The challenges of parenting twins with an OCD diagnosis – Part one

Guest post – I am honoured to welcome Jason who has written an amazing guest post about parenting twins with an OCD diagnosis

Let’s dive in…

PART 2 will be published later this week...

The earliest years of parenthood are hard.  Really hard, actually.  Parenting twins with an OCD diagnosis is especially difficult.

It’s a time when stressors go up, stress relievers go down. And your scope of responsibility skyrockets in the most beautiful, but also complex and exhausting ways.  For those of us who enter these years with a mental health disorder, some aspects of parenting may be more complicated than others. Especially if, as I did, you have to make parenting and treatment work at the same time.  It’s doable, but it’s not easy. 

Below, I will explain why.

Here’s why:

Confronting a mental health disorder while parenting poses a difficult paradox. You’ve likely never had a better or more pressing reason to get better. But you also have to contend with two new complications. First, all the usual blocks to mental health treatment. Including, stigma, lack of information and resources. These feel even more pronounced because of the added responsibilities and complexities of parenthood. 

Second, mental health treatment and parenting require many of the same resources. Energy, meaningful attention, information, time, and money.  As any new parent will tell you, those resources are strained and limited at the best of times.  In my case, I only learned this lesson after trying (and failing) to ‘power through’ what I thought were typical ‘new parent worries’. Only to discover that what I was trying to manage were clinical OCD symptoms. 

My own challenges

Over the next year and a half, I spent many long days and nights learning how to be a parent and manage my mental health at the same time.  In the earliest months of my therapy journey, I was struck by one question above all others. Why don’t more people talk about the challenges of managing mental health treatment and parenting at the same time?  As we’ll see, there are numerous answers to this question, but for now, let’s start with a seemingly obvious but deceptively insidious reason: stigma.

Paradoxes, Parenting and Stigma

Fred Rogers once said that anything human is mentionable, and anything mentionable is manageable.  I know, from personal experience, that Mr. Rogers’ words are as true now as when he first said them. But it’s also been my experience that certain aspects of parenting are more mentionable, and, by extension, more manageable than others. 

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Parenting twins with an OCD diagnosis is difficult because the fact is, it’s not easy to admit you’re suffering from a mental health disorder when you’re a parent.  There are real and daunting fears of the stigma that come with opening up about your struggles.  For me, these fears manifested in the form of some daunting and complicated questions.

What will people think?

Parenting is a visceral journey that often defines at least part of a person’s life and identity.  With strong emotions come strong opinions.  If it’s something we teach to kids, be it feeding, sleeping, toileting or discipline, someone has an opinion about it. 

In one sense, a range of opinions is helpful because it allows parents to make informed decisions, but in another sense, it adds pressure and judgment to every decision we make.  When you add mental health stigma to the pressures of parenting, you reach a simple but troubling conclusion. The mere existence of mental health stigma prevents some people from seeking mental health support when they need it most.  

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Think of it this way: when are you most likely to need help?  When you’re struggling, of course. However, when are you least likely to admit that you’re vulnerable?  For most people, the answer to the question is likely a time when you’re responsible for something important to you. 

For me, the answer was the day I became a Dad.  To say it was a stressful collision of circumstances is an understatement, at best.  I would like to say I immediately admitted to my struggles and sought help, but I didn’t.  I resisted the reality of my situation because I was stuck. And, I was stuck because I couldn’t answer another important question about my symptoms.

What does my mental health (or lack thereof) say about me as a parent?

Anxiety thrives in the hypothetical.  When I first experienced an onset of clinical OCD symptoms, my mind went into overdrive about what my symptoms meant for me and my family.  Was I sick for life?  Was I cursed?  Was I just too weak to manage my new responsibilities?  Part of me knew that these questions were irrational. But another part of me worried that admitting to my symptoms would trigger stigma towards me from others, and, ultimately, affect the way they saw me as a parent. 

The irony was, anyone who knew me well could see that I was suffering anyway.  Or, to be more precise, they could see that I was trying to cover the fact I was suffering.  In retrospect, I can see many ways OCD affected my parenting in my earliest months of Dadhood.  To dissuade others from missing similar details, I’ve listed several of my most prevalent behaviours below.

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OCD and Parenting: Conflicting Emotions, Conflicting Behaviours

Having kids is touted as a joyous experience, and in so many ways, it is.  For me, though, having kids also meant spikes in stress and anxiety. The likes of which I had never felt before.  From the moment I first held my boys, I felt dedicated to their growth, happiness, and protection. I loved those feelings.  The problem was, my malfunctioning brain took those natural parental emotions, swirled them up with obsessions, and sent my mind into a tailspin.  I never doubted I loved my boys, but my anxieties and emotions were so out of control I couldn’t love every moment of raising them, at least not at first.  Here’s how those feelings manifested in day-to-day life.

Zero to One Thousand

A baby crying isn’t just an early attempt at communication.  It’s a biological chain reaction designed to alert parents to their children’s needs and to prompt them to act.  To an obsessive-compulsive brain, a baby crying is like strapping a rocket to a race car. Your brain is already in non-stop stress response mode. And then it gets flooded with another round of stress hormones every time your baby cries.  Consider, for example, a normal parental response to baby crying:

1.     Baby cries.

2.     Parent hears the cry.

3.     Parent thinks, ‘I need to go check on the baby’.

4.     Parent calmly goes to the baby.

5.     Parent assesses the baby’s needs and offers food, comfort, and attention as needed.

It’s a logical sequence of baby care, and it’s what I expected to be doing when I heard my babies crying.  I was wrong. Here’s what my reaction cycle looked like:

1.     Baby cries.

2.     I hear the cry.

3.     My chest tightens, and my heart rate goes up.

4.     I start picturing worst-case scenarios and wondering which one of them is playing out.

5.     I bolt up from what I’m doing.

6.     I go to my babies and start to assess them for serious injuries and missing vital signs.

7.     I realise they’re OK, and I start trying to calm everyone down, including myself.

What you’re seeing is the effect of increased stress hormones on an already-imbalanced set of neural circuits.  The logical parent in me knew crying was normal and encouraged me to react rationally.  The OCD part of me jumped straight to the worst-case scenario.  Extreme reactions are great for extreme situations, but they’re not practical for responding to the everyday ups and downs of raising kids.  The inner battle of deciding which feeling was right was constant and agonizing.  It was a seemingly endless process that often left me emotionally exhausted.  Speaking of which.

Emotional Exhaustion

Raising kids takes a lot of patience and resilience.  To manage those ups and downs successfully, you need emotional energy.  When my OCD symptoms were at their worst, I was running on emotional fumes.  Sleep times meant I could relax physically, but it also meant lying alone with my brain and fighting off non-stop obsessions.  By the time I went into the nursery to get my boys up for their next feed, it was like I had just returned from hiking on an icy mountain top.  I felt relieved, but I was mentally and emotionally fried.

When my symptoms were at their worst, I was frequently frustrated, irritable, and difficult to be around for my wife and family.  Simple messes and spills were an infuriating disaster.  Stubbing my toe made me feel like the universe was conspiring against me.  It’s not that I’m a petty person.  Normally, those things don’t bother me.  The problem was I had no patience for minor annoyances because all my emotional energy was being spent on managing my obsessions and compulsions.  Over time, getting through the motions of day-to-day life became harder and harder. The longer I tried to tough it out, the more exhausted I became.  Still, I pressed on, thinking it was only a matter of time before things got better.  When that approach didn’t work, I tried to find relief by exercising more control over my circumstances.

Overprotective (No, Like Really Overprotective)

It’s natural to feel reasonably protective of your kids, but OCD makes it hard to react calmly and rationally to even the possibility of a threat.  Some of my worst obsessions were based on my kids choking, drowning, and falling from heights.  Combined with a parent’s emotions, those obsessions made feedings, bath time, and carrying my boys up and down stairs difficult. 

I reacted with fight-or-flight intensity to the slightest hint of choking, unexpected slips in water. And even the slightest of squirms when I carried them up and downstairs.  In other words, I acted as if there was a real threat based on the possibility of a hazard.  OCD is like that.  It makes you believe that situations are either completely safe or imminently dangerous. That your actions are the difference between the two. 

There isn’t a place or situation on planet Earth that is one hundred percent safe, and kids have to take risks to learn their limitations. But at first, I couldn’t accept this.  Believe it or not, that approach made perfect sense to me.  After all, I was just doing my parental duties, wasn’t I?  As it turns out, even those were harder than I thought.

Parenting Duties

I had a lot of trouble learning how to put shirts on my sons.  That’s not a typo.  I had to ‘learn’ how to do it.  Here’s why: babies are tiny and delicate.  When I pull a shirt over my head, I line my head up with the hole and pull.  I can do that because my neck is strong.  It doesn’t move when I put on a shirt.  My sons were little, and their necks were delicate.  In my head, that meant risk for them, and life-or-death responsibility for me. 

For most parents, the delicacy of a baby is just a reminder to be reasonably cautious.  For me, it meant I needed a procedure to ensure there was zero risk of breaking my kids’ necks, or of them suffocating if the shirt got stuck at their noses or mouths on the way down to their bodies.  Most times I was successful, but when a shirt did get stuck, I had to remove it and find another way to put it on. Or find a new shirt altogether. 

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I also tried to only use shirts with extra-wide head holes, and if the head hole wasn’t wide enough, I would stretch it before putting it on (let’s just say my wife – the one who did all the clothes shopping – was none too pleased about that).  Remember, neither of us knew about my OCD diagnosis at first, so there was confusion and frustration all around.

Where am I now?

Looking back, part of me feels proud I didn’t let my symptoms ruin my parenting altogether.  Dressing my boys was difficult, but I still dressed them.  Diaper changes were stressful, but I still did them.  That, in itself, is an accomplishment.  I just wish I could’ve enjoyed those things without feeling like I was navigating a life-or-death situation.  The problem was, I was locked in a state of flared emotions and rigid thinking.  I couldn’t think outside my head because I couldn’t see beyond my thoughts.  

Thankfully, with the help of a brilliant therapist and a supportive family, I found the strategies I was looking for. 

Final thoughts

If you’d like to know more about the practicalities of making OCD, therapy, and parenting work together, be sure to check out part two of this blog series for more information.  You can also find my book, which contains all the gritty details mentioned in this blog and more, at http://www.theocdad.ca. 

A few final words from me

I want to thank Jason for sharing this honest post about parenting struggles whilst managing a mental health condition. I was emotional when I first read through this post, simply because I totally relate to the struggles. I also relate to the guilt you feel for not being your best self as a parent.

I hope this post helps someone out there, and I can’t wait to share part two with you all later in the week.

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