I'm desperate - Please help me: OCD and stubborn people

» maber - OCD and stubborn people

I'm so confused it's like I'm swimming in an ocean and I don't know which way is up or down and I can't see straight. Please help me...
I was diagnosed with OCD about a month ago. I'm 17 years old, so still living with my parents. I believe I have had it all my life. When I was a small child, I used to see pictures in my head. I would visualize things like God naked, my parents dead, me killing other people or myself, me doing sexual things I would NEVER EVER have done, not even after MARRIAGE, and the pictures would NEVER EVER EVER go away. These sexual and violent images were so disturbing to me that they literally made me sick. I would try and stop them. I would imagine myself taking a hammer and smashing in my skull, or scrubbing my brain with a scrub brush, or dipping it in boiling acid, or chopping it to pieces with a ax. As you can imagine, these images only increased the anxiety because they didn't make the other pictures go away and now I had more to add to my collection. Of course I didn't tell anyone, because I was so convinced I was going to hell and I didn't want anyone else to know. The images stayed with me until high school. On top of that, sometimes I would have the most insane urge to do something totally ridiculous: shout a curse word in church or hit my best friend over the head with a frying pan, etc. Sometimes, words or phrases would enter my mind: my mom is a ____, or God is ____. This from someone who was afraid to think the word darn! None of these things helped any, and only increased my belief that I was going to hell. I also felt the need to analyze everything. Every time I'd make a mistake, I'd go over it in my head over and over and over and over again, and I couldn't stop trying to rationalize it or making myself feel stupid over it. I still do this.

Along about that time I started becoming concerned with symmetry. Everything had to be symmetrical. Not like lining things up, but if I touched one side of something I had to touch the other, or I'd get very ill. I was so young, however, that I thought this was normal behavior, and of course my parents never noticed and, because I thought it was normal, I never mentioned it.

The symmetry thing rapidly increased my senior year in high school (I'm about to graduate), probably due to stress. I started having mild "panic attacks" where I would hyper ventilate and my resting heart rate would soar way past 140 at any sign of asymmetry. When I was diagnosed a month ago as having OCD, I doubted at first that I had it because I had no ritualized behaviors that took more than one hour a day (DSM-IV). Then I started asking around and found out that to be diagnosed you have to only have obsessions OR compulsions, and that thoughts can also be compulsions (repeatedly imagining smashing my skull in with a hammer whenever sexual or violent repetitive images would show up). However, after I was diagnosed, I couldn't stop thinking about the fact that I might have OCD. I started reading other people's stories. That's where my mistake was.

I read about people who had to line up their food before they ate it, count things and couldn't stop, scrub their hands until they bled.

And then I started mimicking. In lunch one day a few weeks ago I looked at my green beans and realized how agitating the pile of unorganization was. So I lined them up in height order and ate them, biggest to smallest. Now I can't stop. Forget eating popcorn, rice, spaghetti, or trail mix. I can't stop lining up my food, and if I try to, I'll hyper ventilate.

Starting a couple of weeks ago, whenever I would get nervous I would count things, like I had read about, thinking maybe it would calm me down. (Anger management - count from 1 to 10, that kind of thing.) I would count from 1-5 five times, then from 5-1 five times, then do all that five times, or I would count things (tiles, lockers, holes in speakers). At first, it was conscious. Eventually it escalated into, "I just don't feel right until I do this." Now it's like, "If I try to stop I'll hyper ventilate."

One day, a few days ago, after I washed my hands, I realized they didn't quite feel clean. I kept washing them (as I had read about) five times. That helped. Then I saw a picture in my head: millions of tiny bugs (germs) crawling all over my hands and arms up to my elbows. So whenever I washed my hands, I'd wash up to my elbows five times. Then the bugs in my head started burrowing their way into my skin, and I started scrubbing my hands with a toothbrush. Now I have to spend 15 minutes scrubbing my hands and arms with a fingernail brush or a scour pad five times whenever I feel "gross" (i.e., after touching an unsterile doorknob, or another person.) This, however, waxes and wanes.

The thing is, my parents think I'm making it up to get attention. I finally told my mom everything about when I was a kid, and SHE DOESN'T BELIEVE ME. CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT?!?!? I FINALLY work up the guts to TELL her and she thinks that I'm making it up to fit the diagnoses of some doctor! She thinks I'm doing all of this (repeating, counting, HYPER VENTILATING) just to prove to GOD ONLY KNOWS WHO that I do have OCD! SHE THINKS I'M MAKING MYSELF HYPERVENTILATE!!!!! And my DAD does too!!!!! I haven't even MENTIONED the hand washing - they'll just become MORE convinced. They are both SURE that not only is the diagnosis wrong, but that I'm A) making up the stories about when I was a kid just to fit the diagnosis, and B) consciously counting, repeating, lining up food, etc, just to fit the diagnosis. Now at first, I was consciously doing it, but now I can't stop. And I'm not making up the stories about when I was a kid! They think that I am making them up only because they have never heard me mention it before. WELL, HELLO! If YOU thought you were going to hell, would you want YOUR parents to know?!?!?

I'm going to run away. I cannot possibly live like this anymore. I hate my life and I hate my parents. They are so stupid and stubborn and thick headed and STUPID. I hate them. I just have to make it through five more weeks of school, and then I'm moving into an apartment with my best friend before I am able to go off to college and NEVER SPEAK TO THEM AGAIN.

If you've read this far, I owe you a debt of gratitude. I'm begging you, please answer me just these two questions:

1) Could they be right? Is it possible?
2) How can I POSSIBLY make it through another five weeks with them without running away?!?!?

Thank you so much,
Maber

-- posted by maber