#compulsions tw

[dykesbat]

[faeryton]

taking the "do i have ocd" quiz online over and over

[witherydithery]

Do you think the soap addictions in the False Realm are the strange manifestation of Charles’ hand washing compulsion? Because most everything in the False real does have its roots in Charles’ life in the True Realm.

[donttouchtheneednoggle]

that thrilling ocd&adhd moment when u get the something's not done something's not finished you need to check something you need to check it nothing's gonna feel right til you do check it NOW anxiety but you've forgotten what it IS

[fictionkinfessions]

had my first kin memory in for-fuckin-ever and it was of having a cleanliness compulsion in one of my canons :( why r all my kin memories Sad

(#💌🧷)(#compulsions tw)

[thatreallyminecraftsmygender]

Ironically enough, anxiety is pretty amazing impulse control

That, my friend, depends entirely on what the anxiety is yelling at you about

[moro-nokimi]

world in my eyes

AN: this was @matsvda‘s fic for the giveaway (the prompt being a halle/kiyomi date)! alas, i can’t do anything ooc or pwp, so here we go!

the BU that’s referenced is boston university, which is pretty much non-ivy league, ivy league. for clarity reasons, when lidner is listing off binary numbers, it’s based on how i do mental math to calm down - not a compulsion.

warnings for references to sex, depictions of OCD and compulsions, food references. 

Six year old Halle Bullook (not yet Lidner) remembers thinking hard about her family tree. She knows these things: She is the middle child and only sister between the three Bullook children. There are two brothers. Her older one is named Andrew and her younger brother is named Chase.

Andrew’s lifelong dream is to be an attorney and Chase is up to doing anything. Mom doesn’t fret over it (“children have a long time to figure out what they want to do”). Halle doesn’t like to think about it. Growing up is scary.

Halle’s mother wants to put rollers in Halle’s hair for first grade picture day. Halle chops at it with the scissors in the kitchen.

Andrew and Chase think it’s cool. When Lidner does the same thing at thirteen, they cringe and say that they like her hair better longer. Her mother shakes her head whenever she remembers that Halle’s hair is barely touching her chin. 

(In retrospect, this and her strange obsession with Jasmine in Aladdin ought to have given a hint as to her sexuality.)

Her parents divorced when she was 13 and a half. Mom moved to Louisville, Dad stayed in Boston. Andrew went with mom, Chase oscillated between her and Dad, and she stayed with dad. Dad marries a nice woman named Nicole, who --- as far as Halle is concerned --- is Halle’s mother. 

Halle comes out as a lesbian when she’s 18 and going to BU. Nicole cries a little bit and says that she’s so glad that Halle is comfortable enough with her to say this. Dad hugs them both.

Halle takes Nicole’s maiden name as her pseudonym when she joins the SPK. 

She kicks herself (figuratively and literally speaking) for bedding Kira’s spokeswoman --- without something between them, to say the least. It’s a move uncharacteristic of her. Years of ingrained, Pavlovian training about protected sex has gone out the window, as of about an hour ago.

She jumps into the shower, and showers three times more before she feels somewhat clean. She pushes the lever of the shower to 12 o’clock with her foot and scrubs her feet down with a washcloth. 

Takada doesn’t make things much better when she tells the others that she’s okay with just Lidner around. She directs Lidner to take them to a coffee shop. It’s quiet and dark. Private. A nice place to die.

She stirs the creamer into her coffee three times clockwise, four counter-clockwise. She won’t die yet.

“Takada-san, if I may ask, what are we doing here?” she bites.

“Grabbing coffee. Do I need an ulterior motive to do so with my bodyguard?” Takada asks innocently, raising her eyebrows.

Lidner counts the sips she takes. Breathe in and out. Dodge the question. “You’re aware of my qualifications. This isn’t something I’m used to.”

Takada nods slowly. “I would imagine. But a woman doesn’t get to those positions easily…”

“Neither does a woman who is Kira’s mouthpiece.”

“Mouthpiece…,” Takada repeats. Lidner’s heart races. “Interesting that you say that.”

Christ. “Representative, rather.”

“I gather that you know the… connotations of ‘mouthpiece.’”

“I don’t have a Bachelor’s in English, but I do. Forgive me, Takada-san. It was the first word that came to mind.”

She nods slowly. “Of course. You should feel free to speak your mind.”

Just don’t give me a reason to kill you, you mean, Lidner thinks. Lidner settles for nodding and placidly drinking her coffee. “Excuse me.”

Okay, okay, okay, relax. Binary: one, two, four, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256… In Lidner’s distraction, she forgot that she shouldn’t turn off the faucet with freshly washed hands.

Again.

She’ll be okay. She’ll be okay. She can call her mom and they can talk, mom can give her advice for dealing with OCD.

She sits down across from Kira’s spokeswoman. She almost asks if Takada meant for this to be a date. She sighs a little inside --- her and Takada could’ve gotten along well in a different universe. 

It’s all right. She’ll call her mom tonight and they can talk. She’ll be okay.

Hopefully.

[ethereal-not-occult]

hhh okay I need a few moments to yell about This Scene:

What strikes me the most about this particular exchange is just how much Aziraphale’s response reads like my own dysfunctional, OCD-driven thoughts when I’m having an episode. It’s actually so scarily similar to how my OCD manifests that the first time I read Good Omens -- several months before I was diagnosed and in therapy -- I nearly put it down again because that particular description was so triggering.

I’ll elaborate. Obviously OCD appears in a variety of different forms and symptoms, and it’s not the same for everyone. But one symptom that can appear in OCD is all-or-nothing thinking. Basically it becomes impossible to look at the “in-betweens” of a subject -- there are Only Two Sides of Right and Wrong and Nothing Else (sound familiar?) Maybe the one logical part of you can recognize that this kind of thinking is not quite right, but that part is drowned out by the brain gremlins yelling that it can only be one or the other and you’re evil and wrong for ever daring to think outside that box.

Now, as to how this applies to Good Omens, and this scene in particular. Aziraphale has his world divided neatly into Good and Evil. If something is said to be Good, then it is Good, and anything that is not considered Good must therefore be Evil, with no room for exceptions or error.

Crowley here is the voice of logic, the one that some part of Aziraphale secretly knows has a solid point. But Aziraphale is unable to accept it. One part of him wishes to, but another part of him so deathly fears that he would be sympathizing with “Evil” if he agrees that he immediately retreats into denial as a safety net. It must be bad. Even if he doesn’t understand why it’s bad precisely, this is what he knows to be true, so he shouldn’t argue against it because otherwise that means he’s Evil too, and God knows he doesn’t want to be Evil.

When it comes to OCD subtypes like scrupulosity (c’est moi), this kind of thinking can be so overwhelming that you basically get caught up in a perpetual moral argument with yourself, trying to find one “right” answer or condition that doesn’t exist. Eventually you retreat to the “safety” of extremes; if you just stick to the Good side, then you won’t be Evil. Of course, that also means that any questioning of the Good side whatsoever automatically = evil, and the fear that that causes makes it difficult to break out of these harmful patterns of thinking (and that fear is very strong, and the guilt of thinking you have done “evil” is even stronger). 

I always felt that Aziraphale’s struggles with Heaven and the ineffable plan throughout the book mirrored OCD’s distorted lines of thinking in a way that was painfully familiar. He makes mistakes based off these thoughts -- making excuses for Heaven’s conduct (because questioning it otherwise must mean he is allowing Evil to happen, or else committing Evil himself), retreating behind the safety net of extremes when his firmly drawn lines are threatened.

But at the same time, let’s consider incidents like the flaming sword. For all of Aziraphale’s internal debate over whether the banishment of Adam and Eve was the right thing to do, he still gives them the sword to keep them safe, then lies to God about it afterwards. Then, of course, we come to the Apocalypse-that-wasn’t, in which Aziraphale finally shakes himself free of the tangled web of all-or-nothing, good-or-unforgiveable ‘logic’ that has kept him trapped for millennia, steps forward, and dares to say, “This Great Plan... this would be the ineffable plan, would it?” 

There’s a lot more I can say here, and I’m not even sure if what I wrote makes sense or not. I’m just... emotional at how he manages to break himself free of that futile cyclical way of thinking and forge his own path. At a time when so much seemed hopeless with my own mental health and no help was forthcoming, and I was breaking down over believing I was a fundamentally unforgivable person, Good Omens was such an anchoring story.

Many thanks to @goodm-omen-ts for their wonderful post here that finally motivated me to write this meta. 

Now for some miscellaneous Aziraphale with OCD headcanons:

Intrusive thoughts. Just lots of images and urges and thoughts that are so horrifying and contrary to Aziraphale’s morals pop into his head all the time and no amount of trying will make them go away. When it gets really bad, anything that reminds him even distantly of these thoughts can be a trigger, and if he isn’t careful he can get lost in his head struggling to get rid of these thoughts for hours at a time. But what helps with this are mindful activities that keep his hands occupied and his mind focused on the present, which I feel is how he got into doing stage magic. He gets so focused on executing the tricks and being in the moment that it allows him to forget (or at least sufficiently ignore) the intrusive thoughts until they subside on their own.

Also consider Aziraphale getting involved with other mindful crafts, like knitting.

I feel like at some point Aziraphale would also have distressing intrusive thoughts about Crowley. Cruel whispering thoughts and urges implanted into his mind, saying this is a demon, you must smite harm hurt, along with old prejudices popping into his head that he knows are untrue but somehow he’s thinking them anyway -- the thought of harming Crowley in any way shape or form is simply sickening, and Aziraphale argues against the thoughts constantly, presents all the evidence he has at his disposal (over six thousand years of it) that Crowley isn’t evil, that those are all lies, but of course OCD refuses to listen to logic. The guilt of thinking such terrible things about his friend is crushing, so Aziraphale starts avoiding Crowley out of fear that he will succumb to those awful thoughts and hurt him. Of course that just makes him even more miserable, but the shame prevents him from telling Crowley what’s wrong. Eventually Crowley knocks on the bookshop door himself, and when Aziraphale, teary-eyed and shaking, finally confesses, Crowley holds him and says I’m not angry, angel. I know you never actually believed those things, and I know that you would never hurt me or anyone. Those thoughts don’t represent who you are or what you believe. 

Compulsions. okay but also Aziraphale fearing that his relationship with Crowley will get Crowley punished by either Hell or Heaven and dealing with the crushing guilt that comes with that, and the rituals he sets up in an attempt to avoid such a thing from ever happening. Spending hours brooding over short notes from Gabriel trying to determine if the wording of that particular sentence means Gabriel knows something he shouldn’t, or combing repeatedly through his memories of the Arrangement to see if he’d ever somehow accidentally betrayed to the Powers That Be that it was he, Aziraphale, who had carried out that particular temptation in France instead of Crowley who was in China at the time... just lots of questions of what if, what if, what if. Through this, he also tends to blame and beat himself up over any small thing that goes wrong. 

When Aziraphale is overworked or overtired it gets worse, and he finds himself slipping into his head more and more often. That relaxing sit-down with a book becomes three fraught hours of second-guessing his actions from an event that happened two centuries ago, or he’s at the Ritz with Crowley but can’t focus on the conversation because every time he blinks he sees horrifying images behind his eyelids, and the crowds of people at the tables around them aren’t helping to clear his muddled mind. But then he’ll be roused by a touch to the shoulder, worried yellow eyes beneath dark sunglasses and a questioning “Angel?”, and they’ll pay the bill, drive back to the bookshop in the Bentley while Aziraphale presses his flushed face into the cool window and tries to focus on Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy playing softly on the radio instead of the frantic nest of bees in his brain. He can’t stomach any more food that night, but Crowley miracles up a pair of pyjamas for him (tartan, though Crowley would deny it if you asked) and grooms the tension out of Aziraphale’s wings until the angel manages to fall into a sound sleep.

Just... Aziraphale with OCD. It traps him in a snarled web of indecision, terror, and guilt, and the abuse he receives from Heaven only worsens it. And later, when he realizes his past mistakes, the crushing remorse that that causes makes it difficult for him to forgive himself and move forward. But he works at it, and learns to break out of those lines of thinking, and it’s never a quick nor easy process, but he’s getting there. He’s staying afloat.

(I also have lots of thoughts about Crowley dealing with similar symptoms, especially after his Fall. In my mind he’s more accustomed to dealing with it by now than Aziraphale, and has developed good coping mechanisms, but it still gets hard at times. They help each other.)