I’m A Psychologist And I Still Didn’t Know I Had OCD

Okay, so you go through this common experience about thinking OCD symptoms are just you, part of your personality.

It's just the way that you are.

Sometimes even Stephen Smith, our CEO, says, I thought it was a personality quirk or something like that, right? How did those come across to you? What did you think were personality traits? And what was it like to dismantle that, that this is a part of your personality and more part of a condition that you have?

Yeah, so I definitely can relate to the feeling, oh, this is just like a little quirk I have.

I would always, I can think back to like childhood of things that I would do that I was just convinced, oh, this is just me.

And there were also some things that like my mom was doing.

So I kind of grew up thinking that they were pretty normal.

So being very organized, but to a point where, If something wasn't exactly the way I liked it to be, I couldn't do what I needed to do.

I would kind of put it off.

So, for example, as a school psychologist, I have to do a lot of different kinds of evaluations with students.

I would always color or code my evaluation types.

And so if I didn't have my purple pen, which was for initial evaluations on a specific day, I just wouldn't do work on that report at all that day.

And I never really thought of it as being a problem because I was like, well, I'm still doing work.

I'm just not doing that work.

But really, it was a problem.

And So that's one of them.

Another one would be like I always liked even numbers or numbers that ended in a five.

So if I was driving, my thermostat, my volume had to be set to that.

I would even go as far as to change other people's thermostat, like their temperature setting in the car if I was their passenger, which, again, I didn't ever really – even realize how rude that is.

Um, but I, yeah.

And I just thought, okay, like

this is just,

it just bugs me, you know? And it wasn't really until it started, um, being health focused for me that I realized, okay, I don't think this is just like my personality quirks.

I think there's something a little bit deeper going on here.

Um, and that's kind of when I started to understand that maybe it wasn't just who I am as a person and it was a problem.