Triggers as Deep as the Grand Canyon

This week I am super excited to share a blogpost by my co-author of You’re Not a Murderer: You Just Have Harm OCD and oldest child, Finn Conrey! I’ve been trying for a while to get them to write a post for the blog. Here tis! Enjoy!

Going to the Grand Canyon is something that my mom talked about for a long time. She has been trying to go for years, and though I was less excited, I was still interested in going. When I was little we tried to go—unfortunately, that was the exact week the government shut down and we didn’t get to see the Canyon at all. We finally made it a week ago, and it’s times like this that I miss the uncomplicated nature of my youth when my OCD was quieter. If had I been able to go back then, I would not have had the anxieties I have now.

Well, at least I wouldn’t have had the same anxieties. 

The people everywhere kicked up old fears of me spreading my germs, some sort of dirty miasma to others. Accidentally stepping in mule poop resulted in an avoidance of touching my shoes, becoming a problem adjacent to my first worry. So, my foot touched the hotel room floor —no, there’s no visible mule leavings there from earlier, just OCD feelings that there might be microscopic ones from my shoe that I can’t see—and then my purse sat on that same spot, and later I sat my purse on the table at the restaurant. So now, I might give the next people who eat at this table some sort of weird intestinal virus from coming in contact with mule poop five degrees removed from my hike early that morning. But if I mention all of this to the waiter so he can sanitize like an OCD sufferer would, they will definitely think I’m weird! If I don’t mention it, though, am I a morally corrupt person who doesn’t care if other people get sick and possibly die? Yes, I’m afraid that is true as I stare at the ceiling panicking at midnight. Ah, the trifecta: morality OCD, harm OCD, and germ OCD all ganging up on me at once. Of course one could categorize the germs and harm into one since they may both, at least in my head, at the worst moments, culminate in some poor soul’s death.

 Family members walking too close to the edge of the Canyon breathed a sense of hyper-vigilance into me that went beyond the level of hyper-vigilance I am usually at (which is already high). All of this and more that I have a hard time categorizing resulted in both heightened anxiety and lower patience that I tried desperately to hold inside with varying degrees of success. 

In the end, I ended up both backsliding and progressing in my fight against my own brain. This also translated into using way more hand sanitizer than my therapist would have approved of. I fell back on old compulsions that I tried desperately to fight, and I faced down new challenges, pushing back on my tendencies. I managed to catch myself other times and sit with the uncomfortableness of these new challenges. I am honestly not sure if I improved or declined overall on this trip—I easily get caught up in my own thoughts and that makes self-evaluation difficult at times. However, despite the paradoxical nature of my own being, I am glad I went. It was a good trip, and I feel like I was able to at least start to push forward in my healing a little bit. The Canyon itself was also very beautiful, so that might have added a bit to my positive outlook.

Onward.

Finn Conrey