by Laurie Gough
Thankfully, though, I was relieved to discover that with advances in brain science, wherein scientists have learned that the brain isn’t rigid and unchangeable but malleable and “plastic” (the science of neuroplasticity) a revolution has taken place. OCD and conditions like it can be treated with cognitive behaviour therapy. Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz, author of Brain Lock: Free Yourself from Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior, writes about how they now have scientific evidence that cognitive behaviour therapy can actually cause chemical changes in the brains of people with OCD. He says that by changing your behaviour, you can change your brain chemistry, free yourself from what he calls “brain lock,” and finally get relief from OCD’s debilitating symptoms.
So when I told Quinn that we could fix the glitch in his brain and change his brain patterns through exercises, I was serious. I’d spent long nights researching OCD and learning about the wonders of cognitive behaviour therapy. I’d ordered books on Amazon, such as What To Do When Your Brain Gets Stuck: A Kid’s Guide to Overcoming OCD, Talking Back to OCD, and Freeing Your Child from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. The author of the last book, Dr. Tamar Chansky, affirmed my belief that OCD can be low-grade in many children, but a traumatic event, such as a family death, can tip the scales and cause the OCD to become full-blown. Full-blown. I didn’t think Quinn’s OCD was full-blown. I was hoping we were nipping it in the bud.
When I explained to Quinn that OCD was like a bully in his brain that bossed him around, I told him to boss the bully back, that the bully only had power if Quinn gave it power, that the bully was like the man behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz. He was only powerful because people thought he was. Really, he was just an ordinary man behind a curtain, not a wizard at all.
One day Quinn came home from school and told me he’d beaten his OCD. It was the day I’d made an appointment for him to see our family doctor the next week. “I told the bully to fuck off,” he said proudly. Except for the throwing of the ashes into Lake Ontario, I never thought I’d be so happy to hear my son use that phrase. Unfortunately, the next school day, a Friday, wasn’t so easy for him. Quinn came home in tears. His OCD bully had returned, although he wouldn’t tell me how.
An idea flashed in my head. Rob was playing soccer that night but Quinn and I were free. “I know, Quinn,” I said. “You and I should take our own little road trip in the camper van. We could pack and leave right now.”
An hour later we were on the road north to a town called Maniwaki. I’d never been there — we always seemed to drive south, west, or east from Wakefield, never very far north — but I’d been curious about Maniwaki ever since we’d moved to Wakefield. I thought Quinn and I could explore the town, see a movie, and find a place to camp. The advantage of a camper van is that you can pretty much park it anywhere and nobody knows you’re in there sleeping. As we drove along the highway, I could smell the crispness of a thousand drying leaves. Already, sumacs glistened cinnamon red and an orange flotilla was spiralling out of the sky, ushering autumn in like an unwelcome guest. I was never ready for summer to go.
On the two-hour drive north, I was reminded that our camper van is a gas guzzler, something I’d always known but that, with the out-of-control gas prices, was now painfully obvious, and I learned that there is nothing whatsoever of interest on the drive north to Maniwaki. When we arrived in the town itself, I realized it was even less interesting than the drive.
“This is an ugly, boring town,” noted Quinn. It was hard to argue. But at least we could watch a movie. A website had told us that Maniwaki had a movie theatre and listed which current movies were showing. But strangely, we couldn’t find the theatre. When we went to a library to ask where it was, the librarian said, “That theatre burned down a long time ago.”
“But there’s a website. It says what movies are playing there tonight.” I could hear pleading in my voice. So far this road trip was tanking fast. She shrugged, then told us to try a bigger town farther north called Mont-Laurier. They had a movie theatre that hadn’t burned down. We decided to give it a try.
The drive to Mont-Laurier was more appealing because, on the way, we seemed to cross some invisible line into truly wild country. A big black bear sauntered across the lonely deserted highway right in front of us. I didn’t see a single building anywhere, just endless rolling hills of dense forest and lakes. When we reached the town, which seemed like a mini Mont Tremblant, full of ski equipment shops, we asked directions to the theatre at a pharmacy. Nobody spoke English so I made Quinn ask in French, which mortified him. Normally he’s a little shy but this shouldn’t have been a big deal. He was rapidly losing confidence in himself. When we found the theatre, all the Hollywood movies were dubbed into French, so we decided just to get something to eat and find a place to sleep that night. It was while we were driving to find a camping spot that Quinn asked what time it was. I said it was around 9:30.
“What? I missed eight o’clock!” Quinn sounded almost hysterical.
I looked over at him in the dark. In the light from the dashboard I could see that his face had crowded into the features of a frightened kitten. “What do you mean? What happens at eight o’clock?”
“That’s when I talk to Grandpa every night. That’s why I go outside then. That’s when I ask him to come back!” His eyes shone in alarm as tears began to river down his face.
Things didn’t improve that evening. At the place we camped, a little cul-de-sac beside a brook where crickets chirped in the branches just outside our window, Quinn kept getting out of the van. He had a different excuse every time. He wanted to look at the stars. He wanted to walk around. It was too hot in the van. Every time he left I overheard him out there talking and, at one point, singing. I knew he was trying to communicate with my dad, trying to make up for having missed talking to him at eight o’clock. When he finally came to bed, he couldn’t settle down. At one point he got up and started jumping, trying to stay suspended in the air.
“Why are you doing that?” I asked. Even though it was funny, I wasn’t laughing. It was obvious he was miserable.
“I just am.”
“But why?”
He collapsed down on the bed. “To get closer to Grandpa.”
CHAPTER 8
OCD floods its victims with invasive thoughts and behaviours guided by various rules that can change daily. A new behaviour I’d started noticing was that Quinn had to leave a room by the exact route he’d entered it, sometimes even walking backward, retracing his steps. This in itself wasn’t any more peculiar than his other seemingly random and baffling behaviours, but what I found intriguing was that this new one, like the evening-off, seemed to be so common for people with OCD. Quinn called it erasing. According to the OCD Foundation, erasing, cancelling, and undoing are all common OCD compulsions.
For Quinn, everything had to go back to zero, to be symmetrical. On an online OCD forum, a teenager had written that he’s always late for class because it’s complicated negotiating the hallways when he has to walk back the same way he’d come before he could proceed to another place. A mother wrote about her son having to “backtrack incessantly” wherever he went, even forcing her once to exit from a parking lot the same way she’d come in. I wondered what was happening in the inner workings of people’s brains. Did this evening-off, this need for symmetry, somehow go back in our evolutionary history? And if so, why? None of my books on OCD discussed this, and neither could I find anything online. It wasn’t until I happened to read a book on a completely different topic — what makes things compelling — that I found a possible answer. I was reading a fascinating book called Riveted: The Science of Why Jokes Make Us Laugh, Movies Make Us Cry, and Religion Makes Us Feel One with the Universe, by the cognitive scientist Jim Davies, and came across a section where he discusses symmetry. He wrote that being able to detect patterns in the world has been crucial to our survival. In the natural world, being able to pick out the face of a living thing hidi
ng in the forest could save your life. Faces of living things — be they humans, snakes, cougars, or wolves — are symmetrical. We’re programmed to pay attention to symmetry, to be on alert for things being even. I almost dropped the book on the floor as I read that. Finally, I had an answer for why Quinn, and even my five-year-old self with the sidewalk-crack-stepping, might be so compelled to want things to be even and symmetrical. And not only are we always looking for existing patterns, our brains have adapted to see patterns where no patterns actually exist.
Michael Shermer, the American science writer and author of over a dozen books, including The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies — How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths, asks you to imagine you’re walking home across the grasslands in Africa three million years ago. You hear a rustle nearby. Is it the wind or a predator? If you assume it’s a predator and it turns out to be just the wind, you’ve made a Type I Error in cognition, a false positive, believing something is real when it isn’t. You’ve found a nonexistent pattern and no harm is done. You steer clear of the rustling noise, now more alert, and find another path home. But what if you assume the rustle in the grass is only the wind when it’s actually a predator? This is a Type II Error in cognition, a false negative. You’re not believing something is real when it is, in this case a predator. Too bad for you, you’re dead, no longer a member of the gene pool. Our brains are belief engines that have evolved to recognize patterns. We connect the dots and create meaning from patterns we think we see in nature. Sometimes one dot really is connected to another dot and sometimes it isn’t. The baseball player who always taps his bat on the plate three times before he hits a home run forms a false association but it’s not a life-threatening one. But when the association is real, we learn something about our surroundings to help us survive. We are descended from those early hominoids who were most successful at finding patterns. This is called patternicity, the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise. The problem is that figuring out the difference between a Type I and Type II error is difficult, especially when a split second could determine life or death in our early ancestors’ environment. Therefore, the default is to assume all patterns are real, in other words, that all rustles in the grass are predators. According to Shermer, this mental process is the basis for all superstition and magical thinking. For those with OCD, this primal tendency of being hyperaware of patterns is, for some reason, in overdrive. It’s an adaptive behaviour — one that has kept our species alive — gone rogue. Stephen Whiteside, a psychologist at the Mayo Clinic, has said that OCD activities done in typical levels can be helpful. Jim Davies, in Riveted, agrees, saying that OCD is probably the result of overactivity of mental processes that normally help us. For example, keeping clean and staying away from germs are practices that are good for us.
We had a busy weekend planned toward the end of September. One of Rob’s cousins was getting married and we’d been invited to the wedding in Ottawa. Before that, we’d be driving to Montreal to buy a car we’d found on Kijiji. On the way to Montreal, Quinn kept rolling down his window, putting his face out into the wind and his hand on his heart and saying something we couldn’t catch. But Rob and I both knew what he was saying into the wind, the familiar chant: Please come back, please come back, I love you, please come back. At the beginning of the drive, I kept turning around to say something encouraging about how I knew he could boss back his OCD bully.
“I know, I’m trying! Just one more time,” he’d say, then roll down the window to do it all over again, looking partly embarrassed, partly elated, each time. Clearly, fighting the OCD bully wasn’t easy. In the OCD books, the authors said fighting OCD would probably be the hardest thing a person would do in his lifetime. And to think Quinn was just a ten-year-old kid having to do this. He should have been having fun that fall, playing outside with his friends, kicking the soccer ball around, doing tricks on his bike, playing manhunt in the woods, all the things he’d done for years. I felt so helpless and distraught watching him go through this every day. Sometimes, I’d wake up in the dead of night, when the truth of how things really are never wears a mask or pretends, and I’d feel gripped by a cold fear, wondering how this had happened, wondering if Quinn would ever be himself again. On that drive to Montreal, watching him struggle, I felt a sudden fury at the goddamned OCD bully in my kid’s head. I wanted to yell at it to screw off forever and leave us alone. Along the two-lane highway the leaves flashed by in a show-offy blur. A red maple was vibrating with so much scarlet that it seemed to be shimmering and I wanted to get out of the car and gape. But I couldn’t because of the panic whipping through my chest that only grew when I turned around to see Quinn murmuring his secret words.
“Let’s try some of those exercises,” I said, trying to smile. “We’ll time you to see how long you can go without having to roll down the window.”
Delaying a compulsion was one of the cognitive behaviour therapy techniques I’d read about. Every second that goes by without obeying the compulsion is excruciating, but, as time passes, the anxiety gradually diminishes as the brain adapts to the feeling of not following the compulsion. Our bodies can’t continually send out the fight or flight response — it’s too exhausting. But of course, this is all easier said than done. All the person is thinking about is how much they have to obey the compulsion, and for Quinn not obeying the compulsion meant never seeing his grandpa again. There’s no logic involved in OCD.
Timing Quinn between bouts of window openings seemed to be somewhat effective, but I noticed that instead of opening the window he was surreptitiously touching the handle and moving his lips. Perhaps it was a compromise with the OCD bully.
When we found the guy selling the car from his driveway, Quinn wanted to stay in the back seat of our old car rather than come with us to check out the new one. I looked at him sitting back there, staring at his running shoes. Who are you? I thought, And what have you done with my real son who loves cars more than animals?
As I made my way toward the new car, I couldn’t bear turning around to watch Quinn. Now that he was alone I knew he’d be making up for having to control himself and he’d be talking away at full volume to my dad. My dad, who’d been dead for over a year now. Evidently, Quinn was still emotionally crippled by the staggering bald truth of that death, the bottomless loss. I wondered if kids actually see the reality of death for what it is. As adults we learn to shoo it away to a corner of the brain. The essential truth of our existence — nobody gets out of here alive — is one we wilfully deny. But perhaps kids, or some kids, see death for what it really is. There must be a moment when it hits all of us that our lives will one day come to a roaring halt.
It had struck my dad for the first time when he was about Quinn’s age, he said, walking home from school one day. He’d actually stopped walking and just stood there for a long time, he’d often told me, because the realization that he’d die someday, and that everyone he knew would die someday, seemed too impossible, too brutally appalling, to comprehend. The only way he could come to terms with this inevitability, at least to make it more agreeable, was to think that maybe a part of a person can go on after death. He started to develop a theory that if you’re always nice to people, the kindness will keep affecting others, and, in that way, you can live on after you die. This eventually led to a theory that he used to espouse on at length, boring my mother at dinner parties, that everything affects everything. He’d move a fork an inch across the table and say that that little gesture would eventually affect the people in China, spreading out from the dinner conversation to the timing of when people at the dinner had left, which, in turn, would affect the traffic of the neighbourhood, then the traffic of the city, and eventually, the lives of everyone in the world. He called it the ripple effect and it used to practically shut down my brain thinking about it. I’d imagine millions of tiny ripples all extending outward on the surface of a giant
lake, ripples like halos overlapping one another, the spreading of our separate wills keeping the world afloat. Years later, I learned that my dad had been describing something that chaos theory calls the butterfly effect. As for my dad’s childhood theory on kindness, he held on to that belief all his life. He was the nicest guy I ever knew.