OCD: a battle of compulsion, not quirkiness

Marc Lamberts
4 min readAug 1, 2021

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Struggling with mental illnesses has been a harsh reality for me for several years. And that’s okay, but in battling and fighting against my inner demons I forgot to treat one particular mental illness: OCD. By not giving it attention and thought it didn’t affect me as great, I now have a hard time with controlling and managing it.

To be honest I never knew what to do with my OCD, because for a long period of time, I didn’t believe I had it. That I truly had it and that it was just part of my bipolar disorder. After a while, it turned out that this wasn’t the case for me and I panicked a bit. How should I go about my OCD and what did my OCD entail. I freaked out a bit because I had no idea where to start and why it manifested itself in a harder way at this point in time.

According to Mind UK, you can describe Obsessive Compulsive Disorder as follows: Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is an anxiety disorder. It has two main parts: obsessions and compulsions.

  • Obsessions are unwelcome thoughts, images, urges, worries, or doubts that repeatedly appear in your mind. They can make you feel very anxious (although some people describe it as ‘mental discomfort’ rather than anxiety).
  • Compulsions are repetitive activities that you do to reduce the anxiety caused by the obsession. It could be something like repeatedly checking a door is locked, repeating a specific phrase in your head or checking how your body feels.

OCD can manifest itself in different forms and ways, which varies from person to person. It’s a very serious condition and can be life-disrupting, debilitating, and vile.

Right, I was diagnosed with three forms of OCD. So they told me I was suffering from Checking, Touching, and Intrusive Thoughts OCD. Bear in mind guys, I had no clue what these diagnoses meant or what they did mean to me. To be honest, I knew about contamination, but other than that I was completely clueless. I read a lot about it and started to write down what I did experience that could have an effect on me.

So having obsessions or obsessive thoughts about certain things make you very anxious and it makes you perform certain rituals or also named compulsions. So in my case, the OCD can be divided into three different groups or categories:

  • Checking OCD: The need to check is the compulsion, the obsessive thoughts of fear are in my case the worry of my house getting robbed, getting on fire or people getting hurt when I don’t check the locks, close the doors and make sure everything is cleared of the walking path. I do check my stuff for uni multiple times. I check my wallet for my card. I check my bike. I check clothes. The number is 8. I check everything 8 times.
  • Touching OCD: This was explained to me as the obsessive fear of situations going wrong if I didn’t act on it. The compulsion is to touch certain objects. In my case my cross is in my bedroom. My little bracelet. My watch. The side of my laptop. And yes, the magical number is 8.
  • Intrusive thoughts OCD: This was a bit of difficult thing to understand. I have thoughts about doing bad things whilst being at church. I have thoughts of my friends being in danger a lot.

I was diagnosed with checking OCD wherein I have the compulsion to check everything all the time, to put my anxiety at ease. To check is the compulsion but for me personally it’s to ease my mind for certain worries. If I don’t do the checking, horrible things will happen to my friends and family, a fire will start somewhere or someone will get hurt. I tend to check the locks, the time, letters and I will vividly re-read texts I have received or written. And I constantly check some of the valuable possessions I have with me like my phone, my wallet and my keys.

Next to that I was also diagnosed with intrusive thoughts, which is a rudimentary part of OCD as well. It’s a bit of hard one to explain, because everyone has intrusive thoughts. But in my case, the intrusive thoughts are horrible, horrific and quite frankly drive me mad sometimes. It lets me picture scenes of horrible pain and misery, which make me very anxious, and can’t get them out of my head. The most horrible thing about them is that they are repetitive.

Suppressing it
The thing with having several mental illnesses is — in my experience — that one is more present than the other, and therefore receives more attention. I have been quite unstable with the bipolar disorder that I needed all my effort to get everything in the right order. Now I feel like I”m a bit more stable, it seems like the checking and the intrusive thoughts are getting worse. I think this is the consequence of me not giving it attention or trying to suppress it, but I always had something worse to focus on. And now I haven't and that’s why it feels like I’m having a hard time. In fact, I’m really struggling.

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Marc Lamberts
Marc Lamberts

Written by Marc Lamberts

Academic | CAF A | Recruitment + data analysis consultant in football | Set pieces

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