The Joy Thief by Penny Moodie is published by Allen & Unwin and available now from all good bookstores or online.
When Penny Moodie hears people say that they’re ‘a bit OCD’ about cleaning or tidying, she can’t help but feel frustrated. It took her twenty-three years to be diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder – a debilitating mental health condition involving intrusive thoughts and accompanying physical or mental compulsions – and the stigma and misunderstanding around OCD means this kind of delay is all too common.
Weaving her personal experience with the stories of other OCD sufferers, as well as the expertise of some of the world’s leading OCD doctors, psychologists and psychiatrists, Penny explores OCD’s symptoms, stigmas and treatments with raw honesty and zero judgement. From childhood OCD, shame and medication to perinatal mental illness, relationship OCD and group therapy, this book provides an expansive and very personal insight into the complexities of the condition – and the life-changing impact that best-practice treatment can have.
Below is an extract from Moodie’s new book, The Joy Thief.
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OCD seems to attack the things that you value the most. For me, when I was still in the pre-teen years, that was my family and my sense of security (and the Spice Girls, but luckily the OCD stayed well clear of that love affair). For so long, my obsessions revolved around my health and the thought of dying a horrible death. But now they were starting to shift again.
We were on a long holiday around Europe and Asia before heading back home to Melbourne for good. There was nothing that excited me more than travelling with my family; the airports, the plane food (I was an easily pleased child), the hotels, the family dinners at restaurants—I found them all exhilarating. But only as long as I felt that everything was ‘perfect’. If things didn’t feel right, or an unusual or disturbing thought popped into my head, the excitement would be replaced with panic.
On a horse ride on a beach in Cha-am, Thailand, I was struck by another random thought: What if my dad is gay? It seems like a strange thought for a ten-year-old, but words such as ‘gay’ and ‘homo’ were being thrown around at school, and I was only just starting to learn what they meant. I knew from family conversations that being gay wasn’t a bad thing. My godfather was gay, after all. It was never a big deal. But from peers at school in the nineties, I was getting a different message: to be gay was to be ‘less than’. I started to wonder if gay people could remain married to someone of the opposite sex. I’d seen photos of my dad dressed up as a woman from his amateur theatre days and I’d also seen a photo of him pretending to kiss his male boss on the cheek. So, what if these things added up to him being gay? He would have to leave my mum, and our family would be broken.
What if my mum didn’t know? I’d have to break it to her.
Poor Mum. This conversation wasn’t on her 1997 bingo card. I spent the next week on the Gulf of Thailand’s pure white shores, divulging to her that I thought her husband was secretly gay. She gently rebuffed my claims, explaining that a fondness for theatre and a playful peck on the cheek weren’t evidence of a change in sexual preference. In the same way that I felt a weighty responsibility to keep my parents safe from having a car crash when I was six years old, I now felt responsible for keeping my family together.
I didn’t understand it at the time, but I was making invisible connections between things and slowly creating a destructive web of fear. None of these connections was real, but because I’d thought them, they felt real to me. I couldn’t bear any level of uncertainty, which I equated to feeling unsafe—and when I felt unsafe, I was fearful.
Un/Certainty
People with OCD can experience so many different variations: contamination fears, suicidal obsessions, questions around their very existence. So what could possibly bind us all together? Uncertainty. Or rather, the quest to achieve absolute, 100 per cent, indubitable certainty.
I didn’t realise this until I started to see Dr Andrea Wallace (whom you’ll meet again later in the book as the clinical psychologist who diagnosed my OCD). It had never occurred to me that what I’d been doing since I was a little kid was seeking certainty whenever a thought scared me. What I definitely didn’t know at the time was that seeking certainty is like searching for the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow: it’s a noble but futile quest.
The feeling of certainty
In his book Freedom from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, psychologist Dr Jonathan Grayson talks at length about certainty, and more specifically about our illusion of certainty.12 We all know what it’s like to feel certain, but—whether we have OCD or not—what most of us don’t realise is that we can never achieve absolute certainty about anything. Ever. We have events that are probable or improbable. That’s it.
For those of us with OCD, we experience the illusion of certainty in particular areas of our lives—it could be that when we leave for work, we’re sure that our house will still be standing when we return. Or it might be that we’re certain the sun will rise in the morning. Because we feel certain about these things, we crave this same feeling when we’re anxious about something else—for example, that our newborn baby might not be breathing when we go to bed.
‘What most people don’t realise is that what they experience as a certainty is not a fact, but a feeling,’ writes Dr Grayson.13 When we try to gain certainty to alleviate our anxiety, we use logic. But, as Dr Grayson points out that, logic won’t change our feelings.
A philosophical disorder
When I started writing this book, Dr Jonathan Grayson’s name was popping up everywhere: in books, in my therapy sessions and on numerous OCD-related websites. I hunted down his email address and sent a message asking if we could chat at some point. He kindly agreed to speak to me.
An expert in the area of OCD, Dr Grayson has worked with sufferers for over three decades and is Director of the Grayson LA Treatment Center for Anxiety and OCD. He is eminently qualified to discuss the subject of OCD. He also speaks with the confidence you would expect from a white, American, middle-aged professional. But, refreshingly, he sounds genuinely excited when talking about OCD.
‘I think OCD is, in some sense, a philosophical disorder,’ Dr Grayson begins, when I ask him why he is so fascinated by OCD. ‘Most of the concerns that people have are the great questions philosophers ask. “How can I be safe in a world where my family and I could die at any moment? What is the evil in me? What is the nature of God? Who am I?” And the only difference between somebody who has OCD and a great philosopher . . .?’ The way he poses the question, I can’t tell if it’s rhetorical or if he wants an answer.
‘There’s only one difference,’ he continues, before I can speak. ‘People with OCD actually want an answer.’