jamie_maybeCasual Contributor
Comorbid mental health & walking on eggshells w/ recovery
TW: Anorexia nervosa, OCD, depression, self-harm, s****dal ideation.
My hope is that this post will help to relieve some of the weight of my internalisation and catastrophisation of all of this, and maybe someone out there will know what this is like and be able to give advice or even just share their story if they're comfortable so that I know that I'm not alone with this.
I am 20 years old now - I was diagnosed with severe OCD at 13 years old (though that diagnosis was effectively dismissed by my family until recently, and even then is treated as more of a choice than a condition) and I developed an eating disorder, specifically anorexia nervosa, at 17 years old. I am also suspected of being on the autism/ADHD spectrum, but this is again dismissed by my family as "seeking a diagnosis to be special". I've had so many shitty doctors and therapists and a shitty psychiatrist and at this point, finding help is exhausting and seems to make things worse a lot of the time because either they're misdiagnosing or giving advice to my family without consulting me and then I get forced into these regimes because my family treats that advice as rules and gospel.
Currently, I can barely coax myself into the shower every day because my parents have threatened to walk in on me if I take too long with the water due to my compulsions. I told them that threat wouldn't help, but my mum's response was that "if it creates a reaction then that's good" and when I told her I didn't feel safe anymore taking a shower she replied "if you follow the rules, you'll feel safe".
I'm so stressed recently with university and everything at home that my appetite has decreased and my urge to exercise excessively has returned. I'm restless when I'm sitting or relaxing and panicked if I have to eat and not exercise at any point during the day. I'm feeling like I need to earn my food again, and I'm paranoid that my parents are angry at me or suspect me and are therefore putting extra food on my plate despite the fact that they've been measuring out my food for 2 years now. They're resentful of that fact and wish that I would "make an effort" to stop measuring - and before things deteriorated recently which has been catalysed by uni and deaths in the family, I was making progress there. But now my intrusive thoughts have gotten worse and I'm having to focus all of my energy on repressing that and not hurting myself, and I've regressed back to strictly measuring and my OCD compulsions have extended to being very paranoid about cross-contamination of food to the point where I will wash every individual vegetable if it's been in contact or in the same container as another food group. And my family therefore says that I've stopped trying.
I'm just sick of being a problem and seeing the pain in their faces when they're around me or think about me. I'm sick of the underhanded comments and nudges about how I used to be normal and I'm making their lives more complicated and I'm hurting them constantly. There's nothing I can do that won't hurt them, and if I do go cold turkey and act all normal then I'll be burying so much panic and internalised disgust that I'm scared it will burst and explode out of control and I'll lose my faculties and actually hurt myself badly.
I don't know what to do anymore. I'm just really tired and nothing that I'm feeling feels justified because I know other people have it worse and my family means well. I'm not being abused so I don't feel my anger or fear is valid, despite the negative memories and emotions.