My journey as an OCD therapist (and what I have yet to learn).
Compulsions are some of my earliest childhood memories. I was the only daughter of a single mother, a political refugee from Poland, and a Mexican father that I didn’t know. I locked and relocked the front door, then picked up the landline to make sure there was a dial tone, then looked out the back window to see if there was a car in the alley. I was six years old when I started spending every afternoon, and many weekends alone on the top floor of a duplex in downtown Milwaukee.
In late elementary, I started feeling the urge to cut my arm. It was pre-internet, and I had no idea that anyone else did this too. I always cut in the same spot on the same arm, and then spent the next week compulsively dousing the wound with rubbing alcohol. The skin would bubble and puss, and I would focus all my anxiety on that searing pain. I distinctly remember that queasy feeling of being both powerful and powerless – what I now understand to be the dichotomy of having a control disorder that is out of control. I literally could not stop hurting myself.
By middle school, my compulsive cutting had morphed into stealing. I was easily the best student in my classes, but was pathologically quiet. When other students went to recess, I would sneak back into the teacher’s supply room and take folders and binders. I never used any of these items, but I created a little collection in my bedroom that felt sacred to me. 6th grade summer, I began to slip single sleeves of stickers into my pants at the local Kohl’s grocery store (a staple of 1990s Wisconsin). My OCD version of shoplifting – the same item from the same store at the same time of day, every day – obviously got me caught. I actually got handcuffed as a 75 pound little girl, taken to the police station, and fingerprinted.
My stealing abruptly stopped after this scared straight moment, and my OCD morphed once again into the place where it happily stayed for the coming decades: perfectionism.
Of course some part of me is grateful that my compulsivity settled into a safer landing spot than self-harm or theft, but now that I am a therapist, I appreciate how much harder it is to heal from perfectionism OCD. Pushing myself to achieve that “just right” feeling, and overachieving until I literally cannot keep my eyes open anymore, has propelled most aspects of my life. It has brought pride and achievement, but also loss and disconnection. I anchor myself so loyally to perfection, I am not sure who Natalia is outside of it.
