Download Leaving the OCD Circus: Your Best Ticket out of Having to Control Every Little Thing AudioBook Free
"It's like the meanest, wildest monkey playing around my mind, constantly researching to bite me." That was how Kirsten Pagacz identified her OCD to her therapist on their first period when she was well into her 30s - she'd been following orders from this mean taskmaster for twenty years, without understanding why. Initially the tapping and counting and cleaning and ordering brought her comfort and structure, two things lacking in her family life. But it never lasted; the loathsome self-talk only intensified, and the rituals she got to perform received more bizarre. By senior high school she was anorexic and a compound abuser - common "shadow syndromes" of OCD. By adulthood she could scarcely hide her problems and presented on to careers and friends through large grit. Help finally emerged in the form of a miraculously well-timed general public service announcement on NPR about OCD. At last her illness got an identity. Going out of the OCD Circus uncovers the storyplot of Pagacz's distressing youth and the escalation of her disorder, demonstrating how OCD works to misshape a life from a very young age. It also explains the equipment she used for healing, including yoga, cognitive behavioral remedy, yoga, exposure remedy, and medication.
