Thursday, August 12, 2010

OCD

I had OCD as a kid.  I didn't even know it until my junior year in high school when I took a psych 1010 class through the local college and we learned about different types of OCD.  I had the one where I counted things.  Mostly shapes and colors, but I counted things.  And it was uncontrollable for a long time.  I could be reading a book and start counting the sides and corners of the book.  You say 4 and 4?  No, there are the levels so actually it is 12 and 12 and then 2 faces and that is of a solid object, if it were hollow I counted the ones on the inside too.  I could be watching tv, and start counting the colors in the scene.  Sometimes when looking at a picture, I would count the colors, but could only count the ones the merged into another without hitting a color that I had already counted.... yeah apparently I was messed up and no one knew ( well no one knew about that degree of being messed up ;) )

I was very good at math growing up, so I wonder if it had to do with the fact that I was counting all the time, so maybe I had a thing for numbers?  I don't remember thinking something was wrong with counting, but I would get frustrated with it.  I would consciously try to not count things and sometimes it worked, but most of the time it didn't.  I don't know at what age I grew out of it.  Maybe life got to be so busy and took my mind to other things that I just stopped?  I really don't know, but sometimes still, I find myself relapsing and have to make myself stop.

Anyone else been through this?  Or any other kind of disorder you didn't know you had until later?  Do you remember when it stopped?  Or how you got it to stop?  I wonder how many suffer silently, some not even knowing they are suffering...