by Ben Thomas
She smiled. “Good. Now you’ve agreed to give response prevention a try then you really should also try exposure too. Another meaning for the acronym FEAR is Face Everything And Recover. To give you a much better opportunity to be better you have to let your catastrophic thoughts in. You have to face your FEAR.”
I stood up, head in my hands; this was a step too far. “I can’t. I just can’t let bad things happen. I’m sorry, Susannah, I can’t”. I said desperately.
“Do you truly believe bad things will happen due to thoughts appearing in your head? Do you really believe you have that power?” Susannah stared intently at me.
“No…well maybe…oh, I don’t know.” I buried my head in my hands. “I just can’t risk it.”
“Toby, look at me.” I felt like a naughty schoolboy as I lifted my head to meet Susannah’s eyes. “You have a sense of responsibility and that can be a good thing, but yours is an overexaggerated sense of responsibility. You are trying to control things that you cannot. You need to realise that your mind is tricking you. To get better, you need to expose these lies by facing up to them. I won’t tire of telling you that you have never given yourself the opportunity to know the truth, because you’ve never tested your assumptions. Once you do, you will see that your thoughts cannot harm you or others. Do you see?”
I sat up a little straighter and nodded.
“Everyone has troubling thoughts but usually without much consideration. You cannot control your thoughts, they will come and go just like waves. You are trying to hold back the waves… an impossible job, as the waves just come back stronger. It is important to let go. Be comfortable with troubling thoughts passing through your mind. You’ll find that if you don’t bother the thoughts by trying to disrupt their flow, they will pass by without dissent.”
“So, it’s that easy?” I asked without trying very hard to disguise my scepticism.
Susannah had picked up on both the scepticism and the petulance. “No, Toby, it’s not easy. But it gets easier. It’s vital that you allow yourself to tolerate the discomfort for longer. You’ll be embarking on a massive change and that is challenging, but like most challenges it will be rewarding. You will learn to live again. That’s what you said you want, isn’t it?”
I nodded.
“Let me ask you, Toby: how will you know that you are better?”
I considered that for a moment. “I will be happy…normal.”
The unimpressed look from Susannah told me this wasn’t the answer she was looking for.
I tried again. “I don’t know…I guess, if I was better, I wouldn’t go around checking things as much, or at all, and I wouldn’t be scared of the words I am; I wouldn’t do my chanting; I wouldn’t be scared of thoughts coming into my head…” The lightbulb suddenly came on in my mind, shining brightly against the lies. I leaned forward. “So, what you’re saying is, in order to be better, I have to become that person. So at some stage I do have to stop my checking and chanting, and I have to be comfortable with letting troubling thoughts be present.”
Susannah smiled again and her features softened. “Exactly, Toby. And truly the way to get to this point is through exposure and response prevention. I will help you. We will do it in stages. We’ll do gradual exposure to your troubling thoughts, and in time you’ll realise that these are just thoughts and not harmful. The key is to tolerate the thoughts and not to fight them. As homework, we will start with the checking. When you feel the need to check something, I want you to delay the urge to check for, say, five to ten minutes. You may find that your urge to check has dissipated by then. If not, check, and then delay the next check. I want you to try and act as someone without OCD would do.”
A big smile came across my face and I couldn’t help but laugh. Susannah gave me a puzzled look.
“You sound like Bobby who I told you about before.” I had explained to her about the golf, told her I thought I’d been improving but that had set me back. “He always says he got his super-confidence by acting like a confident person.”
“Well, I think your friend has the makings of a good psychologist. I liked his golf therapy. That was an example of trying to be comfortable being uncomfortable. You are here today, you clearly survived it.”
I felt a fresh surge of excitement and hope and I noticed that it was starting to feel a little more familiar.
“Thanks, Susannah. I think I can do this. I just need to be brave, to have courage.”
“You can do this, Toby. Remember, you cannot control your thoughts; you can only control your actions. So act like someone who doesn’t have OCD. Act bravely and act like the person that you want to be, and one day you’ll find that you are that person.”
27
“So when’re you going to come training, Toby?” asked Darren as he returned to the table with five beers. We were in the Courthouse for what was turning out to be the weekly Friday night lads’ night, one of the most important Bobitivities according to the man who coined the term.
“T hasn’t got time for rugby with his adventure golf commitments,” chirruped Bobby.
“What?” The confusion was clear on Darren’s face.
“Ignore him, he’s being an idiot,” I said as I threw a beer mat at Bobby. “I do fancy it Darren, but I think I need to get my fitness up first. Been running a bit though, so hopefully it won’t be long.”
“Don’t worry about your fitness. But no rush. We’ve waited this long for your comeback, we can wait a little longer.”
I liked the term Darren had used, comeback. That’s what it felt like for my life. It had been three weeks since my first session with Susannah and I’d just completed my fifth session. After resisting for the second session and part of the third, Susannah had convinced me to try the exposure technique. It started in the third session with her showing me some of the words I feared, and then her saying them, the challenge being for me to resist the urge to neutralise them with positive words. It was hard, really hard, but I did it; well, in front of Susannah at least. After the sessions, he came back at me like a wounded lion.
Look what you’ve allowed to happen. Don’t risk it. You must stop this, he said, and I’d relented and chanted the good words in my mind to try to neutralise the alleged evil, and then fretted about the perceived danger for much of the next few hours.
The checking had already improved, though it hadn’t completely gone. A pattern had emerged, where for a couple of days after a session I was good, but then it was as if the effect of the session would wear off, and by the time the next meeting with Susannah happened, I had regressed; but thankfully not as much as I could have. It was two steps forward and one step back. But it was progress.
At our session that day, my ‘comeback’ day as Darren had aptly put it, I had made a huge step forward; monumental, I would say. Susannah encouraged me to actually speak out loud and write down on paper the words I feared. And so, in front of her, I spoke the forbidden words: death, Devil, demons, die, dead. It may be laughable how innocuous, trivial and harmless such words are – and I can agree now, and part of me could agree from the beginning – but he had convinced me otherwise and I had been too scared to face them.
Say them and then write them I did, and you know what? Nothing bad happened. In fact, once I said them, I was surprised and a little mystified at what the fuss was about. It was like I had been told there was an invisible electric fence in front of me that I could not pass, so I’d conditioned myself never to approach it. And that day, I walked forward and reached out. I tested out that assumption and found there was nothing even there; there was nothing ever there, and I could walk free. It was so liberating.
‘It feels too easy,’ I had told Susannah.
‘Like many things, once you know what’s possible, once you believe you can do it, it is easy,’ she explained. ‘It’s getting to that realisation that’s the hard part. After all, it’s taken
you eighteen years in your prison to believe in the possibility of freedom.’
‘Mmm,’ I said. ‘Freedom sounds good.’
‘Freedom’s not free, though. You will need to keep working at it. Fear will always be there, waiting. Doubt too. You’ll have to be vigilant. But don’t fear the fear,’ she added.
‘I know, I know,’ I said, rolling my eyes. ‘Be comfortable being uncomfortable. Has anyone ever told you you’re a very challenging person?’
She smiled. It was still odd, seeing ‘the headmistress’ smile like that – but anytime she did, it felt a bit like a victory. I thought of Bobby and his tickle machine and smiled back at her.
‘I want to say thank you, Susannah. With your help, hopefully my OCD is dying, and with the techniques you have taught me I will bring death to the demons in my head, and I won’t revert to the better the devil I know, and my monster will be dead.’ I leant back in my chair nodding confidently.
‘Good, Toby. Very good.’ Susannah nodded back and smiled some more.
After that session, I didn’t try to cancel the words out. Instead I carried on with the exposure, allowing the words death, dead, demons, Devil, die, to come into my mind without trying to wrestle with them. I even took the short cut through the cemetery on the way home, something I could never have done the day before. I did it to keep the momentum up. I felt I kept needing to prove to myself that I could face my fears and win.
*
“Stop checking your watch T, they’ll be here.” When Bobby said ‘they’ he meant Kev, who was meant to be meeting up with us, along with Pete. After my first session, buoyed with confidence, I had reached out to Kev by texting and leaving him a couple of voicemails saying it would be good to meet up. So far my overtures had been stonewalled. Tonight though, Bobby had convinced him to come out on this ‘lads’ night’ at the Courthouse. Kev and Pete weren’t late as such, but as every minute passed with their non-arrival I got more anxious.
I looked at Bobby, “You did tell him I was going to be here, didn’t you?”
“Hey, hey, here we go,” announced Bobby, rising to his feet to shake hands with a confused-looking Pete.
I stood up in turn to greet Pete. “Good to see you, mate,” I said. “Where’s Kev?”
I could see the consternation etched on Pete’s face. “He was just here. We came in and looked around for you. We were just about to walk over and he got a message from work saying it was an emergency and he had to go. He just left without another word.”
“What a bell-end,” groaned Darren. “Bloody typical Billy Big Balls Kev behaviour.”
Bobby glanced over to see me slumping in my chair.
“You didn’t tell him I’d be here, did you?” I asked.
Bobby shifted uneasily. “I just told him that the lads were out, and when we say the lads, that includes you.”
He’s not here because you thought the words, because you said the words, because you wrote the words. It’s your fault. You’ve caused it.
“He’s not here because of me,” I announced to the table.
“What? Don’t be ridiculous, he’s not here because he’s a workaholic. He always cancels last minute,” Darren said.
Pete sensed my dejection. “Toby, Darren’s right. This is typical Kev behaviour. Admittedly this was a bit more than aborting at the last minute…but sod it, it’s his choice not to have a good time with his mates. He decided that, not you.”
Bobby picked up one of the spare pints and passed it to Pete. “Well said, mate. It’s his loss. I look around this table and see three handsome men with a very handsome man, who are going to have a great night. All is well with the world. Hey, T?”
I looked at Bobby the supposedly very handsome man, and then at Pete and Darren. Bobby was right and he was wrong. The words death, demons, die and Devil had nothing to do with Kev not turning up; they were irrelevant words. Whether it really was work or it was the sight of me that caused Kev to leave, it was his decision and nothing to do with any words in my head. I was with three good friends. I lifted my pint glass towards my friends and pronounced, “All is well, all is good.”
Bobby rushed back from the bar with untypical haste and carrying a fresh tray of drinks. He had an even more excited and mischievous look than usual.
He sidled next to me and said, “There’s a reason why we always start off in this bar the time we do, isn’t there T?”
“Is there?” I asked, bemused.
“And there’s a reason why between the hours of six and seven you are, for a large part, distracted…as if you’re looking for someone?” He continued with his puzzle.
“Yeah, I’ve noticed that, Bobster,” Pete chipped in.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I didn’t. “And it’s ten past ten, not seven o’clock.”
“I think you’re hoping a certain someone will be here,” said Bobby.
“We all know Kev’s not coming.”
“A bit better looking than Kev.” If Bobby grinned any more, his face would explode.
“Sorry, Bob, I don’t follow you.”
“Well, follow the direction of my eyes over yonder.” Bobby diverted our attention to the other side of the bar where a statuesque brunette was ordering drinks for her and her companion, a stunning redhead…Julie.
“Bloody hell, lads. Do you know those two beauties?” asked a mesmerised Pete. Julie had on a white dress that ended just above her knees. She had her hair down and she looked…well, she looked well fit. Hey, I’m a lad. I can’t think of a better description. Okay, amazing. I should have said she looked amazing, because she truly did. Her friend was a little bit taller than Julie and a little more busty. She had long, black wavy hair and had some sort of trouser suit on. I was sure such an outfit had a technical name but I didn’t know it. For what it’s worth, though, I could tell she looked good and ‘on trend’, as the trendy people would say.
“We know the redhead: Julie, I believe,” Bobby glanced at me for confirmation and I nodded before he added, “while the brunette I will very shortly get to know.”
“Strictly speaking it’s me who knows Julie. Bobby has met her once.” I felt compelled to clear up that point.
“Been there, have you, Toby, you jammy bastard?” Daren spoke to me with his mouth but addressed Julie with his eyes. How did I answer that one? As much as I had gotten into the habit of advertising my history with OCD, I didn’t fancy recounting my specific OCD history in relation to Julie.
“We used to work together.”
“And the rest, T-Zone. She well fancies him,” said Bobby.
“Give over, Bobby. You don’t know what you’re talking about. And stop staring at them. Have some decorum…all of you.”
“Ooh, decorum. Get you,” chimed Pete, “there’s no room for decorum with ladies like that.”
I shook my head. “Lads, come on, I’m going to have to get a bucket to mop up your drool.”
“Get them over here, Bob,” said Pete, ignoring my plea.
“Yeah, Bob. Bring them over,” Darren endorsed Pete’s demand.
“No, no,” I interjected. My recent encounters with Julie were still fresh in my mind and no doubt also in hers. I was sure she didn’t want to have to face the awkwardness, and I knew I didn’t. Especially not with a ravenous audience. “They won’t want to be bothered by us. And besides, we’re on a lads’ night.”
The lads collectively mugged at me.
“T, your views are duly noted, and so it’s only fair we put it to the vote. All those in favour of inviting two drop dead gorgeous ladies over, raise your hands,” announced Bobby. Mine was the only hand which didn’t go up. “All those against?” There was no point raising my hand. Bobby declared the motion passed, and with an impressive turn of speed rose from his chair and headed towards Julie and her friend.
*
I didn’t dare look up to check on Bobby’s progress as I disengaged from Pete and Darren’s lustful conversation because I was having to deal with him trying to scare me into fleeing. Not only was I dealing with the anxiety of facing Julie but he was reminding me Bobby had used the word ‘dead’ as in ‘drop dead gorgeous.’ Previously, this would have potentially caused me to leave, or at least withdraw into myself and focus solely on neutralising the forbidden word. This time I tried something different: I told myself and, more importantly, told him that I wasn’t scared of him tonight, or the word ‘dead’, or ‘death’, or ‘die’, or ‘Devil’, or ‘demons,’ or any other word he tried to deceive me with. I faced him head on, and it felt good. I could feel myself getting stronger…braver.
I looked up in time to see Bobby returning, his mission accomplished. And as I looked up I was surprised and delighted to realise I was smiling. I was happy.
“Lads, may I introduce you to the delightful Julie and the equally delightful Natasha. And ladies, may I introduce you to the happily married Peter and Darren.” At this point, Bobby found himself on the receiving end of two serious glares from our ‘married’ friends, which Bobby blithely ignored. “And of course Toby who, Julie, I understand you already know.”
“Hi, guys,” chorused Natasha and Julie before Julie looked at me and proffered a reserved smile.
“Hi, Toby,” Julie said.
Bobby orchestrated the seating arrangements, ensuring that Daren and Pete were exiled at the end of our table with Julie and Natasha in between himself and me.
“So, we haven’t seen you in here for a while, Julie,” said Bobby, ignoring the fact that this was only their second encounter.
“Yeah, Toby always brings us in here looking for you.” I expected this to come from Bobby but no, it was Darren dropping me in it.
“Bit creepy.” Julie shot me a brief glance. Knowing her as I did, I would normally understand she was joking with this comment, but having been exposed to some strange behaviour from me I wasn’t sure whether she was being serious. “Well, you know, work’s been busy, so I haven’t had the chance to go out much,” she explained.