Luna, Sage, and My OCD

 I have started seeing a new therapist and when describing some issue she asked whether anyone had suggested I might have OCD before. And, well, yes. 

The therapist I was seeing in 2019 was the first person to, in some sort of official capacity, suggest I have OCD. This is likely because, for the two preceding years, as I was quadruple checking the stove in my apartment, I neglected to talk to a therapist. In 2019, though, my symptoms were peaking and I had moved in with my sibling so...there was someone around to be affected by those symptoms. At one point, I had crumpled to the floor in the kitchen, sobbing, thinking I was going to die. All the while, Nash had to stand by, looking concerned. I was so embarrassed that I put them through that, and I felt really guilty. That is what led me to seek anti-anxiety medication and therapy. 

Prior to that...I was distressed, a lot, because of my OCD but I just kind of...quietly suffered. Sometimes, I would shame-faced admit to a piece of the anxiety which would be kind of a relief, but I kept the most terrifying thoughts to myself, afraid of what people might think of me should they hear about them. I usually try to talk around those thoughts. 

I probably still will. But. When I was talking to this new therapist, she told me that OCD is "ego dystonic" which means that OCD's intrusive thoughts run counter to the individual's values and...it is a real relief. And now that you have all of that background, I am going to tell you about my mice Luna and Sage and the intrusive thoughts that plagued me when I first got them. 

Throughout my childhood, I'd had plenty of mice. Then, I went to college and then moved into various apartments and went through a real mouse owning dry spell. Until: in 2019, I moved into my older sibling's house and was able to have mice again.

I'd had my rabbit, Eleanor, since 2016 and whenever I went to the pet store to pick her up hay or pellets or bedding, I would stop by and watch the little mice play. They bring me such joy. They're funny and clever little creatures and very, very cute. So, when Nash offered to let me move in with them, I immediately put "get pet mice" on my list of things to do. My dad went with me to, in the end, three pet stores looking for two little girl mice. The first pet store we went to didn't have any, the second only carried male mice. I wanted female mice because I wanted to have two mice who could live together without fighting, and I am not particularly keen on all the peeing boy mice do. 

Luna was a shiny, silver mouse and Sage was a beautiful black with a pink tip to her tail. 

They were so cute, and so perfect. Luna had a nervous disposition and liked to run on her wheel. Sage was calmer and seemed to delight in making cool and weird little nests. 

I loved them so much. And then I started having terrifying thoughts of harming them. 

According to Dr. Jeffrey M. Schwartz in Brain Lock: Free Yourself from Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior, "obsessions are intrusive, unwelcome, distressing thoughts and mental images." I asked my therapist about it the other day and she told me that a study found 99% of participants experienced intrusive thoughts--a high enough percentage that the people running the study suspect the other 1% just lied about not having intrusive thoughts. The distinction for people with OCD is the rumination. While someone else may have an intrusive thought and easily dismiss it as "ew weird," a person with OCD will fixate. Schwartz refers to this as brain lock--basically four parts of the person's brain lock together and start sending out false messages that the individual with OCD cannot easily identify as false. 

So, I might be sitting in bed, cutting magazines to make a collage, and suddenly my brain would say "you're cutting your mice." This would be, you know, a false message. And while I could see that no I was not cutting my mice, I would have a fear that I would cut them or that I wanted to. I started keeping my scissors in a different room, afraid that without diligence or obstacles I would cut these beloved little mice. 

Sometimes I would see them running on their wheel, or I'd be holding them, and I'd have the thought that I had them in my mouth or that I was biting into them. Sometimes, I would just be driving home at night after a long day and, unbidden, the thought of harming them would make its way into my mind. 

 These thoughts were horrifying and caused me great distress. I was very afraid that I might be a danger to these little mice. I was scared, too, by what the thoughts might mean. After all, anyone who has dipped their toes in the true crime genre knows people who hurt people usually start by hurting animals. On top of all of this: I loved these mice and couldn't stand the thought of them being harmed. 

Many of my compulsions tend towards avoidance, so I would find myself averting my gaze from their cage--somehow afraid that seeing them would cause me to hurt them--and I would repeat stop it to myself ad nauseum. But I had gone out and bought these mice. My dad and I had gone all over town to find them. These little mice lived in a cage on my desk which meant they were entirely dependent on me: they could scavenge for food or water, they couldn't seek out a new nest if their home became soiled. Not only that, but being confined to a cage all day isn't good for them: mice are curious and social. What I'm saying is avoidance wasn't an option because I had accepted the responsibility of their care. 

This is my belief about getting any pet. The pet/person relationship is one in which the human has made major life decisions on behalf of the pet and, therefore, has the responsibility to give that particular pet the best life possible. This means figuring out their unique needs, often trying different things to resolve issues, and sometimes making really hard choices. It means taking on unpleasant tasks, and sometimes difficult ones. Sometimes it means giving a lot of love to a creature who will never stop viewing you as a threat. 

This is to say I did not see myself as having any option other than to give these little mice the care they deserved. I couldn't return them to the pet store: there was too great a risk that they would then be sold as snake food. I couldn't just avoid them: they depended on me for food, water, a clean cage, and novel experiences. And so, even though my OCD was encouraging me to avoid, I could not listen to those compulsions. 

In Brain Lock, Schwartz repeatedly makes the point that, "When people with OCD do compulsive behaviors in a vain effort to buy a little peace, they are really only exacerbating their Brain Lock." This runs concurrent with his other message: by not giving in to a compulsion, the person OCD begins to lessen the obsessions/compulsions that are plaguing them. Schwartz offers up four "R's" to the behavioral therapy he is promoting: Relabel, Reattribute, Refocus, Revalue. The concept of the "Refocus" section basically encourages the person with OCD to, after having identified their compulsion as a symptom of their OCD, focus on something else for fifteen minutes rather than engaging in the compulsion. Typically, according to Schwartz, the urge to do the compulsion will have lessened by the time the fifteen minutes has passed. 

Of course, if your compulsion is to avoid something, focusing on a different thing is kind of like engaging in the compulsion. In this instance, you would do the thing anyway and the urge to avoid would lessen as you proceed. Sometimes, a person with OCD has no choice but to engage in a behavioral therapy, even without knowing that is what they're doing. In Brain Lock, Schwartz offers up a couple of relevant case studies, including a woman who was terrified she would murder her infant daughter and a man who was convinced the pizza sauce he used at the restaurant where he worked was blood. The woman, of course, still had to care for her child. The man, because he was working, did not have the option of stopping every time he made a pizza to engage in a full sanitation routine. 

Here's the thing: I had no choice but to care for my mice. I had a few months where I was scared, a lot, about potentially harming them. But after awhile? The thoughts just...stopped. I didn't even think much of it. I had lots of anxieties: fears I would leave the stove on and burn down the house, fears I would leave the door unlocked, fears I would accidentally call someone while I was complaining about them, fears that I was dying, fears that I would runover pedestrians or bicyclists, fears that I would get arrested for something I did years before and I had no recollection of, fears that I had gross things in my mouth, fears, and fears, and fears. 

Which is to say: it wasn't like I stopped worrying about harming my mice and suddenly felt a huge wave of relief. Instead, I stopped worrying about harming my mice and just...didn't think of it again. 

Then, seven years later, I read this book and I remembered. Without intending to, I had overcome a facet of my OCD. Both Luna and Sage lived to be just under two years old--a pretty reasonable lifespan for pet store mice. Since then, I have had ten mice over the course of six years and without the fear that I would somehow harm them. I have plenty of other fears, of course, about how they could become sick or injured. I just am free of the fear that I would be the cause of it. It feels kind of magical, this bit of freedom, now that I recognize it. 

It also makes me hopeful for the treatment of other facets of my OCD symptoms.