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