Brain Lock: Free Yourself From Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior (26 page)

Erica and Tracy went to a private school and missed a whole year of school when the family’s finances got tight. Jill was always in a bit of a Catch-22. “If I got very sick, I couldn’t work because I was spending all my time cleaning. We’d have to move a lot because we couldn’t pay the rent.”

When they were very young, the girls just thought, “Oh, well, this is what everybody does.” Later, though, they had a hard time explaining their mother’s peculiar behavior to their friends. Certainly, their friends found it puzzling that they were never invited in. “Mom would tell us stories to tell people,” Tracy remembers, “how to make excuses for this or that. It bothered me a lot, the peer thing. ‘How come your mom can’t take us all to the skating rink tonight?’” Tracy would mumble something about, “Well, she just can’t.”

When Tracy was in third grade, her whole school became “contaminated.” If she or her sister had to go the principal’s office, that was a kind of double-dip contamination. Tracy says, “I remember one time when I knew I was going to have to go in and see the principal. It was a Catholic school, and I was really religious at that time. And I was really praying to God that I wouldn’t get called into the office because I knew that then I would have to go through all this extra nonsense.” A trip to the principal’s office meant two or four showers when they got home—always an even number.

Tracy began telling little lies. When interrogated by Jill, she would say she hadn’t been to the principal’s office when she had. Sometimes she’d sneak a schoolbook out of the “dirty closet” and take it into her bedroom to study.

When Jill found out her daughters were lying, “This rage would come over me. Now, everything was dirty because I had no idea where they’d really been or what they had touched after they’d been there. I’d get itchy all over and start hyperventilating.” When Tracy was in ninth grade, she broke her silence and told her best friend about these strange things her mom did. “It was a breakthrough for me, finally talking to somebody.” Her friend told the other girls, of course. Pretty soon the girls at school were joking, “Hey, I think it’s so cool. Can I come over and stand in your closet with you?” To Tracy, it was not funny.

The girls hated their mother’s OCD—but they learned to use it to their advantage. Tracy says, “Erica and I would tell her, ‘If you’re not going to let our friends come over, then you need to give us money to go out.’” They weren’t allowed to earn money by baby-sitting because the child or the child’s family might be contaminated. Though Jill was struggling to keep afloat financially, she would give them what they wanted.

There was no logic, of course, to Jill’s obsession about contamination, and this fact was thoroughly confusing to the girls. Tracy recalls, “Erica and I used to spend a lot of time asking her, ‘Well, how come this is dirty now and it wasn’t dirty before?’” If a “contaminated” person should telephone, Jill would spend hours scrubbing the wall by the phone while dirty dishes piled up in the sink. “That’s what would make my children really upset. Sometimes I would even take all my clothes off first, so I wouldn’t have to clean them. They’d
come home and find me standing there, naked, with a paper towel and a bottle of rubbing alcohol. It was bizarre. They’d say, ‘Mom, you’re an alcoholic.’ And, of course, seeing them get upset would make me upset. It’s terrible when your kids are ashamed of you.”

“I hated her,” Tracy says. “I would tell her all the time, ‘I hate you. I hate you for making me do this.’ OCD affected every little thing in my life—the lying to people, the conflict I felt. When she’d make me shower four times, I’d tell myself, ‘I’m doing this because I love her.’ And then I hated her. I’m still like that now. I’ve hit her, I got so angry. And I love her. I don’t want to hit my mom.”

Once, for a lark, Tracy and a girlfriend decided to hang out one night in a graveyard. When Jill asked where they’d been—as she always did—Tracy told her the truth. For weeks, Jill dwelled on it: graveyard-death-contamination. When Tracy’s girlfriend later came by to visit while Jill was out, she knew she had to lie about it. There wouldn’t have been enough alcohol in the world to make the house clean again. As it was, Tracy says, “We’d go up to the city and buy literally cases and cases of alcohol—three, four, five cases. By that stage, all she was doing was cleaning.”

Things had gotten out of hand, and the girls were fed up. Tracy was 16 and the family was living in North Carolina when “the big blowup” came. Erica confronted Jill and told her that she and Tracy had been lying to her for years, doing things she’d told them not to do and not doing things she’d told them to do. “We told her, ‘We’re not going to live with this. We’re not going to have a life like this,’” and they left, going to stay with families of school friends. Jill was devastated. She knew she couldn’t have them with her if they were going to betray her, but she was too sick to really understand what she had done to them.

Erica, who was 19, did not come back. She and Tracy took an apartment, but after a while Tracy came home. “I missed her. I loved her. I felt bad for her. I knew she was hurting.”

The homecoming, of course, triggered a massive “alcoholing” of the house, since Tracy was now badly contaminated. Jill remembers, “I ended up cleaning the cat, too.” Tracy says, “We’re talking even books, page by page, and photo albums. My award certificates from school got smeared with alcohol and had to be thrown out. It killed me. I was very mad at my sister for having us tell mom all that
because she had destroyed everything and now I had to come back and pick up the pieces.” Jill, unhappy and depressed, had been thinking that life might be better in Florida. She decided to drive south and take a look. But first, all their possessions had to be drenched in alcohol before she put them into storage.

It was spring break, and while her mother went to Florida, Tracy planned to go to Montgomery, Alabama, to visit former school friends, but she knew that to Jill, Montgomery was “really dirty.” So she lied. She told her mother she was going to visit other friends in Savannah, Georgia. They made plans to rendezvous in Florida. But Jill became suspicious and, en route to Florida, called Tracy’s friends. Her worst fears were confirmed: Tracy had gone to Montgomery, after all. Jill “felt betrayed a second time. It was breaking my heart that they could just lie to me like that. And I was still so confused about my disease.” Tracy was now contaminated; they could no longer live together. Tracy says, “She couldn’t even talk to Erica or me on the phone.”

Eventually, Jill and Tracy sort of worked things out and, for a while, were sharing an apartment near the UCLA campus, where Tracy is a student. For years, Erica and Jill were estranged. Erica had trouble forgiving her. She lives in a different section of the country, and they have seen each other only once in the past five years, but they have spoken by telephone. Jill understands, “She still has a lot of the old hostilities. But things have mended. She no longer blames me for taking her family away. Understanding that I have this disease has taken a lot of the pressure off. She’s forgiven me. She knows that it’s a sickness, not me.”

Although Jill and Tracy haven’t totally resolved their conflict, they’re working at it. When Jill’s compulsions affect her, it makes Tracy angry—“I don’t want to be a weirdo.” Deep inside, she’s a little scared that she may have some OCD tendencies. Tracy herself has a little problem dealing with death and dying and is extremely squeamish about what she will eat.

Jill has shared with Tracy what she has learned about OCD and its treatment from me and from other members of the OCD therapy group, which she attends faithfully. Recently, Jill got a traffic ticket and was taking a driving-school-at-home program. There was one problem: She couldn’t touch the manual because of an old contami
nation obsession about official papers that started at the time of her divorce. (When Erica was 16 and wanted to get her driver’s license, she had to wait three years because Jill couldn’t go into the department of motor vehicles, an official building.) So Tracy flipped the pages for her. But at the end, Tracy told her, “OK, you’ve got to sign it.” And she did. Tracy said, “Well, since you signed it, do you want to go ahead and try to touch it?” Tracy, seeing that Jill was nervous and jittery, thought a minute and then told her mother, “I think it would be really cool if you touched it. And you’ll get a big gold star.” It wasn’t easy, but Jill reached down and touched the manual. “Suddenly” Jill said, “my hands and arms got all these red splotches, and I was itching between my fingers, but I knew I wanted to touch it. I had to—for my behavioral therapy.”

Today, Jill’s obsessions and compulsions are largely under control. She no longer “alcohols” her house. Her mother’s death two years ago caused a setback—her family members, who had become uncontaminated, suddenly became contaminated again.

But she’s working on that problem, practicing her therapy every day. “You know,” she says, “I’ve always had a real strong survival instinct.”

BRIAN AND HIS WIFE

For most of the fourteen years of their marriage, Sara has shared Brian with his OCD, his morbid fear of battery acid, and his compulsive need to scrub public streets to avoid being contaminated by it.

She minces no words as she talks about her husband, his illness, and how it has essentially destroyed their marriage: “OCD has ruined my life. It steals your husband. It steals your lover, your companion, your friend. It steals your time, money, and energy. It takes all there is to take and gives nothing back. And it never says ‘thanks.’”

Sara and Brian met at the office where they both worked and had known each other six years before they married. In all that time, she had seen no signs of his illness. But they had been married only a few months when she began to notice strange little behaviors—“He’d ask me not to walk in certain places, drive certain places, wear certain shoes”—but she was able to convince herself that these were simply his little eccentricities.

Of course, there were those long, long showers he’d take, but, again, she just “put it down to his being very neat.”

Then, when they’d been married about a year, there was a battery spill at work, and, she remembers, “He just went ballistic” and had to be hospitalized. The gates of hell had just opened for both of them.

Night after night, Brian would lie in bed, listening for the sirens that would tell him that there was an accident nearby. He was always on the alert, ready to grab a bucket and baking soda and drive to the scene and start scrubbing.

Sometimes, Sara said, he would be in the middle of a sentence when he would hear those sirens and would just jump up and disappear for five hours, forgetting even to close the front door in his panic.

The family—which included his son and her son by previous marriages—was being torn apart by OCD. “My kids didn’t know what was going on,” Brian says, “All they knew was that dad was deathly afraid of batteries and battery acid and that I wasn’t fit to go out in public. I mean, it was terrible. Terrible. If my wife could have left me and not felt guilty, she’d have done it. I couldn’t do anything. I wanted to crawl under a rock.”

Of course, the boys couldn’t have friends over because Brian couldn’t control where those friends might have driven or where they might drive next. Once, they came home from school and confided in Sara, “Man, we did chemical experiments today and we had sulfuric acid everywhere.” That was a secret they kept from Brian, knowing he would grab the boys on the spot and start scrubbing them down. Looking back, Brian says, “My son was real anxious to join the Marine Corps. I think he just wanted to get away from me, get away from the problem.”

As his OCD progressed, Brian could no longer work. “I was an absolute basket case. I felt like acid was all over me and I couldn’t get clean. It was in my bedroom, it was on the walls. One day a friend of my wife came to the house and I learned that he’d driven down a street where there’d just been a traffic accident. Now it was on his tires. I spent all night on my hands and knees, washing the carpets with baking soda and water. Then I rented one of those vacuum things at the market and cleaned and cleaned.”

Brian says, “It got to the point where this thing was just com
pletely out of the stratosphere.” He was scrubbing streets all night long, waking up exhausted, and then starting the cycle all over again.

Was he crazy? Was she crazy? Sara was so confused by this time that she wasn’t sure.

Some nights, he would sit in front of the TV, watching
The Late Show
and then hours of late-late shows, hoping somehow to postpone the dawn and another day of fear and scrubbing.

He sought psychiatric help, but was given a laundry list of misdiagnoses, including schizophrenia. Thirty days in a psychiatric hospital did little good, nor did another two weeks in a second hospital. “Nobody had a clue” as to what was wrong with him, Brian says. Their solution seemed to be “to give me lots of stuff to make me sleep.”

He remembers almost nothing about the first five months of 1985. “Sara told me later that people we knew had died during that time, while I just lay in bed, absolutely zoned out. I had tremendous bouts of depression and I would cry frantically because I was just going crazy inside.”

Then one night they happened to be watching
20/20
on television, when there was a feature on people with OCD. Sara recalled, “I was so relieved that this thing had a name.” Brian said, “A bell went off.” He now knew what he had. The feature had mentioned the UCLA outpatient program for OCD patients, and Brian called. When he got hold of me, he was so relieved that he broke down and cried.

Brian’s is a classic, and severe, case of OCD, and his progress has been up-and-down, depending on how faithfully he takes his medication and how faithfully he practices the Four Steps of behavioral therapy and attends the OCD therapy groups.

If he works hard at it, he is able to keep his symptoms under control, but he has failed to learn the most important lesson: Only constant vigilance defeats OCD. Until he does, he will suffer the consequences, and Sara will have to suffer with him. When his OCD is really bad, Sara says, it is so extreme that “he uses paper towels and sandwich bags to open doors. And we can’t go to church because there is a man there who owns a battery company.” As long as Brian takes Paxil in the prescribed dosage, he is able to fight off depression and suicidal tendencies.