Challenge Yourself

Thanksgiving is a good time to challenge yourself to do things you haven’t done in a while. Or ever! When my OCD was at its worst, I wasn’t doing any entertaining because of my fear of contamination. It was such a struggle to get through cooking a meal for someone other than my husband and son that I just gave up.

I loved making cookies for my son and husband and I to take to school and work every holiday and I even gave that up. I had my husband make simple dishes when we needed to take something to a potluck.

Gradually, I challenged myself to prepare potluck dishes myself. First, I helped my husband rather than just giving strict clean instructions and worked my way up to making dishes myself. We can both see the humor in some of my demands: Don’t touch this or that; Did you wash your hands? Did I touch that? What if I did? One time, after I had finally gotten to the point of putting together a dish myself, I threw out two sets of pickles and olives before I finally got it right.

Years ago, I went to an OCD support group. I took cookies I had baked. That was my challenge. Another woman’s challenge was eating food she considered possibly contaminated. What to do? She touched the floor with a cookie and ate it!

Those days seem like a lifetime away. Today, I entertain. We have people over for dinner. I prepare food for others. The fears have vanished. I applied exposure and response prevention to my fears. And I prayed and gave my fears to God. With time, I reached a point where I felt comfortable with the risks. The rewards of fellowship with friends, helping others, having a festive atmosphere created by shared meals, etc – all this made the risks seem fewer.

How will you challenge your OCD this Thanksgiving?

Be Thankful

I hope you all are enjoying this season. If you are struggling with OCD or another anxiety disorder, take a moment to think back on where you were last year, or maybe just last week or yesterday if you’re really new to treatment. Thank God for the small steps and the big steps you’ve been able to take.             

Tell me what you’re thankful for this year.

Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge

New Book Lauched

Check out my page at Author Central on Amazon.com. Every blog entry should be showing up there too. If I plugged in the RSS feed correctly. We’ll see. I’m kind of guessing at all this. My coauthor Bruce Hyman and I are launching The OCD Workbook, Third Edition. Since it was first published in 1999, The OCD Workbook has sold more than 100,000 copies and emerged as one of the most popular resources for people seeking to overcome obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

This new edition has been fully revised and updated with the latest research findings on the causes of OCD, advancements in medications for the disorder, and new promising treatments including mindfulness-based stress reduction and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). Additionally, this third edition features additional material to help family members deal more positively and effectively with OCD in a loved one. It explains how children with OCD can be effectively treated, and offers steps for parents to help their children overcome OCD.

The OCD Workbook, Third Edition is now available. Since it was first published in 1999,The OCD Workbook has sold more than 100,000 copies and emerged as one of the most popular resources for people seeking to overcome obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

This new edition has been fully revised and updated with the latest research findings on the causes of OCD, advancements in medications for the disorder, and new promising treatments including mindfulness-based stress reduction and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). Additionally, this third edition features additional material to help family members deal more positively and effectively with OCD in a loved one. It explains how children with OCD can be effectively treated, and offers steps for parents to help their children overcome OCD.

“No wonder your son is such a great writer.”

My husband and I have been volunteering at World Vision where our son works. People have been telling us how proud we must be of James and this was one of the comments. My reply? Yes, my writing did have something to do with James developing good writing skills, for several reasons. He was 12 in 1994 when I started my writing career. I checked his writing assignments for school. And I remember telling him, as I had told his sister that he should always write his best, whether the teacher is checking grammar or not. Never turn in poor writing.

But most importantly, and if you are an aspiring writer, this is where you can help your children and they can help you. James checked my writing! It had been over 20 years since I’d had any formal writing training and I didn’t know a preposition from an adverb. I instinctively knew how to put a sentence together but I needed help with proofreading. I took some classes and read books. I shared what I learned with James then insisted that he double-check my writing and I checked his.

James also developed some awesome computer skills and created a website for me and several other websites. He had people three times his age writing for his Silver Surfer website.

Flowers in a Vase

My husband Jim's cat Andy admires my flowers, "They look nice in a vase."

We’ll talk about writing here too. How did I become a writer? My first career was nursing. Well, not quite, I spent four hours as a bus girl the summer after high school. Then I got word I had been hired at the local nursing home as an aide. I never worked as hard as those four hours in the restaurant my mother worked in. I remember talking to my aunt on the phone, telling her how tired my feet were and thanking her for paying for nursing school.
In high school I had taken a writing class in my senior year and there my passion for writing was ignited. I wrote my first poem:

Lilacs,
Like some people,
Look nice on a bush,
But not in a vase.

I wasn’t the type to take too many risks, however, and a writing career was a risk. Nursing was safe and I did want to help people. I became a registered nurse and spent twenty years as a nurse. Then, at the age of 40, something happened to my brain, I was suddenly struck by the urge to check. I developed OCD. You can read more about my struggle with OCD at http://CherryPedrick.com

Melody Loves Icecream

We travel with our four cats. Melody has been diabetic for seven years, but now that she is elderly she seems to be in remission and can enjoy her favorite treat, icecream. In fact, she doesn't even need insulin anymore and we actually need to encourage her to eat. This one hot day, I bought her a kiddie cone at Dairy Queen. She purred as she ate it.

Snowball disappears

Less than a year later, Snowball disappeared. He had been very ill for a couple years and was 18-years-old. We looked all over the house then started to look outside. No Snowball. Then James applied some detective skills. He saw a hole in a grate in the garage and some white fur clinging to the loose wire. James remembered going into the garage earlier that day. Maybe Snowball had followed him into the garage and perhaps escaped through the grate. We reasoned that he was ready to die and went off to do so alone. Animals sometimes do that.
I remember thinking if that had been me, I would have felt so guilty, but James and my husband seemed to just understand that these things just happen. No one blamed him. I certainly didn’t. But I would have blamed myself if Snowball had followed me into the garage, for this was the year OCD struck me with a vengeance.
I had been preparing James for several years that when Snowball died we would get two kittens. Maybe calicos. As it happened, I found two calico kittens who needed a home a few months later. James named his cat Spunky because he wanted a spunky cat. She is not spunky.
I named my cat Melody after the editor of my first published article. The article was about OCD. Melody did turn out to be quite melodious and she turned out to have OCD! Sort of. She stares at pictures and spots on walls. She stares at herself in the mirror. She’s fearful of people, especially young male workers and often hid under the bed when they came to our home when she was a kitten. In her younger years she nervously scratched the furniture – and my arms – until we had her declawed. Melody loves certain people foods and eventually developed diabetes which she has survived for seven years. Before sugar was taken away from her one of her favorite things was licking and playing with jelly beans. She’d chase them until they were lost under the couch, then ask for another.
Melody has a reputation for being a “crazy” cat because she lashes out at people other than me. She’s really just giving a little warning because she’s fearful and she feels like she’s being teased. Because her reputation precedes her people tend to approach her with caution, and it does seem like she is being teased. She’s more anxious than the other cats and I could relate to that. Over the years, as she’s aged, she’s mellowed and doesn’t seem as anxious. She cuddles more and seems more relaxed. And so am I! It’s as if we’ve both recovered together.

Before Melody … Snowball the Cat

1994 was the year I was diagnosed with OCD. It was also the year our cat Snowball disappeared and Melody came into our home. The year before OCD hadn’t arisen in my life. I wasn’t having problems with checking the door or questioning my decisions. But something very traumatic did happen. To me it was traumatic anyway. I still don’t know why I got so upset. Perhaps that was the beginnings of OCD, the beginnings of my brain changing.

My son James had gone on a business trip with his Dad, leaving me home to work and take care of Snowball and James’ two pet rats. About two days before they returned I looked in on the rats and was devastated to find them both dead in the cage. They still had a bit of food and water, but I chastised myself for not checking on them enough. Maybe they didn’t get enough to eat. Snowball didn’t really like the rats and it could be they were literally scared to death.

I had to wait over 24 hours to tell my son about the rats because he and his dad would be on the road, traveling back home. This was before cell phones. I cried hysterically, sure he would be upset and perhaps even turn to a life of drugs and debauchery because of this horrible thing. I’d been told, “Yes, he’s a fine boy now at 11, but just wait, he’ll be a teenager soon.” I’d been watching, but so far he was still fine, but this could be the turning point.

Finally, my husband Jim and James called and I told them. James said, “Okay, Mom.” That was it. “Okay, Mom.” When they got home we buried the rats under the tree in the front yard. A few weeks later two plants sprouted. Corn! Maize actually, God’s reminder to us that life goes on.

I learned from this that children are resilient. We often blow things up out of proportion. They not only survive, they thrive. I needed to remind myself of this over the years when I was diagnosed with OCD. James was affected by my OCD. I tried not to burden him with it, but I knew he was. My questions – “Did I lock the door? Are you sure? Should I go back and check? Do you think I hit something with the car? Did I lock the car door?” Calling him into the bathroom to search the floor for a pill that I may or may not have dropped on the floor. Doing without because my income was cut when I changed careers. The list goes on.

Not only did James thrive, he grew to be an exceptional young man. He has compassion for those in need and in college his heart was touched by the AIDS crisis in sub-Saharan Africa, leading him to found Acting on AIDS, an AIDS awareness program for World Vision. He is now World Vision's advisor for college activism and social networking.

http://www.worldvision.org/news.nsf/news/what-is-advocacy-200907-enews

Breaking Free

In the last few years I haven’t had a presence on the Internet. No blog. My website hasn’t been updated. I haven’t been on OCD email lists. Why? It has to do with how I identify myself.
As a Christian I’ve always, first of all, found my identity in Christ, as a child of God. This sustained me through my struggle with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). In 1994, I was diagnosed with OCD. I still identified myself as a Christian and as a wife, mother and nurse, but more and more I identified myself as a person with OCD.

The first book I coauthored was titled The OCD Workbook, Your Guide to Breaking Free from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and I considered myself to be breaking free. When Bruce Hyman and I revised it in 2005 I identified less with OCD because it was taking up so little of my life. Now, as we’re completing the third edition of The OCD Workbook, I can say I have broken free. Not cured – there is no cure and I must be vigilant. But free of the grip OCD once had on my life.

Now, instead of withdrawing from being identified with OCD, I’m more willing to embrace it. With this blog I want to celebrate breaking free and give people hope that they too can break free.