I used to doubt whether someone secretly hated me, and because of that, I would get mad at that person for the possibility that they hated me and I wasn’t aware of it. The worst part is that I was conscious of how irrational it all was, but I couldn’t stop feeling anger and rejection toward the person.
I also used to force myself to think about horrible situations that I knew would make me uncomfortable. When my grandmother passed away, I forced myself to imagine her body being torn apart and all kinds of terrible things happening to her. It felt like torture. That was the most intense part, and the milder version was, for example, telling myself, 'Every time you go into the bathroom and see this object, you will think of X thing.' Then I started doing a ritual to undo/cancel actions that I felt I had to do.
As a child, I was quite a hoarder, I couldn’t even throw away a candy wrapper because I obsessed over the thought that I would 'never see it again' if I threw it away, or 'poor wrapper… it will be all alone.' Over time, I even started picking up papers I found on the street, pencils at school, a paperclip, anything I saw lying around. I felt like I just couldn’t leave it there. I felt sorry for it, and if I didn’t take it, I knew I’d think about it all day. That’s why I created my ritual of tapping my leg three times, it allowed me to cancel whatever my mind was telling me to do.
I also remember imagining that the paper on the street was happy being there and didn’t want to be picked up, and that sometimes calmed me down. Same thing when throwing away clothes, I had to convince myself that the item was happy to leave my house. If I felt like I was abandoning it, I simply couldn’t throw it away because I wouldn’t be able to handle the guilt. It was crazy. As a child, I felt deep distress when my parents changed the furniture or when I found out they had thrown something away. If something broke, I would even keep the pieces.
Something that may have triggered this was that my mom threw away everything. She did whatever she wanted with my stuff. I didn’t trust her, I would ask her to leave something where it was, and she wouldn’t. To this day, I don’t know why she does that, but if she sees a piece of paper or something she thinks is useless, she throws it away. She threw away things that were important to me, maybe notes that she didn’t even know the meaning of. The worst part is that she wouldn’t take responsibility for it, so I never knew for sure if she had thrown it away or if I just couldn’t find it.
I started checking the trash every night because I knew I would find my things there. And when I asked her why she had thrown something away, she would say she didn’t do it, never taking responsibility. It was so frustrating not being able to make her understand something as simple as 'don’t touch my stuff.' She still does it, though on a smaller scale.
Psychiatric medication helped me calm my anxiety, which in turn reduced my OCD. I started taking the risk of not performing the ritual and realized that nothing bad happened.
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