused me, they would have backed off (even if they also thought, ‘God, she’s weird!’). Perhaps when they grew up and became more aware of the world and things like OCD, they remembered me and realised what had really been going on…or maybe not. As I said last time, OCD is very misunderstood. (And maybe they don’t remember me at all – always possible!)
At least I didn’t lose any friends because of that behaviour – but OCD still impacted my social life, mainly because of how controlling I was. Other people just didn’t understand that pencil marks on a desk represented a life or death situation. They didn’t understand how imperative it was that we carry out certain rituals, to ensure that some indefinable disaster didn’t occur. I had no choice, as a child, but to force these things on them. They had to do things my way. Not only that, but controlling them meant I didn’t have to deal with any kind of unpredictable behaviour. I often ran through imaginary conversations in my head, even, and then couldn’t stand when others didn’t follow the script I’d written for them. Often it was easiest just to stay on my own so that I didn’t have to worry about what others did. I didn’t like being bossy. I didn’t like being in control – it was exhausting. I just didn’t know what else to do. So for a long time I preferred to play on my own, away from people.
Final Thoughts
There is so much else I could mention. OCD simply consumed me, until I was in my late 20s. I fed that monster everything I could, letting it grow and grow and grow until it was hard to find me amid that devouring fear. Where did it all come from? There are the medical causes, of course, but I think the obsessions we develop actually stem from life experiences and emotional problems. A huge part of my recovery from OCD was intense self-reflection and identification of the roots of each one of my obsessions – which we’ll talk about next time. Be sure to subscribe to this blog so you don’t miss any of these articles.
And finally, if you’d really like to get into the mind of someone with OCD and learn what it’s like to live with – and try to overcome – not just this condition but fear in general, please read my novel Equilibria:
Anna Nolon is obsessive – about everything. She worries about her grades, her appearance, germs, the pattern of her footsteps, the number of syllables in the words she says, her parents’ approval, the future and, most of all, death. It’s okay – so does everyone else. This is Equilibria: the first society built to accommodate OCD. But when Aaron comes along – the strange new boy who doesn’t quite fit into that pristine society of Holy Balance and Order – Anna is forced to look at the dark shadows hanging over her and decide if perfection is really what she wants.
Until next time….
Vrinda Pendred is a graduate of English with Creative Writing at Brunel University. She completed work experience with Random House and proofread for Mandala Publishing. She is married with two children and lives in Hertfordshire, England, where she does freelance editing and proofreading. She is also a writer, and you can learn more about her personal work here.
Vrinda has been diagnosed with five neurological conditions: Tourette’s Syndrome, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, ADHD, High-Functioning Autism and bipolar disorder. In 2010, she founded Conditional Publications with the intention of providing a creative outlet for people, and (hopefully) changing a few minds out there about what neurological disorders really are – including not just the limitations, pain or frustration, but also the more positive, beneficial ‘symptoms’ of these strange conditions.
She made three contributions to Conditional Publications’ debut release Check Mates: A Collection of Fiction, Poetry and Artwork about Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, by People with OCD. Since then, she has released a novel entitled The Ladder, inspired by her personal struggle with bipolar disorder, as well as a number of short stories, the YA sci-fi /fantasy series called The Wisdom, and Equilibria, a YA dystopia about a society engineered for people living with OCD.
