Throwing Away Knives

My Years in an OCD Crypt

Most of us are familiar with phrases like “I’m so OCD” or “I’m OCD about that.” We know what “being OCD” implies—someone is very, very particular about the need for order or cleanliness in some area of life. When speaking of real OCD—Obsessive Compulsive Disorder— images of repetitive hand washing or meticulous arrangement of knick knacks come to mind.

Casual usage distorts what this confounding mental disorder really entails. While its common themes do include visibly precise arrangements and hygiene, its less visible form darkens the inner world of secret sufferers. This so-called “pure” variant assaults perfectly sane people with macabre fears or shocking, repulsive thoughts that they might be or do the very things they fear.

Most people dismiss fleeting, weird thoughts as brain blips, nothing to take seriously; but for OCD victims, these thoughts spur a non-stop cycle of examination and compulsions—efforts to make sure that the thoughts aren’t real threats. A heterosexual man may suddenly wonder if he’s gay; a Muslim woman might obsess over committing blasphemy; a mother may have unwanted thoughts of harming her children.

The key features of OCD is the unwanted, bothersome nature of the thoughts and the contrast between them and the sufferer’s real beliefs and desires. A person with OCD does not comport with their aberrant thoughts. This mismatch is frightening, and the emotions they generate can be disabling.

Getting rid of repugnant thoughts prompts a never-ending search for certainty. You just want to make sure you wouldn’t really ever do or be that horrible thing. The revolting idea of being a murderer, molester, addict, freak or blasphemer sends conscience-stricken victims into a panic. With OCD, you are compelled to find convincing assurance that these sick pathologies and dangers will never visit you.

But all efforts at certainty are in vain; No matter what articles, books, or trusted friends say, OCD doubts it. It screams of danger and demands immediate attention all day. Under the spell of its alarms, you take pains to avoid the offensive thought and the crippling fears it produces. That means avoiding every place, person or object that triggers it—but avoidance only reinforces the fear.

In the world of mental agonies, OCD stands as one of the most confounding. People of all demographics are ambushed by its disgusting suggestions and dreadful imagery. Its themes are remarkably similar among most sufferers—religion, sexuality, and violence are common ones. No medicine cures it, though it may soften its edges.

Ten years ago, I found myself in the daily grip of this monster; we dueled for two long and gruesome years, swords clashing over a series of morbid thoughts. In fact, it was the culmination of many previous years spent secretly battling the other faces of my mysterious foe.

Now well past the nightmare, I hope to encourage others who find themselves in the dark crypt of pure OCD. The gold mined from my furnace of affliction did its good work in my life, and I hope the hard-earned wealth can be of use to others, too.

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The Beginning

Since early childhood, I’d had a particular bent toward fear of death, and I struggled with separation anxiety. In first grade, I was afraid to go to sleep in my bed, convinced I would die in my sleep. To stave off the grim reaper, I often slept in my parents’ doorway, which apparently was off-limits for his deadly errands.

In fourth grade, I missed 88 days of school; I stayed at home, obstinately and tearfully refusing to attend, overcome with grief about leaving home for the day. Sensitive to a fault, I hated my classroom vibes, with no motherly warmth there; I was sure that shrill Mrs. Neimi and her classroom favorites disliked me.

I decided I must avoid the place altogether—an unfortunate strategy if you’re a student—so most school mornings brought weepy battles and despondency. My poor mother, knowing I was otherwise happy and well-behaved, was perplexed and exhausted, so she gave in. I nursed my emotions while watching The Price is Right. Bob and his “angels” seemed much nicer than my teacher.

Blessedly, the next year’s teachers were the most beautiful and loving creatures one could want. My smiling history teacher taught me all about the Plantagonets and Henry VIII; My homeroom teacher was kind when I was tardy. I was able to recover nicely and move on….until three years later, in eighth grade.

In middle school, even the best and brightest meet their match in adolescent moods, so I was no exception—but I had the added misfortune of having horrible, intractable, everywhere acne. Living in Florida meant wearing sleeveless shirt and swimsuits, both of which exposed my dermatological disaster to the world. What could I do to avoid the overwhelming shame?

A couple years later, glowing from a high school beach trip, I discovered the solution for all beauty woes. When it doubt, just tan it! An obsession was born. My quest to out-tan the acne had begun.

People like to laugh at the idea of tanorexia, but it’s a real thing. I wasn’t orange; I was browned under the real Florida sun, and I loved every sweaty minute of it—for a while. After a year or so, it turned into a compulsory time of worship, a heavy labor to keep from fading into boring irrelevance. Being outside as much as humanly possible seemed the wisest course; being tan helped camouflage my acne, and I felt prettier.

My pleasant prescription became an all-day, nagging urge that compelled me to get outside—as soon as possible. When school let out, I needed to get home and tan. On a sunny weekend, doing anything indoors was unthinkable. If the forecast gave no hope for browning rays, I worried that I was already getting pale. If sunlight beamed while I was inside, I was distracted, restless to get outside, where relief and calm awaited.

My ridiculous uber-tan lasted for years, even into college, even after Accutane had rescued me from acne’s visible curse. I never told anyone, except my husband, of the deep shame and fear that descended on me during and after those years. I finally escaped its ultraviolet highs when I got married and started working.

Soon enough, though, I was pregnant, and a new battlefront erupted. Most moms instinctively want to protect their babies from dangers within and without the womb; I did, too. But once again, OCD would weaponize my desire and transform it into a crazy taskmaster as I brought my firstborn into the world.

In pregnancy, I developed a bizarre and shameful fear: What if I punched my stomach and hurt the baby?

Surely only psychos wondered that. Why would one even do such a stupid thing in the first place? The irrational urges were miserable, so I stayed busy to avoid the temptation to “gently” test the strength of my distended, seven-month stomach. Each time I gave in with a quick thump, I wondered if I had done any damage, which required an additional round of gentle poking and prodding to “test” for signs of life—assurances that all was well.

After finally delivering my sweet baby, I was elated to start my program of being the best mom ever. I would take my baby out on stroller walks daily, breastfeed only, use cloth diapers and quiet her with beautiful music. But one day during her infancy, while changing her tiny diaper, I was stopped in my tracks by yet another OCD fiend: What if I became a child molester?

This was possibly the worst fear of all for a parent. There could be no lower scum on the planet, no one more worthy of condemnation. What if the constant diaper changes made me prone to such perversion? This was next-level torture, and to admit to anyone this shameful mental assault seemed impossible. I muddled on and waited for the harassing thoughts to fade, and they did.

Mercifully, over weeks of time, each horrifying new theme lost its shock value, eventually fading completely—like details of dreams, or long forgotten appointments. I’d now Googled around enough to know that other moms suffered from irrational fears, too. But each time an obsession passed, a cruel new tyrant appeared within days or weeks, and the process began anew.

The Middle

In 2015, my mental distress reached peak level, rendering me nearly useless and stealing every bit of joy and hope I’d previously known. My struggle could no longer remain hidden. Death, the pinnacle of fearful possibilities, entered the picture.

My dad had died in 2013 after years of suffering from complications of diabetes. Emotions, for him—and for his hero, John Wayne—were cringe-worthy and weak. He was, despite this gruff flaw, a true believer, so I saw no need to mourn his transition from suffering to certain glory. I determined to face it with the calm acceptance that would make him proud.

But the details of death proved to be strangely unsettling; my mom was all emotions, and her lonely neediness, while understandable, was crushing and grating for me. From the cold hospital gurney to the creepy funeral home, the whole thing felt surreal, and with six young children in my care, my season of struggle was on full display.

Right around the time of my dad’s funeral, a neighbor across the street—an attractive, stylish mom—descended into psychiatric meltdown as her marriage crumbled. Her frequent visits with her kids and strange conversations began to wear on me; I was homeschooling, struggling, and now navigating my first real death. Her frightening breaks with reality became yet another part of my tiresome, dreary scenery.

As death blackened my skies, my neighbor’s psychosis dimmed my neighborhood landscape. Soon, depression hovered over me, inspiring new fears about every kind of mental fright; OCD was quick to suggest, “what if I lost my mind, too?”

Exactly year after my dad died, a far darker death cast me fully into the darkness. A friend, a mom like me, took her own life right before Halloween—and on the anniversary of my father’s death. A gaggle of beautiful children left behind, with many dark questions and hurts, and a community in agonizing shock. Suddenly, the unlikely nightmare scenario haunted me: Could the same thing happen to me?

It was now time for OCD to raise its head in a most roaring, terrifying fashion.

A series of violent “what-ifs,” ran loose through my mind over the next few months, terrifying me as I walked around our home or in the back yard. A child’s golf club could be a murder instrument, so I hid it; knives in my kitchen would be weapons of insanity, so I threw them away. The dog’s leash was a means of strangulation; it must be left outside. Ropes must be discarded. At every turn, fearful imagery nagged me relentlessly. I tried tricks and talismans to guard my feelings and guarantee our safety—but all to no avail; the thoughts still returned.

As a Christian on a trip through earthly hell, I knew that suffering was a training exercise that matures one’s faith. Only, at this point, I wasn’t enjoying the big spiritual boot camp. It seemed protracted, odd, and dark. Fears of harm, fears of losing my mind, fears of perversion, and now a real example of tragedy sat before me. Had God abandoned my friend? Maybe the worst could actually happen; Could God abandon me, too?

My faith itself began quaking, even with the slow abatement of my other fears. It seemed my last hope would give way to inevitable defeat. What if God wasn’t there for me? Where is he now? Why this suffering? The fraying threads of my faith would be OCD’s next target.

Throughout this black wilderness, I was still mothering, teaching, cooking and cleaning, but with a heaviness that did not escape my children. I spent the rest of my time ruminating, laying around in reasoning with the cruel jail master of incessant anxiety. My husband would come home from work to absorb my growing depression and help where he could.

I was mentally shot, though. It was time for counseling; no longer could I believe that my terrors were just from the fatigue of processing death.

My Christian counselor listened patiently to my litany of strange and embarrassing thoughts, all the morbid and irrational fears I couldn’t shake. I spoke of my internet research about mental pathologies, apostasy, and illnesses. I told her about the routines and measures I took to avoid ghoulish dangers—the discarded knives, chains, ropes, and sharp objects. I avoided being alone, or alone with my kids. I avoided driving—what if I ran our SUV off the road? I told her of days spent laying around, my energy devoured by constant rumination.

She looked at me, with a calm smile, and said, “has anyone ever told you that you have OCD?”

From there, I was referred to an OCD expert, who explained that my fears were very typical for this maddening disorder. Medication could help, but not cure it. OCD is best defeated by refusing to seek comfort through mental compulsions and avoidance. Don’t respond to a bully, and eventually he goes away.

Now my enemy had a name, and I chose to face its spiritual battle unmedicated, a decision itself fraught with doubts, but one that I do not regret. It took many months of filling my thoughts with scripture and ignoring faulty messaging, but the tactics worked. Just knowing that there were many others secretly struggling with OCD chipped away at the shame and inspired me to move forward. In fact, I could eventually laugh at the absurdity of my brain’s errant thoughts.

The wild days of OCD began to abate—albeit quite slowly— but the battle for my faith still lay ahead.

The End

In the background, the sad specter of apostasy still haunted me. I read my Bible, or I listened to worship music, and I still attended worship, but the words brought only fears of apostasy, not comfort. God wore a frowning countenance now. Perhaps God had finally cast me off.

I couldn’t be sure this was just OCD—this a sign that it likely was—and my deliberations soon multiplied once again.

One day, though, my growing faith doubts accelerated into freefall. I suddenly had a heart-stopping new thought: What if God didn’t even exist? Life’s rug had now been yanked out from under me. The very core of my being and the lens through which I saw the universe seemed to disappear—and completely against my will.

My existential doubt tangled with the past two years of tragedies, making it hard to discern what was the whim of OCD and what was a genuine crisis of faith. The questions about faith itself—its mysterious workings, and now its vexing disappearance—were a new and earth-shaking peril.

Never before have I felt lower, more frightened, or more depressed. The merciful God of the universe, his fullness in Jesus Christ, his beautiful mind and relentless love for sinners, the night sky that always spoke his name, the everlasting arms underneath it all—poof, all gone. It was the saddest and darkest of possibilities, and no amount of “research” could track him down.

Late winter days were still spent homeschooling—a pleasant distraction that gave my days some purpose—but the rest of the day, I lay by our fireplace for calming warmth or on our pool deck for light. I waited with many tears. What would my children do if I turned from faith? To lose my faith was to lose my life, and I mourned.

Here is where my story turns, in a simple schoolday moment. While asking my son to label a diagram I’d placed before him, I leaned over and examined the drawing.

The eyeball, fashioned like a delicate and complex camera, cast an image upside down; an optic nerve carried this intelligence to the brain. I was struck by the design of this human camera. It was as if I’d never seen an eyeball before. Such impossible genius blew my mind. Could something so brilliant be an accident? It couldn’t be—there must be a designer, and that must be God.

The eyeball stared down my doubt in the most magnificent way. I regained my senses; the truth from the little diagram brought light back into my shadowy world.

I began to apply my penchant for research to digging into the details of creation, from geology to the circulatory system. My homeschool was the perfect place to indulge my passion for God’s creative work. Although my mind was still recovering, “the everlasting arms” were, once again, underneath it all. Of course, they’d never really left at all.

To drown out the remaining OCD bullies that still roamed my mind, I began reading voraciously, plowing through theological books. In my loneliest days of battle, men from the 1600’s became my closest friends. Puritans took my hand, gently reasoned with me, and walked me through my own unfolding Pilgrim’s Progress.

They reminded me that the overarching question for OCD was not one of psychiatry, but of theology: Would I believe God, or my thoughts? Would I exercise my faith by acting on truth, or follow the dictates of my feelings?

Puritans wrapped truth in masterful language. Richard Sibbes reminded me that God’s mercies were far bigger than my debilitating weakness and sin; Thomas Watson showed me how a godly man thinks and operates; Thomas Brooks understood the enemy and prescribed “precious remedies” of scriptural truth. William Bridge’s A Lifting Up of the Downcast was a daily counselor (and I needed daily lifting). John Bunyan testified of my stay with Giant Despair, but he also pointed to an escape from my Doubting Castle, the key of God’s promise.

Their writings anticipated my many objections and outlined biblical responses. These ancient friends and faithful mentors waited in my suffering when present-day friendships seemed a world away. They counseled me to refuse rising emotions that war against biblical truth; They reminded me that God never lies, but my emotions usually do.

Some of my mentors were modern, too. I leaned on today’s Os Guinness and yesterday’s C.S. Lewis when doubts tried to overthrow me; Ray Stedman and Martyn Lloyd-Jones encouraged me with their pastor’s hearts. These giants of faith cast long shadows; we walk together in separate decades, bound across time by the much larger shadow of the cross. I wanted my suffering to go away, but God provided a trial that drove me into the heartening company of courageous saints.

The long path through darkness disabused me of my false comforts and flimsy idols. My agonies forced me to confront imagined self-sufficiency and control. I thought reason could deflect OCD’s lies and calm my emotions, but the comfort always proved fleeting. There were never enough facts to silence my doubts; OCD demands certainty that humans can’t produce.

Lasting peace could not flow from the wild undulations of my circumstances or chemistry; something unmovable was needed. When my thoughts were a big ball of string, I longed for untangling clarity of truth. God’s commands, paired with his promises, made sense, and when they captured me anew, my world made sense, too.

My stay in Doubting Castle was God’s hard kindness. Maybe some of us require extra training— strange mercies for rebels whom he rescues to conform to himself. For believers, no struggles are wasted, even mental woes like OCD. The dungeon’s deathly gloom was brutal, but God was faithful, even when I was faithless.

I wouldn’t wish to stay there again, but I took a souvenir as a reminder. I walked out clutching the key of truth—fully restored.