Treating My OCD When I Became A Parent

I had fallen hopelessly in love with my daughter and was trying to show her the world, but it suddenly felt anything but safe...

The OCD I have doesn’t compel me to clean, or flick the light switch a certain number of times; instead, the compulsions I have are entirely in my mind. I try to predict outcomes, to control them, by making choices that have systematically made my world smaller. For a long time, my choices were made only out of fear: I was too scared to become a mother, I was too anxious to travel alone, my body reacted to an approaching man on an empty street the same way it would if my house was on fire. Sometimes my brain feels like it’s on fire.

My daughter was born five weeks early and small. Winter was approaching and the illnesses that come with it circulating. On our discharge from the hospital, the doctors were vague with their advice– be sensible, try to protect her from viruses, but don’t cut yourself off from the world.

For an OCD brain, vagueness is the enemy. I wanted concrete facts, evidence, advice. In the absence of these, I began to see only threats, the slightest of possibilities becoming inevitabilities. Every choice felt like life or death – did I want to go to my best friend’s 40^th enough to risk falling ill and harming my daughter? Did that person with a cough in the baby music class have RSV? How could I introduce solids when the risk of choking felt so real? How would we ever leave her with anyone other than myself or my husband? I would google furiously, relentlessly, looking for stories that would both reassure and confirm my worst fears.

When you’re a new parent, you are frequently told to ‘trust your instincts’, most often when it comes to your baby’s health. For someone with anxiety, this is entirely unhelpful. For someone with OCD, this is almost impossible. Every flutter of anxiety felt like a warning shot through which I could justify my hours of ruminations and obsessions. I had fallen hopelessly in love with my daughter and was trying to show her the world, but it suddenly felt anything but safe.

I had been in therapy for a while, but, a few months into motherhood, I sought out a therapist who specialised in OCD treatment. Partly due to widespread misinformation and partly due to the taboo nature of many obsessions, OCD takes an average of fifteen years to diagnose. As a result, the official figures are most probably inaccurate, but between 1-3% of the general population has OCD, and for post-partum OCD the figure ranges between 9-17%. Even once I understood I had OCD, it still took me four different therapists to realise that we were going around in circles together - in trying to allay my every fear we were only reinforcing their legitimacy.

It makes sense that a disorder that inflates your sense of responsibility and attaches to the things you value most is so prevalent after giving birth, when suddenly you actually are responsible for the person you love down to your bones. As part of the new therapy process, I learned that my theory of control was tied up in the theory of magical thinking – the idea that I could somehow control the future. This meant that the good had to go out with the bad. I had to throw out my crystals and step away from any type of manifesting as it all reinforced the concept that I could dictate the future with my thoughts alone. There was a grief in saying goodbye to this part of myself. I was scared I would be saying goodbye to the part of me that felt optimistic. The part that believed in good things. The part that would somehow know exactly what to do in an emergency purely because it was hardwired in me.

I dropped my ‘safety behaviours’ and learned to label my negative thoughts before they spiralled into something too amorphous, too guilt-soaked, too messy to name. The vague bad feelings I experienced in my body weren’t this famous ‘gut instinct’ I’d heard so much about, but were purely physiological. Instead, I learned to make decisions based on my values, not my fears. I have (mostly) stopped repetitively googling my daughter’s symptoms, have (mostly) stopped wading through reddit and Mumsnet forums for the worst-case scenarios, have (partly) stopped seeking repeated reassurance from loved ones. I have introduced my daughter to playgrounds and nursery and babysitters and holidays and crunchy food and swimming pools and, recently, airport floors. I am learning to live with uncertainty and, crucially, the discomfort that I might get it wrong one day. And it is this small shift from trying to predict, control, every outcome that has made the biggest difference. It would be so easy to hide from the world, to avoid the bad and miss the good, but what sort of lesson would that be for my daughter? What sort of life would that be?

The change has been both minuscule and vast. Some of my closest friends wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, but every so often, my body feels at peace. And some mornings, when I’m with my daughter before the sun comes up, or when she runs into a room calling out for me, I feel a sense of wonder for the world that almost feels like magic.

Ella Berman is the author of Reese's Book Club Pick Before We Were Innocent. Her new novel L.A. Women is about a complicated friendship and rivalry between two ambitious writers in 1960s L.A. – plunging readers into the legendary parties and unparalleled creativity of iconic Laurel Canyon, while exploring the impossible choices women face when ambition collides with intimacy. Published by Head of Zeus and available now.