“Great.” She pushes open a door farther down the hallway and we walk into her office. It’s a small room, but cozy, a dark green two-seater couch against one wall, with a bright yellow accent rug and a round wooden coffee table.
“Tea?” she asks, turning on the electric kettle on her desk, which sits against the wall opposite the couch. She sits in the office chair and spins to face me.
“Sure.” I sit down on the edge of the couch. “I didn’t know therapists made their clients tea.”
She chuckles. “It’s not required, but I like to. I have some fidgets there too, if you want one.” She points out the bowl on the coffee table, and I lean forward, rifling through it until I pick up a squishy rubber cat. It reminds me of Brekky.
“Chamomile or peppermint?” she asks, and I pick chamomile. A moment later, a steaming mug sits in front of me, and Tracy is peering at me over her own cup.
“So. Tell me what’s on your mind. Your mom gave me the rundown, but I’d love to hear it in your words.”
“Yeah.” I nod. It feels easier, somehow, to open my mouth this time and say the words. “So. I’ve been having these ...thoughts.”
I tell Tracy the whole story, the way I told it to Anna. She asks me questions here and there, about what the voices sound like, where they come from, if I see the images in my head or in the world around me, how I react when I have the thoughts. She asks about what’s happening in my life, if there’s anything stressing me out or weighing on me, so I tell her about Dad, and about Forrest, and the Queer Alliance, and my homework.
When I’m done, she takes a sip of her tea. “Have you ever heard of obsessive-compulsive disorder?” she asks.
“OCD?” I frown. “Yeah ...that’s when you’re like, a clean freak, right? Like, you can’t stand germs and have to wash your hands a lot.”
“Not exactly,” she says. “There is what’s called contamination OCD, where the primary fear is of being, well ...contaminated somehow, often by germs. For people with that subset of OCD, they have a lot of thoughts or mental images about this fear, this obsession, and they engage in actions—rituals, or compulsions—to try and manage those thoughts.”
“I don’t have that,” I say.
“Yeah, it doesn’t sound like you do. But there are other OCD obsessions too. Anything you can think of can be an obsession. So someone might be obsessed with the idea that harm could come to someone they love. They’re having a lot of thoughts about it, a lot of fear and maybe mental images of how that harm could happen, or inner voices telling them it will, and their compulsions might revolve around trying to prevent that harm or ensure that it hasn’t happened. The compulsions can be external, like having to call that person to make sure they’re OK, or they might be internal, like reviewing your last interactions with that person or the route they might take to work or the activities they do every day, to figure out whether they’re all right or how they might potentially come to harm.” She turns the mug in her hands, watching me.
“That’s ...me,” I say slowly. “It happens a lot.”
Tracy nods. “Rejection or abandonment could be another obsession. Or suicide.”
When she says that word, it’s like my whole body lights up from my toes to the top of my head. “You mean ...I don’t actually want to kill myself?”
“You’ve told me you don’t want to.”
“I don’t.” I shake my head. “But why would I have those thoughts?”
“That’s what happens with OCD,” she says. “That’s why it’s so tricky. It convinces us that our thoughts are our reality—or that they could be. That there’s meaning behind these thoughts. They’re called intrusive thoughts.”
“I know that phrase,” I say. “Like—I let the intrusive thoughts win!”
Tracy smiles. “Totally. But the meme isn’t accurate to what intrusive thoughts actually are. They’re not the random, benign impulses we get. Intrusive thoughts are opposite our values, opposite what we actually want and think and feel and believe. And everyone has them.”
“Really?”
“Yep.” She nods.
“Everyone has them,” I repeat. “Everyone has random thoughts about jumping in front of a train. Or their dad getting killed in a freak car accident. Or all their friends turning on them.”
“I know.” She leans forward in her chair. “But it’s true. The difference is, most people say ‘oh, that was a weird thought,’ and move on. With OCD, we give that thought meaning. We think it says something about us. And it’s usually to do with something deeply important to us, which is why it’s so distressing.”
“Oh.” I’m kind of hearing what she’s saying, but I’m still stuck on that part where everyone has thoughts like mine. Except not everyone freaks out over them. “Why does MY brain have to do this? Like, what went wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong with you,” she says. “No one really knows for sure what causes OCD. Like a lot of things, it’s probably a combination of nature and nurture.”
“Doyouhave OCD?” I ask.
“I do!” She raises her mug. “Cheers to both of us.”
I snort and lean forward, grabbing my mug. It’s still warm, and the taste of the tea is calming. “Cool, so how do I make it stop?”
