lostcompass
09-03-2013, 04:27 PM
This post will probably get pretty long so I'm sorry in advance. It's just that I've never opened up about my story before and need to get it off my chest. I spend so much time wondering about why I've become the way I've become that I have no energy left to do anything worthwhile and enjoy my life.
I'm sixteen years old and I've been dealing with anxiety/OCD for about four years now. I had mild anxiety for a few years before then but never as severe as it's become now. Ever since the first event that triggered my anxiety, my fears have simply moved from one thing to another and it's become exhausting trying to dodge the constant stream of negative/scary thoughts and feelings of impending doom that characterize this awful disorder.
The first fear that tripped my anxiety was being terrified of rape. I was nine at the time. I was sitting in my father's car alone talking to my older sister, who was sitting in the moving van behind me, over a walkie-talkie. My father has had a habit of picking up and moving my family roughly every 2-3 years and has always been terribly unaware of what has been going on in my life (I won't go into too much detail right now). Suddenly a man's voice cuts in over the frequency and starts talking about doing all sorts of sexual things (showering together, etc.) to whoever I presumed he was talking to. Being an oblivious nine-year-old, I began talking to my sister about wondering who he was talking to. His voice cut back in then with a single word: "You." I can't begin to describe how terrified I became after that. Regardless of whether it was pure coincidence or whether he had truly been speaking to me, that event planted the seeds for the anxiety and other issues I've developed in the past years.
Up until I was twelve, I was consumed by fears of rape. I never left the house because I was terrified I'd be grabbed and thrown in the back of a van. Looking back now, it seems rather ridiculous but in my child's mind, it was all very real and terrifying.
I've always had some sort of calamity happen with pets that I've owned. When I was six, my father brought a wild rat inside from the palm tree in front of our house (we lived in Florida at the time) and attempted to domesticate it. He placed all of the responsibility for the rat on me, giving me little, if any, say in whether I wanted to keep the thing or not. I distinctly remember feelings of anxiety and overwhelming fear during that period of time; I was six, I couldn't possibly care for a wild rat. To make a long story short, I went out one day with my family for dinner, leaving the rat in the cage that my father had bought for it. When we returned home, it was nowhere to be found. Now, you would assume that, as a parent of a young child, he would recognize the fact that I was six years old and had tried to be as responsible as I could with the animal despite the fact that I didn't want it in the first place. Regardless of my pleas he was hellbent on the fact that he thought I was lying when I told him over and over again that I didn't know where the rat had gone. So hellbent, in fact, he forced me to sleep in the pitch-black garage for two hours, and then moved me to the tiny hall closet. At the time, that was one of the most terrifying experiences I had ever had and contributed to a hefty portion of my later fears of responsibility/commitment and anxiety over pets.
At eight, my parents bought a cockatiel for me for Christmas. I treated for that bird as well as I possibly could for several years and eventually found myself become more and more lax and neglectful of its care, not out of cruelty, but simply because I couldn't handle the responsibility of it any longer. I attempted to talk to my dad about putting it up for adoption, but he soon became hostile and forced me to keep it. One day a few months before my thirteenth birthday, I noticed that the bird looked ill but assumed it would pass. The same day, I went in to check on her and found her lying almost dead on the bottom of her cage. I rushed upstairs to alert my father of what was happening, hoping for some advice or call to the animal shelter. Instead, he began screaming at me violently, telling me I was "incompetent," "a murderer," and asking why couldn't I have just taken care of the damn thing, what was wrong with me, and other things that have escaped my memory. He screamed bloody murder (quite literally) at me for hours, scooping the bird up from the bottom of the cage and rushing downstairs to call the animal shelter. By the time he got on the phone, she was already nearly gone. I watched the bird as her breathing slowed, eventually coming to a stop altogether. We buried her in the backyard. For weeks afterward, my father reminded me every day how incompetent I was, and how I was a murderer.
I buried those memories deep down inside for about nine months, when I began yearning for a cat. I felt a mixture of excitement and overwhelming anxiety on the car ride to the pet store, where my mother helped me pick out a cat. Once I got her home, she began tearing up my room. My anxiety reached an all-time high that evening, when I felt absolute terror. I was terrified, and I had no idea why. Since getting that cat, my life turned upside down and I've not had one day since that hasn't been riddled with anxiety over one thing or another. For a few weeks, the anxiety got so bad that I began breathing very shallowly, causing my diaphragm to constrict. I, going crazy with fear over the cat and being a generally ignorant thirteen year old, decided to look up "chest pain" on Google and naturally received dire results as one can expect of Google. At the time, I had no idea that my diaphragm was constricting because of my breathing, let alone did I even know what my diaphragm was. After that search, I was absolutely convinced that I was having a heart attack and didn't sleep that night. Over a period of four months, my anxiety very dramatically shifted focus from the cat to my own health. I worried about everything from bug bites to headaches, ironic considering I had never been health conscious before and was previously a very adventurous, outdoorsy child. Around my fourteenth birthday I developed quite severe OCD. This time? Spiders. I was terrified of finding them in one place only: my bed. I religiously checked that bed as if my life depended on it, removing the sheets, comforter, pillowcases, and mattress pad every single night, checking and rechecking for up to thirty minutes before I finally went to bed. This compulsive behavior helped me cope with my overwhelming anxiety, giving a sense of control over my chaotic mind.
(This paragraph may be too TMI for some). Later that year, I got an anal fissure as I was also compulsive about cleanliness and rubbed the sensitive skin back there raw. Having a history of health anxiety, I naturally expected the worst and thought that I was bleeding internally or something and panicked. So began five months of extremely compulsive and obsessive behavior. I won't go into too much detail; I'm sure you can imagine what I ended up doing as a result of the fear. I felt like I was dying all day, every single day for five months straight and had overwhelming feelings of terror and panic. It was absolute hell.
Being homeschooled since the 2nd grade and isolated in the house because of my father's anti-social personality, I was essentially imprisoned in my own head, consumed by my fears. By January of the following year, my OCD had spiked again and I became absolutely consumed with the act of handwashing, as I was terrified that there might be raw meat on them, and I thought I would contract some sort of bacterial illness from it. I washed my hands probably 30+ a day for several months despite the fact that I never cooked and never really went into the kitchen at all. I also began spitting, fearing there might be raw meat in my mouth or on my lips. I would wash my mouth out 10-15 times a day, over and over again, terrified it still wasn't clean. During the summer of 2012 I was distracted from my problems, as my mother was planning to separate from my father and I was coming with her. We left when he was out of town, hauling our shit into a moving van and moving to a town about thirty miles away. No goodbye, no nothing. I didn't and still don't have a very good relationship with my father. The resentment I feel toward him over his emotional abuse and his contribution to the impetus of my anxiety disorder is one of the main reasons why I don't.
In fact, during some of the times when I needed my parents the most, they completely ignored my needs, telling me to just get over it. We've always had financial problems due my father's incompetency with money, so my parents have spent most of my childhood and teenage years trying to build a stable financial base, as well as caring for my adopted younger brother and sister. As a result, mine and my older sister's needs have been pushed to the back burner for most of our childhoods and I feel that I've been pretty much alone dealing with anxiety/OCD. Having been homeschooled and isolated didn't help.
Now, a year after we separated from my father, I have severe depression, self harm, and suicidal thoughts on top of my anxiety/OCD. I have an extremely loving and supportive boyfriend, am now going to a public high school, and my family situation has gotten somewhat better since we moved but all my thoughts, compulsions, and obsessions are still there. I've just repressed them.
Again, I apologize for the long post. I just really needed to get it all out because my anxiety/OCD was triggered by myriad different things, not just one event and I needed to write them all out to make sense of it all.
Can anyone make some sense of my story, and why I became the way I am today?
Thanks in advance. I greatly appreciate anyone willing to read my story and offer advice.
-Shannon
I'm sixteen years old and I've been dealing with anxiety/OCD for about four years now. I had mild anxiety for a few years before then but never as severe as it's become now. Ever since the first event that triggered my anxiety, my fears have simply moved from one thing to another and it's become exhausting trying to dodge the constant stream of negative/scary thoughts and feelings of impending doom that characterize this awful disorder.
The first fear that tripped my anxiety was being terrified of rape. I was nine at the time. I was sitting in my father's car alone talking to my older sister, who was sitting in the moving van behind me, over a walkie-talkie. My father has had a habit of picking up and moving my family roughly every 2-3 years and has always been terribly unaware of what has been going on in my life (I won't go into too much detail right now). Suddenly a man's voice cuts in over the frequency and starts talking about doing all sorts of sexual things (showering together, etc.) to whoever I presumed he was talking to. Being an oblivious nine-year-old, I began talking to my sister about wondering who he was talking to. His voice cut back in then with a single word: "You." I can't begin to describe how terrified I became after that. Regardless of whether it was pure coincidence or whether he had truly been speaking to me, that event planted the seeds for the anxiety and other issues I've developed in the past years.
Up until I was twelve, I was consumed by fears of rape. I never left the house because I was terrified I'd be grabbed and thrown in the back of a van. Looking back now, it seems rather ridiculous but in my child's mind, it was all very real and terrifying.
I've always had some sort of calamity happen with pets that I've owned. When I was six, my father brought a wild rat inside from the palm tree in front of our house (we lived in Florida at the time) and attempted to domesticate it. He placed all of the responsibility for the rat on me, giving me little, if any, say in whether I wanted to keep the thing or not. I distinctly remember feelings of anxiety and overwhelming fear during that period of time; I was six, I couldn't possibly care for a wild rat. To make a long story short, I went out one day with my family for dinner, leaving the rat in the cage that my father had bought for it. When we returned home, it was nowhere to be found. Now, you would assume that, as a parent of a young child, he would recognize the fact that I was six years old and had tried to be as responsible as I could with the animal despite the fact that I didn't want it in the first place. Regardless of my pleas he was hellbent on the fact that he thought I was lying when I told him over and over again that I didn't know where the rat had gone. So hellbent, in fact, he forced me to sleep in the pitch-black garage for two hours, and then moved me to the tiny hall closet. At the time, that was one of the most terrifying experiences I had ever had and contributed to a hefty portion of my later fears of responsibility/commitment and anxiety over pets.
At eight, my parents bought a cockatiel for me for Christmas. I treated for that bird as well as I possibly could for several years and eventually found myself become more and more lax and neglectful of its care, not out of cruelty, but simply because I couldn't handle the responsibility of it any longer. I attempted to talk to my dad about putting it up for adoption, but he soon became hostile and forced me to keep it. One day a few months before my thirteenth birthday, I noticed that the bird looked ill but assumed it would pass. The same day, I went in to check on her and found her lying almost dead on the bottom of her cage. I rushed upstairs to alert my father of what was happening, hoping for some advice or call to the animal shelter. Instead, he began screaming at me violently, telling me I was "incompetent," "a murderer," and asking why couldn't I have just taken care of the damn thing, what was wrong with me, and other things that have escaped my memory. He screamed bloody murder (quite literally) at me for hours, scooping the bird up from the bottom of the cage and rushing downstairs to call the animal shelter. By the time he got on the phone, she was already nearly gone. I watched the bird as her breathing slowed, eventually coming to a stop altogether. We buried her in the backyard. For weeks afterward, my father reminded me every day how incompetent I was, and how I was a murderer.
I buried those memories deep down inside for about nine months, when I began yearning for a cat. I felt a mixture of excitement and overwhelming anxiety on the car ride to the pet store, where my mother helped me pick out a cat. Once I got her home, she began tearing up my room. My anxiety reached an all-time high that evening, when I felt absolute terror. I was terrified, and I had no idea why. Since getting that cat, my life turned upside down and I've not had one day since that hasn't been riddled with anxiety over one thing or another. For a few weeks, the anxiety got so bad that I began breathing very shallowly, causing my diaphragm to constrict. I, going crazy with fear over the cat and being a generally ignorant thirteen year old, decided to look up "chest pain" on Google and naturally received dire results as one can expect of Google. At the time, I had no idea that my diaphragm was constricting because of my breathing, let alone did I even know what my diaphragm was. After that search, I was absolutely convinced that I was having a heart attack and didn't sleep that night. Over a period of four months, my anxiety very dramatically shifted focus from the cat to my own health. I worried about everything from bug bites to headaches, ironic considering I had never been health conscious before and was previously a very adventurous, outdoorsy child. Around my fourteenth birthday I developed quite severe OCD. This time? Spiders. I was terrified of finding them in one place only: my bed. I religiously checked that bed as if my life depended on it, removing the sheets, comforter, pillowcases, and mattress pad every single night, checking and rechecking for up to thirty minutes before I finally went to bed. This compulsive behavior helped me cope with my overwhelming anxiety, giving a sense of control over my chaotic mind.
(This paragraph may be too TMI for some). Later that year, I got an anal fissure as I was also compulsive about cleanliness and rubbed the sensitive skin back there raw. Having a history of health anxiety, I naturally expected the worst and thought that I was bleeding internally or something and panicked. So began five months of extremely compulsive and obsessive behavior. I won't go into too much detail; I'm sure you can imagine what I ended up doing as a result of the fear. I felt like I was dying all day, every single day for five months straight and had overwhelming feelings of terror and panic. It was absolute hell.
Being homeschooled since the 2nd grade and isolated in the house because of my father's anti-social personality, I was essentially imprisoned in my own head, consumed by my fears. By January of the following year, my OCD had spiked again and I became absolutely consumed with the act of handwashing, as I was terrified that there might be raw meat on them, and I thought I would contract some sort of bacterial illness from it. I washed my hands probably 30+ a day for several months despite the fact that I never cooked and never really went into the kitchen at all. I also began spitting, fearing there might be raw meat in my mouth or on my lips. I would wash my mouth out 10-15 times a day, over and over again, terrified it still wasn't clean. During the summer of 2012 I was distracted from my problems, as my mother was planning to separate from my father and I was coming with her. We left when he was out of town, hauling our shit into a moving van and moving to a town about thirty miles away. No goodbye, no nothing. I didn't and still don't have a very good relationship with my father. The resentment I feel toward him over his emotional abuse and his contribution to the impetus of my anxiety disorder is one of the main reasons why I don't.
In fact, during some of the times when I needed my parents the most, they completely ignored my needs, telling me to just get over it. We've always had financial problems due my father's incompetency with money, so my parents have spent most of my childhood and teenage years trying to build a stable financial base, as well as caring for my adopted younger brother and sister. As a result, mine and my older sister's needs have been pushed to the back burner for most of our childhoods and I feel that I've been pretty much alone dealing with anxiety/OCD. Having been homeschooled and isolated didn't help.
Now, a year after we separated from my father, I have severe depression, self harm, and suicidal thoughts on top of my anxiety/OCD. I have an extremely loving and supportive boyfriend, am now going to a public high school, and my family situation has gotten somewhat better since we moved but all my thoughts, compulsions, and obsessions are still there. I've just repressed them.
Again, I apologize for the long post. I just really needed to get it all out because my anxiety/OCD was triggered by myriad different things, not just one event and I needed to write them all out to make sense of it all.
Can anyone make some sense of my story, and why I became the way I am today?
Thanks in advance. I greatly appreciate anyone willing to read my story and offer advice.
-Shannon