Devil in the Details

by Jennifer Traig

  Instead our major contribution to society is that, like rodents, we are pests. No surprise that Freud named his famous obsessive-compulsive subject the Rat Man. Unlike the Rat Man, I was never plagued by obsessions of rats biting my backside (anal sadism, indeed), but I did, in a sense, have rats on my mind. When my OCD was flaring, it truly felt like a rodent had burrowed its way into my brain, my basal ganglia like a scrabbling animal, each movement of its tiny claws compelling me to do things against my will. A flick here made me inspect the juice glasses; a flick there, and I was sterilizing all the flatware.

  Basal ganglia injuries can bring the condition on almost instantly. The rest of us have to work at it. It’s a thousand tiny impulses, building on one another. First you decide it’s a good idea to check the oatmeal bin for bugs. Next you’re going through all the canisters, and before you know it, you’re wearing a hazmat suit and examining the frosted flakes for ground-up glass. Each action further enforces the obsessive-compulsive circuit. When the disease is full-blown, sufferers are firmly entrenched in neural loops that make them repeat thoughts and actions over and over. In other words, your brain keeps getting back in line for the same carnival ride it didn’t enjoy in the first place. You lose your sunglasses, you throw up on your shirt, and two minutes later you’re back on the Whizzer. Wheeeee.

  In spite of all this, obsessive-compulsives aren’t delusional. OCD is not a psychosis. Sufferers never lose touch with reality. Sure, we do crazy things, but we know they’re crazy. We don’t want to do them at all, but we can’t help ourselves. I’ve done plenty of things that truly were deluded – dyeing my hair magenta, working at a summer camp, using a home tooth-bleaching kit – but the difference is that I thought these were good ideas at the time. I never thought it was a good idea to disinfect my binders, but I had to do it anyway. Back on the Whizzer we go.

  The ride is the same; so is the scenery. There can be no greater proof of the uniformity of human hard wiring than the sameness of obsessive-compulsives’ triggers. Cross-culturally and trans-historically, we zero in on the exact same things: details and doorknobs, electrical sockets, locks, light switches, blood, bugs, and germs. AIDS is a recent favorite; with its overtones of sex, blood, and contagion, it seems custom-made for the obsessive-compulsive imagination. Surely these fears are evidence of some evolutionary remnant, an instinct for self-preservation gone haywire, but I can’t help wishing our cathexes were more colorful. Why couldn’t we be obsessed with, say, tropical drinks or fad dances? It would be much more entertaining if the disorder compelled us to mix banana daiquiris or perform the lambada.

  Perhaps our obsessions are entertaining enough. In real life we are meek and law-abiding, but in our minds we are murderous sex fiends. Most obsessive-compulsives fear they are going to stab a loved one. Many of us can’t bear to be around knives at all. This fear isn’t all that irrational; knives are dangerous, and goodness knows even loved ones can push it. Our other fears, however, make less sense. Though we are neither pedophiles nor animal-lovers, we fear that we are going to rape the baby and the housecat. We worry that we are going to make passes at friends, family members, strangers we find repulsive. Straight obsessive-compulsives often fear that they are actually gay. We all worry that we are unwittingly peppering our speech with profanities. We replay conversations over and over in our heads, convinced that we blurted out something unforgivable. When I was a young child this wasn’t too bad, but by adolescence it was a real problem. After a perfectly pleasant exchange with a great-aunt I could spend hours trying to recall whether or not I’d told her to go screw herself the hard way. I would beg my sister, Vicky, for reassurance. “You heard our conversation. Did anal sex come up at all? I know it sounds crazy, but I think Aunt Rose may have raised the issue.”

  “No, you were the one who brought it up,” Vicky would respond, sick to death of talking me down. “You told her you were going to give it to her all night long. I wouldn’t expect a birthday check from her this year.”

  Cruel, sure, but I could hardly blame her. Reassurance-seeking is the obsessive-compulsive’s most annoying habit, as incessant as it is disturbing. We tend to ask loved ones things like, “I’m not going to poison you, am I? I’m really worried I’m going to poison you.”

  But our loved ones needn’t worry. Though obsessive-compulsives’ primary fear is that we might hurt others, we’re much less likely than the general population to actually do so. OCD is a closed circuit. Obsessive-compulsives are the original navel-gazers, too caught up in our own worries and routines to unleash our negative impulses on others. Even if we were inclined to do harm, we wouldn’t have time. Compulsions tend to keep us busy around the clock.

  Here, too, there’s little variance. We all love to write lists. We like to clean. We enjoy worrying. And then we have our specialties. There are the washers, the checkers, the counters, the tappers. Most people fall into more than one category, but one behavior tends to dominate. A hopeless dilettante, I dabbled in a few. Tapping captivated me for a while, then washing, then checking. Each was a variation on a theme, a spell chanted in another language.

  What I wanted, simply, was magic. I’d grown up with Samantha, Sabrina, and Jeannie, those sparkling blondes whose tics and twitches could solve any problem. My OCD just seemed like more of the same. These jerky urges, I was sure, gave me powers. There is a magic in OCD, revolving as it does around lucky numbers, magic words, formulas, and rituals. Tapping the bookcase meant everything would be okay. Washing the plate three times meant my family wouldn’t die. So I tapped the bookcase, I washed the plate, and guess what: everything was okay. They didn’t die. Abracadabra. Magic.

  But the props, the props were lame. Instead of top hats and rabbits I had furniture and flatware, plants and plates. They didn’t get any better as I grew older. By the time I was seven, most of my compulsions revolved around stuffed animals. Stupid stuffed animals. I hated them. They were so babyish, birthday gifts I’d gotten instead of the more adult playthings I really wanted, like checkbooks and carpet sweepers. The animals were just so needy, so much work. They had to be washed and dressed and cared for. Worst of all was the compulsory feeding, conducted every night after I’d been put to bed. They ate air served up in a plastic panty hose egg. Each animal got five servings, consisting of fifteen bites each. The feeding was strictly ordered, with the animals lined up by size. I moved down the line with my egg, making eye contact with each while maintaining a breathless narrative chatter. “Biteforyoubiteforyoubiteforyoubiteforyou biteforyou,” I exhaled. “Now, abiteforyoubiteforyoubiteforyou biteforyou.” I had twenty or thirty stuffed animals, and if they skipped dessert I could be done in forty-five minutes. My mother finally noticed what was going on and confiscated my plastic egg, with an admonishment to cut the crap.

  That was fine. I had other hobbies. I’d become a voracious reader, which prompted a whole new genre of compulsive behavior. For the better part of second grade I couldn’t stop internally narrating everything that happened to me. I put my conversations in mental quotes, my actions in descriptive passages, pausing in cross-eyed concentration as I tried to get it all down in my head. “Stop looking at me like that,” my sister would threaten (“‘Stop looking at me like that,’ her sister threatened”), and I would raise a questioning eyebrow to buy time (“She cocked an eyebrow inquisitively”). That would just make my sister angrier (“‘I mean it, stop it,’ she repeated. ‘STOP IT. STOP IT!!!’”). The narrative always finished unhappily (“The oafish beast twisted her sibling’s delicate arm, then grabbed her dainty palm and spat in it. ‘That’ll teach you to stare at me,’ the harpy warned”). The end.

  Learning to read was probably the worst thing that ever happened to me. It just gave me so much material, the newspaper most of all. ‘Dear Abby’ and ‘Ask Beth’ probably weren’t the best reading material for a seven-year-old, but they were the only features in the local paper that held my interest. Advice columns opened my eyes to everything that could go wrong. Their r
eaders’ problems became my own, giving me things to obsess about while I sat awake not feeding my stuffed animals. What if my boyfriend pressured me for heavy petting? What if I discovered my best friend’s husband was having an affair? What if my inlaws refused to cut their son’s apron strings?

  All sad stories, but the one that kept me up nights was from an unfortunate reader who wanted to know if her prematurely sagging breasts had been caused by jogging without a bra. I already had plenty of reasons to dread PE – boredom, unflattering uniforms, the possibility of exertion – but I didn’t know a droopy figure was one of them. This sent me spiraling into a panic. Unable to think about anything else, I finally addressed the issue in a tête-à-tête with my mother. She was not sympathetic. “First of all, you’re about six years away from puberty. And since when do you jog? Sitting on the couch watching eight hours of cartoons a day, as you do, is not going to affect your bustline either way. Worry about something that might actually happen, like brain atrophy or butt cramps.” Dissatisfied, I stomped off to my room to draft a letter asking for advice on dealing with an insensitive mother.

  Advice columns, after all, covered just about everything. But I don’t remember anyone writing for help with their obsessive-compulsive impulses. In the late 70s, OCD was not the disease du jour. (TMJ was. Burt Reynolds had it! It was glamorous.) MS, CP, SIDS – they tackled all the other acronyms. But OCD wasn’t even really a disease yet. People didn’t know they had it.

  I certainly didn’t. And after a while, I didn’t have it anymore. It had moved on. When it came back again, five years later, it would be wearing a yarmulke and a prayer shawl, causing crises in the laundry room. My OCD mutated into scrupulosity, and it got its hooks into me like garden-variety OCD never had.

  I liked scrupulosity because it got right to the point. It’s the purest form of OCD. In a sense, all OCD is religious, of course; it’s a disease of ceremony and ritual. (Freud, for the record, argued the opposite – that all religion is obsessive. Inflammatory, sure, but if you’ve been pestered by a doorbell-ringing, Watchtower-wielding missionary you won’t argue the point.) OCD certainly looks like religious practice: we perform our compulsions with exacting devotion, we repeat incantations, and you know what cleanliness is next to. But with scrupulosity, the rituals truly are rituals, the incantations are prayers. The stakes, moreover, are infinitely higher. With other forms of OCD you fear that if you don’t perform your compulsions, your father might get sick; with scrupulosity, you fear you’ll cause a global spiritual Armageddon or, at the very least, damn yourself to hell for all eternity.

  It’s no surprise that scrupulosity is the oldest recognized form of OCD. There’s a fine line between piety and wack-ass obsession, and people have been landing on the wrong side for thousands of years. There are records of obsessive-compulsive monks going back to the sixth century. By the twelfth century, scrupulosity had been named, recognized, and even lauded by the Catholic Church. Later, as sufferers wore clergy down with their annoying doubts and worries, it was recognized as a disease requiring psychiatric intervention, but for a long time scrupulosity was seen as a virtue.

  And why not? Some of Christianity’s best and brightest had it. The Little Flower, Therese of Lisieux, suffered excruciating scrupulosity throughout her teens before going on to become the patron saint of Fresno. Ignatius of Loyola was tortured by a flaming case that compelled him to pray seven hours a day. Martin Luther’s compulsion to confess was so severe and constant that his confessors threatened to cut him off. John Bunyan’s scrupulous obsessions were relieved only by spending hours chanting ‘I will not, I will not, I will not’ while nailing his arms. It’s not as exciting a celebrity roster as, say, that of syphilis, but it’s enough to staff an all-star benefit on the History Channel. Today the condition is common enough that there’s a Scrupulous Anonymous group. I’ve never joined, so I can’t tell you if they subscribe to all twelve steps or if they just repeat one step over and over.

  I can tell you that, like most resources for the scrupulous, they are Christian. If obsessive-compulsives are rat men, the scrupulous are church mice. Scrupulosity affects Christians and Jews in nearly equal numbers, but only Christians address the issue with support groups and socials, chat boards and pamphlets. Judaism, so verbose on most other subjects, is nearly mute on this one. We have no vocabulary for it. Still, it seems clear that there’s a history of Jewish scrupulosity. The scrupulous Rat Man himself was Jewish, and there are tales of rabbis who compulsively rechecked their locks, who examined every grain of salt for contamination, who could spend three hours picking out the perfect matzo for the seder. True to neurotic form, Jewish tradition argues that these sages had perfectly good reasons for their behavior: their good-for-nothing sons left the doors unlocked, the salt had been contaminated once before, and what’s so wrong with wanting to serve nice things?

  The problem may be that traditional Jewish observance and compulsive behavior are almost too close to differentiate. Judaism has codified a whole choreography of compulsive, compulsory gestures and tics. We reach up to touch the mezuzah each time we pass a doorway. We kiss the prayer book when we close it, the Torah when we approach it, any religious object when we drop it. We cover our eyes when we say the Shema prayer, and bend, bow, and straighten when we say the Aleinu. The Amidah, the silent prayer, is a ballet of compulsive movement. We take three steps back and three steps forward and bow before we begin; bow twice more; rise up on our tiptoes three times; jump up and bow, then bow left-right-left and take three steps back and three steps forward again. We repeat verses, shout responses at given prompts, sit and stand, sway and nod. With all the swaying, flailing, and outbursts, a Jewish congregation could easily be mistaken for a Tourette’s convention.

  Orthodox Judaism looks so much like scrupulosity that some psychiatrists, and my father, have asked if they might be one and the same. The psychiatrists, at least, came to the conclusion that they are not. They’re close, sure, but there are some vital differences. Orthodox Jews are motivated by spiritual duty and rewarded by a sense of fulfillment; the scrupulous are motivated by circuitry and rewarded by chapped hands. Orthodox Jews may look nuts, but in fact they’re perfectly well-adjusted. In other words, pre-tearing toilet paper for the Sabbath may be crazy, but it’s not compulsive.

  If, however, you happen to be both compulsive and Jewish, you’re in for the ride of your life. The Jewish scrupulous experience is extraordinarily rich. Sure, Christians have that snappy “What Would Jesus Do?” catchphrase to govern their ruminations and inspire new ones, but even as a Jew, I find the phrase sacrilegious. (Is one really supposed to characterize Jesus as a best girlfriend? When it is applied, you end up asking questions like, “What would Jesus do if his boyfriend pressured him for some tongue after cheerleading practice?” It’s a bad formula.)

  Christians may have the slogans, the support groups, and the brimstone, but Jews have an endless supply of minute laws. They have the devil; we have the details. Scrupulous Christians have only the Bible for crazy source material. Jews have the Talmud, the Shulchan Aruch, the Code of Ethics, and a host of other texts, all chock-full of obsessive minutiae legislating matters as esoteric as the cleanliness of hairnets. There are 613 commandments, which is enough to keep even the most industrious compulsive busy all day long. Every movement and moment is regulated, from the morning Modeh Ani prayer to the bedtime Shema. The order in which you put on your shoes, the order in which you tie them, the way in which you wash and dress and eat and speak – all these things are prescribed in exacting detail. Almost every activity requires a blessing before and after. There’s even a blessing for using the bathroom, which, considering the binding capacities of traditional Jewish cuisine, is totally understandable.

  It’s almost too much, an embarrassment of riches for the compulsive practitioner. As a result, most scrupulous Jews tend to overlook, even violate, the bulk of the laws while observing one or two with excruciating care. Compulsions tend to come before com
mandments. I could violate three or four commandments in one fell swoop. I was happy to lie to my dishonored parents while breaking the Sabbath, as long as it was in the service of getting my hands ritually clean.

  The great thing about having so many laws was that you could pick and choose, and move on to the next when the last lost its magic. I tore through scores. When the agricultural laws lost their luster I turned to the laws proscribing the mixing of kinds: meat and milk, linen and wool, oxen and asses, and, in my interpretation, diet and regular. Next came the Levitical regulations regarding bodily fluids. Here I thought I’d truly found my metier, but this, too, grew old, and I moved on to the Temple construction laws. At some point I became absolutely convinced I needed to learn all the rules regarding the ephod, the temple vestment. What if the Messiah came and I needed to sew an ephod? What if I ended up on the Urim and Thumim committee? I had to know the regulations. No one wants to be the jerk who messes up the Messianic Age. No one wants to be the idiot who gets us all kicked out of Eden again.

  Because one’s immortal soul – Jewish or Christian – is on the line, scrupulosity can be one of the hardest forms of OCD to treat. The therapy and pharmaceuticals that can fix other obsessive-compulsive disorders often aren’t enough; clergy has to be brought in, too. Oddly, religion is often what helps the sufferer get over it. There are numerous accounts of terribly afflicted people whose scrupulosity disappeared as soon as they entered a religious order. Well, no surprise. If faith in a higher power can get people to stop doing really, really fun things like cocaine and Keno, it can certainly get them to stop sterilizing can openers.