Latest / Living Uncertain an OCD Podcast / Avery's Story(OCD)(Episode 20)
Transcript
- Opening: Hello, and welcome to the podcast, Living Uncertain. This podcast is dedicated to obsessive compulsive disorder, OCD, and the primary treatment, exposure response prevention, ERP. OCD comes in many forms, such as contamination, perfectionism, checking, harm, superstitious, religious or moral, sexual orientation, and or relationship. ERP is the gold standard to treating OCD. and it focuses on deliberately confronting fears, the exposure, while refraining from compulsive rituals, the response prevention. With repeated exposures and without engaging in compulsions, we learn to tolerate anxiety and break the cycle of intrusive thoughts. We are a married couple that have faced both the challenges of OCD and the incredible healing that ERP can provide to your marriage, family, and your home. As a person who lives with OCD, I am much more than this diagnosis. We all can be. Marc & Stacee: Hi y'all, this is Stacy, along with my husband Mark, want to thank you all for living uncertain with us once again. We are actually coming f to you from the road today. We are on an old-fashioned summer road trip. We are headed into the state of Washington. And today's episode is gonna be unique in that way. We want to welcome you all to episode number 20. And today we have a pretty special guest. We think she's a special guest as well. And it is in fact our daughter, our daughter Avery, who is fourteen. And we are gonna do a little QA with Avery today because of course as you all know from listening to previous episodes, our journey has quite affected our children in a lot of ways. And I've done the intensive ERP in order to be able to help have a different relationship with our children and help have the opportunity for our children to do things that teenagers and other children should be able to do. And so we're gonna start off our podcast episode talking to her about how my intrusive thoughts and how my compulsions have perhaps affected her andor affected her brother, which she knows. And then we may discuss personally how her recent diagnosis of O C D has affected her and what she's doing as we are entering some ERP for her as well. So welcome to the podcast, Avery. So let's start off with this. How do you feel like my my O C D, so my when it was at its height, my intrusive thoughts, my compulsions, how were they affecting you and or your brother the most? Yes. Do you find that when I before I even had the ERP, before I went through intensive treatment, were there things that were limiting to you because of my compulsions and intrusive thoughts? Mm-hmm. And those fears and thoughts of mine went beyond normal mother's intuition, normal mother's worry, and really became quite significant in holding you back and holding your brother back from being able to do what other kids and teenagers might want to ha want to have done, right? Mm-hmm. Okay. So what is the biggest thing that you've seen? This is a big question, kind of a loaded question, but since we've gone on this journey with ERP and you know about this journey, you've seen it, how has it positively affected you? Like what's one thing you can think of that's made a positive impact? It does make sense. So in one of the most recent episodes, and I'm gonna share this with you, this might be the first time that you ever heard this 'cause you haven't necessarily listened to all the episodes yet, but in a very recent episode of O C D of of our podcast, I r mentioned that one of the things that my O C D lies to me about is to tell me that particularly because you're the younger sibling and because I've had more practice with Miles and the ERP That my intrusive thought is often if you're out of my sight, you're dead. How does it feel hearing that? No, I know you're not, but how does it feel because I know that and we'll get to this in a little bit, but you've had some of your own intrusive thoughts and your own compulsions to tamp down some of your O C D needs and that has become one of my intrusive thoughts that I've been directly addressing with our therapist and with dad through ERP, which is that if you're out of my sight, I automatically think that y you're dead. And so again, how does that feel hearing that? So the whole reason why we're on this road trip, AB, is so that you can meet one of your friends that you've met online. And we're gonna be going to public places and you and her might want to go to different vendors and or different stores and stuff and you might be out of your mom's sight. And sometimes that might limit in the past, it would limit what you could do. Now the next couple of days your mom's gonna have to do some ERP still, probably by allowing you to go a little bit out of sight. I mean, you probably don't even know that or realize that. Yeah. So how do you you know how do you are you gonna be able to reassure your mom when you go when you have to walk out of her sight? Tell the listeners, are you allowed to reassure me? No, I'm not. Is dad allowed to reassure me? No. What do you think one of my first questions is gonna be once you've left my site? That'll my first question to you, yes. 'Cause that's a often a a compulsion. Yes. Right. And that'll that'll leave me sitting in a very uncomfortable feeling and that'll allow my anxiety to reach its height, which is what we've talked to our listeners a lot about as well, what the ERP process looks like, which is that I have to let my anxiety get to its l biggest peak and then bring it down on its own without engaging in the compulsions and mine being that checking in and reassurance tendency, especially with your dad. Now I feel as though prior to our ERP I would be asking your dad at least ten or twelve times if you were okay. Yeah. If I thought some if he thought something had happened to you. in which he would constantly reaffirm and reassure me, which was never breaking the cycle of my compulsions. And that's the biggest thing that we've learned and wanna wanna continue to make progress with. So how do you feel about wandering away or or going somewhere different with this new friend of yours where perhaps you're out of my sight. Yes. That makes a lot of sense. Now we're also gonna be meeting your friend's parents. And there's potential that there will be some anxiety on my part once you've left my site and I have to work through that anxiety. What are your thoughts about that? No, that makes sense. And I have to say I'm a little trepidatious about that myself because there's one thing about showing my anxiety to your father or even to your brother when I get to that place. And so I'm so glad we're doing this experiment now, at this time, once the ERP has already kind of l settled with me so that I can have an easier time allowing you to do what we're about to do, but I definitely see where the challenge is going to be. And I love what you said earlier too, Ave, because O C D is an ongoing continuous thing. And even though you go through ERP, O C D doesn't just magically go away and it's not magically cured. And that's really something that's important in what we're trying to get through to our listeners too and to to sh to have them share their experiences someday with us because we know how hard it can be. So as our first official Guessed on living uncertain. Would you like to share anything about yourself or about potentially some of the recent diagnosis that you've had as well? Absolutely. So the past three years you've been online w with school. Can you talk about why you chose to do that versus be in person, why the in person was a a little bit of a struggle? Sometimes just like going online. So things out. So obviously there's pros and cons, but for me because of how bad it was, doing online was just like the easiest like escape for me. Obviously you know I've started going to therapy and stuff for it so now I will be going back in person for high school. So what are some of the your O C D tendencies that you deal with on a regular basis? In terms of your contamination O C D, do you wanna talk a moment about what that looks like on your everyday in your everyday life? Hm. What about your can we talk about your bedding and what that looks like? And you mentioned and I'm so glad you did, that you've started therapy and that you're excited that you have gotten this diagnosis earlier so that you can get a h hold of it and a handle on it earlier in life. And we're so very proud of you. Both your dad and I are so proud of that and excited for what this journey could be for you. What is something that you perhaps learned? I know you've been doing a lot of the psychoeducational piece with your therapist. What's something that you've learned about O C D that you kind of wanna talk about or share? That was the the first thing for me as well. And the most eye opening for me too is things that I had just been doing as a regular that I thought were just part of my everyday life that ended up being compulsions related to O C D. That was very eye opening for me too. So yeah. have you enjoy have you been happy with the therapy process so far and what you've learned and what you've tried to implement? What what was one of the first things that we tackled for your ERP? So you had a ritual every Sunday You wanna explain it now? So what what did you have to end up doing instead of doing it on Sunday? Could we touch a little bit on your eating? And so one of the things that you do eat are chicken nuggets. And when you make them at home, you have a particular d number of them that you have to make. Do you remember the first time you ever had to do that particular ERP moment and how you were feeling in the time in the moment? No, that's very brave of you today, Ave, to come onto the podcast and to share all of that. Dad and I have talked multiple times about how we try to keep our podcast as as raw and as y you know as real as possible and as authentic as we can. And and this was just another way that we could do that for everyone listening. And is there anything else that you can think of that you'd like to share? That's a great message. And especially for those of us who l who have OCD and who are actively going through ERP, it's you said it very very well, which is it gets very hard and you want to give up, but you see the result on the other side and it's exciting and and it makes you want to keep going, right? Excellent. Well, we're very proud of you. We're excited about your incoming school year going back in person. We're so thrilled that you're taking on this adventure of ERP and and trying your best with it and seeing the results. It's very exciting for the whole family. Thank you for being a guest on our show today. Thank you for joining us on today's episode and Living Uncertain with us. We are not therapists and this podcast is intended to provide information and support. It should not replace traditional means of seeking help from a licensed mental health professional. If you like this episode or would like to hear more, please like, subscribe or share with someone you think may benefit. Here at Living Uncertain, we're building a community of support. If you and your significant other would like to share your story, we would love to have you on the podcast. Please click on the link in the episode description and fill out the interest form.