I had always heard that OCD is highly “comorbid” with autism, which means that they are often found together. I had also heard of combinations involving ADHD. My therapist himself, long ago, told me that most of his clients with OCD were unusually intelligent, as well as highly imaginative and often sensitive, or unusually creative and empathetic. Now that I understand more about neurodivergence, these traits strike me as telltale features which could signal autism, ADHD, or giftedness, among other forms of neurodivergence.
Nevertheless, for many years I blocked out the idea of this comorbidity between OCD and neurodivergence as irrelevant to myself. “Yes,” I thought, “I’m sure there is plenty of overlap, but that isn’t me.“
It’s funny how God unfolds His plans. I had children – five of them. I struggled with parenting to a degree that did not always seem to match the experience of my friends. I beat my head against parenting choices in an extremely ruminative, OCD manner until, about five years into my parenting career, I suddenly realized my OCD had latched onto discipline. Even after that, I struggled inexplicably to hold all the pieces together, increasingly drowning under the weight of…what exactly?
Things got worse. Finally, I reached a noteworthy low point, telling my husband, “I see three options: either all my parenting principles really are as wrong as my deepest fears are telling me, or my own anxiety is making parenting feel impossible, or there is something objectively different about [the child I was struggling to parent].” I renewed my research into parenting styles; I pursued therapy for my recalcitrant OCD and anxiety; and I began researching sensory differences for my child’s benefit.
After a year of soul searching, tearing away layer upon layer of lingering fears and triggers, relentless learning, and painfully aggressive spiritual growth, I discovered that at least one of my children is neurodivergent. I suspect several of the others.
What is more, it dawned on me through this process of brutal honesty and reimagining that I am probably neurodivergent myself. I suspect that I would be placed on the autistic spectrum, in the modern parlance which has opened that spectrum up so widely. I might also be considered intellectually gifted, at least in some areas. Then again, it seems more likely than not for someone on the autistic spectrum to have a wildly inconsistent profile of towering strengths and plunging weaknesses. In any case, this discovery has shed unexpected light on my longstanding quest to “get to the bottom” of my OCD.
*****
For many years I struggled to understand where my OCD had come from. On the one hand, research has not identified any simple cause for OCD. On the other hand, it never made sense to me that my OCD sprang from wholly genetic roots, as if I had been destined from all eternity to struggle with mental illness, and nothing that ever happened to me could have made any difference.
The baffling thing was that, although I slowly came to accept various minor “traumas” that seemed to have played a role in elaborating my psychological wounds, they were truly not that serious. My childhood was reasonably stable by almost any metric; and it has always seemed to me that people have come out of much worse childhood experiences with lesser psychological problems than my inexplicable, lifelong scourge of OCD.
Then I reconceptualized myself as neurodivergent. Suddenly I became aware of real, unique needs that were not fully met, even in a basically stable, loving environment. I was a highly sensitive, highly empathetic child, with a propensity for deep thought and a strong tendency to internalize my experiences. More specifically, I now believe my unique nervous system places me in a newer autistic sub-profile labeled “pathologically demand avoidant,” or more kindly, “persistent drive for autonomy” (PDA). Essentially, my nervous system is unusually sensitive to threats. It perceives even subtle incursions against my autonomy as life-threatening, causing a rapid escalation into the fight/flight/freeze/fawn danger response.
Over time, with no understanding of this, I suspect I internalized those threat responses as if I were bad or shameful for experiencing them. Out of shame and also fear of undesired consequences, I subconsciously hid my resistance to being controlled; but internally, shame and fear waged war against my natural instincts and emotional responses, creating an ongoing tug-of-war. On the one hand was my nervous system activation in response to exterior demands; on the other, my shame and fear worked to disconnect me from that sensation, because it made me bad and placed me in danger of other undesirable consequences, especially potential damage to relationships I valued.
I learned to distrust my emotional reactions to things altogether, and sometimes not even to notice them (although I suspect this tendency was heightened by naturally weak awareness of my feelings due to autism itself). I came to rely heavily on my intellect to think my way around problems without reference to my natural instincts. Sometimes my deeply-buried emotions would attempt to reassert themselves, but my fear and anxiety would leap into the fray to deflect the rest of me from noticing.
For example, my common sense and my instincts of conscience had a faint inkling about the state of my soul at any given time, but my fear did not trust these humble parts. Instead, it forced me to ruminate, analyze, check, and test, because the stakes of making a mistake about the state of my soul seemed far too high. The same was true of any risk of contamination, and eventually of my vocational discernment. I could not trust my desire for marriage, or my desire to marry any one specific man. That desire might be wrong, might be shameful, might even be disordered and lead me astray. The consequences could be so unthinkably disastrous.
This is a dysfunctional way to live, to experience decisions, to engage in discernment, and to relate to beloved persons, including God; but I have lived this way for most of my life. It has been both freeing and fascinating to uncover new factors playing into the disordering of my psyche, because I have realized that not all of my uniqueness is disordered. Some of it is how my brain is wired…and that comes with very real strengths as well.
I hold no ill-will towards my parents or other authority figures who did not understand what was happening inside me. These phenomena were poorly understood at the time, and I was a highly-masked, high-functioning person who made it my business to suffer in silence, clinging to my privacy like a cloak. Furthermore, even being aware of these issues is not a magic bullet to better parenting. I realize that all too clearly as a struggling parent myself.
May God have mercy on us. We are so very broken, and so deeply in need of His grace, even as we are dazzling in the inherent goodness and brilliance He has bestowed upon us as His image-bearers. I can only take comfort in my newfound sense that He cares intimately about the details I encounter as I play out my tiny part in His inscrutable plans.
Catholic and OCD 