Shortly after I returned from the intensive course on OCD, I also had my own OCD moment. I think this probably occurred so that I could fully understand how my son’s anxieties worked. We were leaving for a two week ski holiday. I had packed everything and had all three kids in the car. I was the last to leave the house and I had two big bags in each hand as I did so. Once I was in the car and had driven out of the driveway, I started with a momentary doubt as to whether I had locked the front door of the house.
As I got about five minutes down the road I had enough of a doubt about whether I had locked the house that I started interrogating the children as to whether they had seen me lock the door or heard the alarm being set. They each responded independently that they thought they had heard the alarm but no one saw me lock the door. None of them wanted to be responsible for saying for sure the door was locked so I got no reassurance from this. I kept going over it in my head, trying to remember if I had put the bags down and if I had really locked the door. The more I tried to remember what I had done the more I was convinced that I hadn't locked it!
We were now a good ten or fifteen minutes away from the house and my mind and my heart were starting to race. I was finding it more and more difficult to breath properly and I could tell that I was having an anxiety attack. This wasn’t the first time that I had had an attack like this, in fact I have had them quite frequently in my life. The further away from the house we were, the more anxious I became and the more unclear my thoughts were. By the time we were twenty minutes away, I had convinced myself that not only had I not locked the door or set the alarm but that I couldn’t even remember shutting the front door as I couldn’t remember setting the bags down.
We were now so far away that I really didn’t want to turn around and go back but I was starting to sweat from the anxiety I was experiencing. The panic I felt was intense! Just as I was about to turn around I suddenly thought, “gosh what in the world are you so afraid of?” As I started to dissect my anxiety I realized that I was of course afraid that someone was going to break into the house and steal all of our things. So I tried to think what things I would be upset about if they were stolen. There wasn't much.
I also realised that I couldn't CONTROL whether someone showed up to break into our house in the first place. This realisation was extremely powerful. In fact if someone actually came to the house to break in, it probably wouldn’t matter whether the door was locked or even ajar. If they were determined to break in they would still get in. So in essence whether the door was locked or not became irrelevant. Once I went through this process in my head the anxiety started dissipate. This experience taught me that facing our fears is the most effective way to reduce our anxiety.
See the complete story here.
