Brain Lock: Free Yourself From Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior (27 page)

When she feels able to face the consequences—which almost
inevitably include angry outbursts—Sara tries to force him to confront reality, to acknowledge that this thing that is bothering him is not battery acid—it is OCD. Sometimes he will, sometimes he won’t. Most of the time, he won’t. She says, “OCD is this giant monster that sits over in the corner. He’s eating us alive, but we’re not supposed to notice.”

The acid problem is, in itself, hard enough to live with. Sara says, “He has ruined more things trying to prevent acid contamination than if we’d sprayed daily with the stuff.” Their driveway and lawn are inundated with baking soda and ammonia. He even cleans under the bushes. The sinks are pitted from the ammonia, and Sara says she expects the pipes to disintegrate and collapse some day.

“We spend three to four hundred dollars a month on baking soda and ammonia. It’s so frustrating to watch the waste. It’s ruined our clothes, shoes, and carpet.” Brian watches where she walks and may decide later to retrieve her shoes from her closet and clean them. He turned a favorite pair of blue suede shoes a hideous green by dousing them in ammonia.

The money wasted is money they cannot afford to throw away. He was a partner in a car dealership that fell victim to overexpansion, recession, and the rerouting of a major freeway in the early 1990s. It was a financial disaster that left him broke. Because of his OCD, his job performance since has been shaky. His current sales job requires a great deal of driving—and he cannot keep appointments with clients if he finds that he will have to drive on streets where there might have been an acid spill.

Although money is tight, Brian still feels compelled to buy things he doesn’t need. His closet is filled with suits and ties he’s never worn. “He doesn’t want to get them contaminated,” Sara explains. Once, she went to a department store to buy him a birthday gift and, undecided, asked the saleswoman for an idea. When the saleswoman suggested a tie, Sara quickly chose something else. As the saleswoman was ringing up the purchase, she noticed the name on the credit card and said, “No, he sure doesn’t need a tie.” She recognized him as the man who couldn’t stop buying ties.

Brian buys hammers and other tools in duplicate and once had to rent a garage to store all the stuff he was hoarding. Sara observes,
“We could have put his son through college with what he’s invested on this disease.”

He will buy and buy—and then a great guilt will seize him. Because he has OCD, he will reason, he must deny himself everything. “Everything,” Sara says, “shampoos, haircuts…but then he will reward himself to the same extent that he has denied himself” and the buy-and-scrimp cycle will repeat.

But the greater toll on his family has been the emotional one. “If you’re sick from the neck down, everyone will help you,” Sara says. “If you are sick up above, there is this shame. A woman stays with her husband who’s terminally ill and she’s a saint. But I’m told I’ve got to be ‘out of my mind’ to stay with Brian. I ask people, ‘Would I not be kind to him if he had polio or heart disease?’”

Many times, angry and frustrated, she has thought of leaving. “I’ve actually gotten in the car and driven until my gas tank was almost empty, not knowing where I was going. Finally, I’d pull over and wonder, ‘Where am I?’

“I’ve told him I want a divorce. That’s when he starts taking his pills by the gallon and calls the doctor and starts going to the group.” But only until the marital crisis blows over.

There are many reasons why she has stayed: She is 56, and this is her third marriage; her first husband was a schizophrenic, her second an alcoholic. There is the matter of commitment. “He needs me terribly.” And, she says, “Even the unstable, if it’s constant, becomes secure.”

When he is himself, she knows, he is a kind, loving, and charming man—the man she married, the man he was before he became so overwhelmed by his disease and not able to think of anything but his own needs.

Sara hates the role she is forced to play in her marriage. “I have become the mother, the watchdog, the critic. I hound. I nag. I try to control. I cry. I give up. Then there is nothing. Just apathy and sadness. What a waste—of him, of me, of time, money, everything.”

Most of all, there is the dreadful loneliness. “I am alone most of the time, whether Brian is home or not. He doesn’t think of me anymore. He is always thinking his own thoughts, always thinking of
battery acid. I have never experienced loneliness like this. Even being divorced was not this lonely.”

Most of the time, she is “contaminated,” so physical intimacy between them is out of the question. “He won’t even touch anything I have touched or use the same towel or the same cup.” The problem is compounded by the fact that she works at an auto dealership. In Brian’s mind, that means only one thing: battery acid.

Sometimes, she has reached out to hug him and has seen “stark terror” on his face. Or she might take his arm, and “he just recoils.” Over time, she has learned to stifle her feelings, not to initiate any show of affection, so as not to be rebuffed. “I am no longer an equal, no longer feminine, no longer a love object.”

“OCD isolates you like no other disease,” Sara says. “It tries to keep your family and friends away. You can’t plan get-togethers or holidays. It controls where you drive, walk, shop, see movies, every aspect of your life. Nothing is left untouched.”

She smiles and says, “If I didn’t have a sense of humor, I’d have done myself in—or him.”

When he gets really bad—which is when he slacks off on his medication and behavior therapy—she worries that he will be suicidal. “I don’t want to come home from work,” she says, “and wonder if he’s hung himself in the garage.”

Sometimes Sara struggles to keep her sanity. She will sit and recite multiplication tables, just to focus on something besides his illness. For three years, she was in therapy. And, she has taken up hobbies with a vengeance—“I craft myself to death.”

But her real strength comes from “a deep, abiding religious faith,” combined with coping skills she learned from living with an alcoholic. “I will relive the good times mentally and use them over and over” to get through the bad times.

Still, she has to take medication to control her heart palpitations. And she overeats: “I haven’t yet learned that food doesn’t cure anything.” Once, when Brian was out of town, she ordered pounds of pasta from a favorite Italian restaurant where they cannot go because it is “contaminated” and systematically ate her way through all of it.

A few years back, Brian and Sara decided to take their sons to Hawaii. “The vacation that I’d dreamed about,” Brian says. “I
thought we were going to have a great time.” But the second day, they decided to take an offshore snorkeling excursion. As luck would have it, the owner of the boat asked everyone to remove his or her shoes before boarding. He then opened a storage compartment and put the shoes inside. Brian froze when he saw that there were batteries stored in that compartment.

From that moment, Sara says, “Everything we had on was contaminated and everything we bought was contaminated. It ruined the whole vacation.”

“I was living in a virtual hell for the whole five or six days we were there,” Brian recalls. “I didn’t even wear my shoes off the boat. I just left them there. But I couldn’t possibly clean everywhere where my kids wore their tennis shoes and I wasn’t going to grab their shoes off their feet and get them new ones.”

For a long time, Sara was very supportive of Brian. At his most desperate, he considered having brain surgery, but she talked him out of it. By the time he sought help at UCLA, she had consulted an attorney about a divorce. Brian states, “I begged her to do it. I said, ‘Honey, I don’t see me getting any better and I can’t possibly put you through this for the rest of your life. Go out and find somebody else. Let’s get this thing over with.’”

She didn’t. For one thing, she didn’t think he could make it on his own. And she worried constantly that he would take his own life. Brian remembers, “I had bought that book that tells 450 ways to kill yourself. I’d learned how to cut my wrists and all sorts of other things. I never tried but, boy, I sure contemplated it. I remember telling a doctor at UCLA, ‘You know how bad I am today? I’m so bad that there’s not a person in one of those beds on the cancer ward that I wouldn’t change places with.’”

Sara talks about her weariness, her loneliness. Sometimes she is just too tired to fight his OCD, so she gives in to it, even though she knows that will not help him to get well.

She says, “I’ve tried not to buy into his illness, not to be codependent, not to be an enabler. But those times the house becomes a true war zone. There is no peace. So, if he thinks there is battery acid on a certain street, I agree not to drive on it so he can have peace of mind. I’m running around the edges, trying to keep every
thing peaceful.” When she feels strong enough, she will force the issue and make him confront his disease. And he will go back to doing his behavior therapy and taking his medication. Then things markedly improve.

The worst part, Sara says, is that “he’s in this alone and I’m in it alone.” Rare are the occasions when he’s honest about what’s bothering him—it’s not battery acid, it’s OCD—but at those times she feels very comforted. Most of the time, “the beast is eating both of us, and we’re both pretending that it’s not touching anybody.”

Sara longs to hear Brian say, “You’re great for staying with me,” but he never does. She doesn’t think he understands what he’s putting her through. After all,
he
is the one who gets up at night to scrub the streets, not her. Her friends tell her, “You’ve got to have your head examined.” But she cannot bear to think “what he would be like and live like without me.” So she stays.

Because he knows where he can get help, she is hopeful that sooner or later he will decide to conquer his disease because he must—for his sake and for theirs. Meanwhile, she says, “He’s wasting his life, and I’m wasting mine watching him wasting his. I want him back with me. I want us to be in this together. I’m sure he’s lonely, the same as I am.”

It’s not easy to know why Brian continues to go through such extended periods of noncompliance with his medication and behavior therapy when it is obvious to everyone, including him, that he shows consistent and marked improvement when he complies. From a classical psychotherapy perspective, it’s clear that he has “emotional conflicts” about getting better, but it has not been easy getting to the root of what they are. The pattern of his cooperation with his treatment plan is somewhat hopeful in that the periods of remission are getting somewhat longer, but things remain much too inconsistent.

The moral of this story is that not everyone avails themselves to the same degree of the opportunity to get better. Some people seem to cling to their suffering more than do others. We are hopeful that Brian will eventually sort himself out and follow the combined medication-behavior therapy treatment regimen that has proved effective for him.

JOEL AND HIS PARENTS

Steven and Carol, both academics, at first indulged their 14-year-old son, Joel, in his newfound interest in subscribing to newspapers from different cities.

What they didn’t know was that Joel had no intellectual interest in those newspapers. In fact, he wasn’t even reading them. He was hoarding them. Stacks and stacks of newspapers were piling up in his room. “It was a real fire hazard,” Joel says.

Carol remembers, “If you went into his room, it would hit you in the face, this tremendous, overpowering smell. And you’d suddenly realize that it was newsprint.” Carol and Steven did the logical thing: They took the newspapers—by then thousands of pounds of newspapers—out into the yard and asked Joel to sort out the ones he wished to keep. He started to make choices but then, she says, “he just kind of cracked up. He couldn’t do it.” Even though he never read those papers, he was obsessed with the idea that he “had to preserve this information.” For a long time, Joel was able to rationalize that his “collecting” made sense.

His parents thought it was a bit odd. They had no way of knowing that it was, in reality, the first stage of an OCD hoarding compulsion that was to get completely out of control. Soon, Carol says, “We started to find old food containers. He was saving things like McDonald’s wrappers. I’d root around and find them all over the house. At first, Steven thought, ‘Okay, he’s making a collection,’ and he’d allow him to keep one sample of each.” But before long, Joel would be scouting the alley, sifting through other people’s trash cans in search of food wrappers. And then he began hoarding junk mail. Carol had to take all the junk mail to school as soon as it came to the house and dispose of it there.

Obviously, Carol and Steven were beginning to see a disturbing pattern in their son’s behavior, yet they were completely puzzled about what might be going on in his head. Thinking back, they recalled an episode several years earlier that had seemed harmless at the beginning: Joel had suddenly taken an interest in making videotapes. But his was no normal teenage experimentation. Soon he was taping compulsively and indiscriminately; the recorder was on all
day long. Of course, he never played any of the tapes. Taping in and of itself had become a life-consuming activity.

Joel explained his hoarding by saying that he was into recycling, but, Carol noticed, “Nothing actually got recycled.” It just got stashed away.

To their relief, the hoarding obsession eventually began to go away. Joel did not throw away the mounds of junk in his room—he was too sick to deal with it—but he stopped bringing in more junk. Carol and Steven reasoned, “Well, maybe this was just an adolescent problem.” They consulted a psychiatrist who suggested that coming-of-age pressures and anger can cause teenagers to do all manner of strange things.

Life seemed to move along quite normally for several years, and then, on Joel’s 16th birthday, Carol and Steven took him to his favorite restaurant for dinner. But Joel couldn’t eat. They asked to change tables, thinking that might help, but Joel was able to force down only a few forkfuls. Joel explained that he had been thinking for some time about converting to an organic vegetarian diet and now, all of a sudden, he felt confused and put off by his food. Like many young people, he had interests and concerns about the environment that were leading him in the direction of not wanting to see animals killed for meat. Carol and Steven understood; certainly didn’t object; and, in fact, tried to incorporate his new dietary preferences into their lifestyle as much as was practical. At this stage, Joel would still drink milk and would eat meat occasionally if someone else had prepared it.