Taking Back What OCD Spoiled: A Storytelling Episode

Episode 16: Taking Back What OCD Spoiled

In today's episode, I wanted to share a story with you, especially since right now I'm in Seville, Spain and the first time I was here, OCD almost ruined what has turned out to be a lot of love for this country and my experiences here. 
I wanted to share this with you because every time I'm here I remember just how far I've come since that trip...and I just want to keep getting stronger. 

In this episode, I also wanted to let you know that I published my Relapse Workbook! It's called The OCD Relapse Roadmap: Your Recovery Compass. It's so fitting that it published this week in the midst of being here. This workbook was a labor of love for me, and I'm so excited to give it to you!

You can find it on Amazon!

If you are in need of a community for people who can help you feel more accepted, less alone, and more connected to people who understand, please check out my online community for weekly support, monthly classes and events at https://the-ocd-support-community.co.mn 

If this podcast inspires, supports, and gives you hope and you’d like to support us monthly or sponsor us, please visit our patreon page and become a member. Your contribution will help us continue the podcast and help us provide even more resources for our community! www.patreon.com/intrusivethoughtsunmasked

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Welcome to Intrusive Thoughts Unmasked, the podcast where we explore what it's really like to live with intrusions, the emotional landscape that comes with them, and the common experiences so many of us share. I'm Chrissy Hodges. I created this podcast to bring lived experience into the light for those navigating intrusions and mental rituals with OCD. My hope is here you can finally take off the mask we so often have to wear to hide this disorder. I want you to feel seen, understood, and accepted exactly as you are. Welcome to episode 16. This is going to be a storytelling episode. I wanted to share something with you today. I'm in Spain, in Seville, Spain, and we're doing an OCD event today. And uh being in Seville always reminds me of a time that I was here in OCD. It was so loud and very scary. And so today I just wanted to share a little bit about that experience and what it's like revisiting Seville after all of these years. I hope you enjoy the show. So my nonprofit OCD Game Changers does an event in Seville, Spain every year, every couple years. We have a partner down here, Alejandro Ibarra, who's amazing by the way, and does a lot of advocacy in Spanish around OCD and especially pure OCD. He helps to organize it. So I've been coming down here now probably uh four years, and I want to talk to you about the first year that I was here for the event. Now I've talked a little bit about my OCD when I lived with intrusive thoughts and was very hyper-vigilant about my feet. So this is um this is a really important OCD experience that I went through, and I do not like to talk about it. There's so much shame around that time of my life, and I think a lot of it is that it seems so stupid to have wasted so much time on something now that I look back and think, oh my gosh, I it this it was OCD the whole time, and I couldn't get a grip on it. So much happened in my life at that time that I just could not be present for. And this is a struggle I think so many of us have is in the grief, the aftermath of OCD, looking back and the things that we regret and the things that we did or didn't do or had to do because of OCD, whether we do know that it's OCD or not. The injury is an overuse mechanical issue. I tend to hold my body really tight with stress. So I'll hold my jaw really tight and my shoulders up and back. I have been getting PT for this for years and years and years, and inevitably, anytime I'm very stressed or I have a bout of anxiety for a while, my body kind of gets stuck in that position. Well, what happens is that then my feet have to turn out in order to connect to the ground, even slightly, which puts pressure on the joints in my toes. It was around, it was a long time ago. I started to develop these this pain in my feet, specifically my right foot. And I would run and it would hurt. Went to PT and she said, Oh, this is she examined it and she said, This isn't anything, it's not a stress fracture, it's nothing you need to go to the doctor with, it's just some chronic pain. So let's suggest you, yada yada yada, here's some things you can do. Well, it was too late. OCD just grabbed hold of that. Its grip was so tight. I fell into this hypervigilance that I had never experienced in my life. And worse, I couldn't recognize that it was OCD because the pain was real. My PT, my physical therapist, was sitting there saying, Yeah, you've got some overused stuff. It's inflamed. And then of course I didn't hear the second part, what which was, but it's okay, you can still do what you want to do. It just might get flared up. I went into if that pain is there, I can't do anything. I can't live life with this pain. That my core fear was completely activated, which is the fear of being trapped. So it's being trapped in this body with this pain that I can't get rid of. And to hear my PT say, yeah, this isn't something that we can just that you're gonna get rid of. It's just gonna be this pain when your body gets stressed. So you just have to be mindful of it, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I didn't hear that. I didn't care. It was, I'm gonna have this pain for life. I'm never gonna be able to run again. And so every moment of every day became thinking about this pain. Wondering if I move my foot this way, does it hurt? If I stand up, is it hurt? Is it gonna hurt? Say, can I can I run today? If I if it hurts when I run, then I shouldn't run. And now I start projecting out into the world. I don't want to go to the grocery store because I don't want to walk into the grocery store and feel the pain and have a panic attack. I'm not ever going to be able to travel. This was before I really started traveling internationally, and I knew at some point I wanted to, but my brain said, you'll never be able to. I would imagine myself walking in the streets of Spain or in Europe or wherever I wanted to go, and that I would be in pain. And I would be thinking about that pain all the time. All the hiking I've ever wanted to do around the world in different countries, I'll never be able to do because of that pain. Everything was about the pain. I ate, drank, and slept pain. Thinking of it, worrying about it. It was in my dreams. And per usual, I didn't tell anybody. One, because I didn't know that this was OCD. And two, because I was so embarrassed. It was the same as when I had sexual orientation OCD. I didn't want to tell anybody because I didn't want anyone to hear or I didn't want to hear what anyone had to say about it. What would they say? That's too bad. I would just go see a doctor. I knew what the doctor was gonna say. They were gonna say nothing's wrong. This is a this is an uh the overuse injury, and you need to go to PT. And now PT is saying, here are the things you need to do, but of course I wouldn't do them because my brain said, nothing's going to work. You're stuck with this pain forever. Now my insight was so low around OCD because the symptoms were so high and the shame was so high. There was a moment when I like a year into it, I guess, we'd gone out to eat, and I was miserable. I had fallen into a depression too, and didn't tell anybody about that either. We were in the car, and my husband at the time, he went in to get something, and I was sitting there watching all these people walk in and out of the store, of course, thinking about my feet. I just couldn't enjoy anything anymore. Nothing brought me joy. I was I was so hyper-focused and hyper-vigilant about the pain in my feet all day, every day. And I saw this old woman walking out, and I think she had a cane or something. She looks probably 80s or 90s even. And I thought to myself, I'm gonna be her age and my feet are gonna hurt. And I just got this surge of sadness, this despair I'm gonna have to live in this body with this pain until I'm 90. I should just kill myself. Oof, I just jumped back a little. Oh my gosh, wait, why would you think that? I thought, oh my gosh, if I'm having suicidal ideation, this is OCD. This has got to be OCD. And so I started thinking, and then I was like, oh my goodness, all my compulsions I've been doing, the avoidance, everything. And I started crying, and I talked to my husband about it that night, and he said, Okay, what do you need to do? And I yeah, it to me it was just okay, I could implement ERP, but that is not gonna work because it's not going to make the pain go away. So I maybe dabbled here and there in ERP, and then I just let go of the idea that it was OCD. It may be OCD, but it doesn't matter because the pain's still there. So fast forward, my first trip to Spain. Now, I had not gotten this OCD under control again because I just didn't know it was OCD. I couldn't believe it. And so this was my first international trip. I had been to London, but I had not been to Spain before. Now, this is a Spanish-speaking country. I don't know Spanish. I know a little bit now, so it's it's better. Uh I was really nervous about that. So again, in Corfir Activated, being trapped somewhere and not being able to communicate or not being able to get my needs met because I couldn't communicate. So I was already nervous about that. I'd never had an event in Spain, so I was stressed about that. It's fully translated Spanish to English. I didn't know what that was gonna be like. Flew into Spain, and immediately it was just this feeling of I feel like I'm gonna hyperventilate at every step. And now all of a sudden, the pain in my feet because of the stress just amplified. We checked into the hotel. I was one of my friends was here with me. Um, and she said, as I was going to my room, she said, okay, I'm gonna drop my bag off and then let's go. Let's go walk around, let's go shop. And of course, I said, you know what? I'm just really tired. My classic OCD excuse. I'm just really tired. I think I'm just gonna go and lay down for a little while. I was tired, of course, from the trip, but I was not tired enough to not go walk around this beautiful city of Seville, Spain. I was scared. And my friend spoke some Spanish. So going with her would have been fine. But of course, I couldn't control anything. What if I didn't want to stay out? What if my feet started hurting and I needed to get back to the hotel and I didn't know how? What if she wanted to stay out longer or walk longer than I wanted to walk? I mean, these things are so embarrassing, even to say out loud right now. And my phone didn't work here. I didn't understand how to use SIM cards or anything like that at that point because I had just started traveling internationally. So outside of Wi-Fi, I didn't have a phone. So then again, this feeling of being trapped. What if I'm lost in a city and my feet are hurting, I can't speak the language. It was so overwhelming. And I felt so ashamed. Here I am in this city. Everybody is so excited to get there for this event. And I can't leave my hotel room. I am justifying it in my head in every which way. But I closed the curtains and I just laid down and in my head said, you know, you are tired. You just need to rest. That night we were gonna go get some dinner. Um, I didn't know where we were gonna go. Of course, I wanted to know exactly where, so I knew exactly how much I was gonna have to walk just in case my feet hurt, uh, exactly where it was. So in case I get lost or we get separated, how am I gonna get back to the hotel to the safe place, right? And to me, it was just drink, just drink alcohol to drown all this out. If you get a buzz or if you get just drunk enough, you'll be able to go and you won't think as much about your feet. So that's what I did. So here I am, either avoiding life by staying in my room or avoiding life by escaping with alcohol. The next day, I woke up determined. Chrissy, you've got to get out and do something. I looked up maps and I wrote down, okay, you're going to go to this restaurant. It was a Mediterranean restaurant, it had tapas. I'm going to do this. And I wrote down the directions in handwriting as I looked at the phone. Because my phone didn't work outside of Wi-Fi. And I thought, you're going to walk to this restaurant, it's just down this road and to the left, and you're fine. And then you're going to walk back and we're going to consider that a win. Every I get my shoes on, my comfortable shoes on. As soon as I walked out the door, I all of a sudden felt like everybody was staring at me. Of course, no one was even staring at me. They didn't even know I existed. Um they're going to know that I'm a tourist. They're going to see that I don't know what I'm doing and maybe I'm lost and I'm standing out like a sore thumb. But no, let's just go. Okay, so turn this way. This is where the map says turn this way. Okay, I'm going to go down that road. And now all of a sudden, the streets are just all running together. There's streets everywhere. There's cobblestone everywhere. I don't recognize any of the names of the restaurants. I don't recognize the landmarks. I am lost. And I'm looking around and now my foot starts hurting. And I remember that pain vicariously feeling it right now as I'm talking. It was this shooting pain up my foot and up my leg. And I thought, oh my God, I am stuck in this city. I don't know where the hotel is. I can't even remember the name of the hotel because I was panicking so bad. So I couldn't even ask for directions. There's no restaurant in sight. Here's my foot hurting so bad. Everybody is staring at me. They know that I'm lost and that I'm stupid and I'm a stupid tourist. No one's going to help me. No one's coming to help me. This is very reminiscent of the podcast I did a couple of weeks ago, right? I just kept walking. I found this big square. I walked through the square. I walked down this road and I turn and I see this restaurant, this sushi restaurant, and it's safe. And I thought, just go into this safe restaurant. We'll just get something to eat and then we'll figure out what to do. So I get into the restaurant and I sit down and I look around and everybody is just talking and laughing and joking with whoever they're there with. And I was fighting everything to hold back the tears. What has my life come to? How am I gonna ever get through this? I am not living life. OCD just has me under its thumb all day, every day. I am in this beautiful city in Spain where everybody wants to travel and do things and I can't even walk to a restaurant without panicking. I could feel the sting of the tears wanting to fall down my face, and I just thought I'm not gonna do it. So I regrouped, ordered some sushi, connected to their Wi-Fi, and mapped out how to get back to the hotel. And I made it. I got through the event and got home, swearing by everything in my mind, I will never travel again internationally, and not because I don't want to, because I can't. I can't do this. And OCD just doubled down and said, Yep, you can't. Look at how miserable that was. But there was also something about that trip that lit a fire under my ass. I came home and in reflection of the trip, that was the trip was what tipped me over the edge. You can either live like this for the rest of your life or you can do something about this because this has to be OCD. So I went to my PT and I told her what was going on, and she just I love her. She basically just ranged me. She said, Chrissy, you're not living your life, and this is your choice. She understands OCD, and she said, I have cleared you to do anything that you want, and the pain is going to be there. And she said this, and I wasn't sure how to take this at first. This was pride. She said, people who have anxiety and people that have OCD, practice hypervigilance to the point where the pain isn't even as bad as you think it is. You are just making it worse. And I thought, she's calling me weak. She's calling me a liar. She wasn't. But what I did is I went after the appointment. I'll tell you about the appointment. After the appointment, I went home and said, this is like the groinel. I'm treating my foot, the pain in my foot, the way that I treated the groinal. The more I would think about the groinal, the worse it got, the louder it got, the more scary it got. So the more I think about the pain in my feet, the worse it gets, the more stressed I get, and the tighter I hold my body, which then makes the pain worse. So one of the things she did with me is she said, We're going to do some exposure work on your feet. And I was like, no. But she did. She got my, she got thy toes and she started like gently pulling them back and forth. And of course I was like, that hurts, that hurts. And she said, Okay, it's going to hurt. But I want you to do this. She said, I think I had to count out doing that 50 times. So I started, you know, counting in my head and she said, Tell me a little bit about Spain. And so I started talking to her about Spain and, you know, not just the bad parts, but the good parts about the event and things. After a minute or so passed, I said, Oh, I lost track of time. And she said, But the important thing is, do you feel pain in your feet? And I said, Well, I do now. And she said, but you didn't. She said, it may have been there, but it had lessened because I distracted you while you were doing the exposure. And she said, the moment you started paying attention, it started hurting again. And so we did several of those different exercises. She, and then finally she she had me stand up and do toe toe raises, and I was terrified. This is gonna be it. This is gonna be the the one that tells me that I can't do it. And of course, the the same thing after I did it for a while, I was doing them and didn't even realize it. And that's what I knew it was OCD. I knew the pain was there, and I knew the pain was going to be there, but I had to get the OCD under control. This is what I mean when I say to people, if OCD is attacking real things, and especially like a real event, you've got to pull the OCD from what's real and work on that because the work isn't to change what's happening or what has happened. You can't change that. I couldn't change the fact that I have this chronic injury in my foot that is going to hurt from time to time. You can't change a real event. You can't change things that are real. What you can do is pull the OCD out of it and work on that. And that's what I did. And I went after it. And for something like this, it was less about doing imaginal exposures or doing, and it was more about what have I stopped doing? And now I'm going to do it. And I'm going to think about the pain and I'm going to feel the pain before I go do it, but I'm going to do it anyway. This is one time where the live life anyway saying really worked for me. And I started to see all the little microcompulsions that I had been doing that I didn't even know it. I mean, sitting down to brush my teeth, not going into the grocery store and instead going into the drugstore or something because I didn't walk as far. These things, these little bitty things that I didn't even know I was doing, I had to challenge. And I had to be honest with myself about all of the things I wasn't doing. And that was very shameful. But I just tackled it head on. Today, I still think about my feet every day. The same way I still think about most of my intrusions every day. But I think to myself, am I gonna allow that foot to stop me from doing what everybody else does or what I would normally do? Absolutely not. I hate it and I wish it wasn't there. I can still live life. And that's what I do try to tell my clients and tell people with OCD all the time. You don't have to love it. Acceptance is not loving it, approving of it, being like, yay, I'm so glad it's there. I hate it. Acceptance is painful of it. But I go and do the things that I want to do in life anyway. Lastly, I just want to share this. I've been coming to Spain now for four years, and I love Spain. It is by far my favorite country to visit. When I started coming to Spain after that year, I even challenged myself further. I started to take little road trips after the event. I would rent a car and drive out to little remote towns in the mountains. Where, I mean, they they don't speak a word of English, but it was a challenge for me. And I have had such a blast doing this. It has shown me that no matter what OCD shows up as, I can push through it, even if it took me that long to recognize it. I am now living life. Eventually, I would love to buy a place or something here. This is this just goes to show how even if something was bad at one point, you can turn it around. You can expose yourself to it and continue to expose yourself and create a different relationship with something than you previously had that OCD just ruined. Last year I was here in Spain. I always kind of home base in Seville first because that's where the event is, and then I'll rent a car and go. And I was here a couple days before anybody got here for the event. And I thought to myself, okay, I want to eat sushi because I always loved sushi. So I Googled or I looked on my phone and my hotel room. Okay, best sushi restaurants in Seville. And I'm looking down, and it was this there was one that had just 4.9 stars. And so I thought, oh, okay. So looked at the map. Now I know how to use my phone, by the way. This SIM card. So I didn't, I don't have to write it down like we used to in the old days. So, you know, set my phone and okay, here we go. I'm gonna into about an 18 minute walk to the sushi restaurant, which by the way, before I would have been like 18 minutes. I can't do 18 minutes, I have to do shorter than that. This is how bad OCD got. I set out to go, and of course, if you've ever been to Seville, it's just, you know, you just look at everything, and it's so gorgeous, and the cut, you know, the culture is just so amazing. And so I'm just enjoying my walk. And as I get closer and closer, I thought, I remember this. I've been here before. And I came up on this little area, and I I just had this overwhelming feeling. I don't want to say like chills, but I did, and I turned the corner, and there it was. That was the sushi restaurant. The one that I randomly picked out of all of the sushi restaurants in Seville last year, my maps led me to the sushi restaurant. And I walked up and I just stood in front of that door, and I closed my eyes, and I remember four years earlier finding that door and just almost falling into it so scared, looking desperately for safety. And I took a deep breath and I walked in and I wished they would have remembered me. Of course they wouldn't. Because I wanted to just say, I am a different person, and OCD does not control me anymore. But I did sit and bask in being able to experience that sushi restaurant as a stronger, more resilient person that just knows a little bit more about how OCD can show up. It was such a beautiful, healing, full circle moment. And I just thanked the universe for that. I hope this episode resonates with you. One of the things that I also wanted to tell you is that I have just published a workbook. It's called The OCD Relapse Roadmap, Your Recovery Compass. And this is a comprehensive workbook that you can write down your symptoms, the emotions around the symptoms, what to do if symptoms are there. Now I think about this story I'm telling you, and I wish I had had this notebook. Because I couldn't believe that it was OCD. I didn't have insight. But if I had had all of everything written down, symptom compulsion-wise, not just in my memoir, I mean, because the sexual intrusions were so different, religious scrupulosity was so different than this, I may have been able to recognize it and believe it sooner and implement tools or at least remember that this is what this is how small OCD can make your life. This is how big OCD can make the shame. So I'm so excited to be able to share this with you as I'm dropping this podcast today while I'm in Seville, Spain, because it is so relevant. It's so important to understand how OCD shows up, the patterns in your life. It's so important to see that your experience is yours. When OCD shows up different, it's going to feel different sometimes, but the compulsions are likely the same. If I could have recognized the avoidance piece and believed it was OCD, I maybe could have challenged that avoidance better, faster, and could have gotten things back on track. Now I'm not full of regret. I'm not full of sadness and grief about it. I was, but now I look back and think I am where I am now because of the events that happened the way that they did. But I wanted to share with you that that is a resource for you now. It is available on Amazon, and I will be running courses with in person with people via Zoom. And I'll also have in the fall have an online course. If you want someone to walk you through filling out the workbook, I will do that with you. But I hope that in listening to this, regardless of what your themes are, regardless of what the content, that if you've been in the position that I've been in, if there are things that you have thought about that feel painful to revisit, that you feel like were spoiled by OCD, I want you to know that I have developed a huge love relationship with Spain after the first time being here and saying to myself, I will never go back to that country. I took back the reins. I decided this is my life, it's not yours, OCD. Now, OCD comes with me to Spain, and I know that. I am not in denial about that. But it doesn't stop me from rebuilding a relationship with this country, having experiences that don't erase what I went through, but help me to see that the more I continue to challenge OCD, the better I get at recognizing it faster and doing the work that I need to do to move through it. And become in you can too. I hope this story helps if it's something that you needed to hear or that you need to hear in the future. Thank you so much for being here and for unmasking with me today. If this podcast supports you, inspires you, or helps you feel a little less alone, I'd love for you to consider supporting it on Patreon. Your monthly pledge helps me to keep these conversations going and create even more resources for this wonderful community. You can join us at patreon.com slash intrusive thoughts unmasked. And remember, when you're here, you do not have to wear the mask. You're seen, you're understood, and accepted exactly as you are. See you next week.