Here is the full transcript of Tauscha Johanson’s talk titled “OCD: Starving The Monster” at TEDxIdahoFalls conference.
In this TEDx talk, Tauscha Johanson shared her personal journey with her daughter Breeland’s battle with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). She criticized the casual and incorrect use of the term OCD in social media, highlighting the serious and challenging reality of the condition.
Through her narrative, Johanson detailed the intense struggles and moments of desperation that OCD brought into their lives, especially the fear and compulsions that drove Breeland to believe she had caused harm. To combat OCD, the Johanson family employed a unique strategy of likening OCD to a monster that needed to be starved, representing the importance of resisting compulsive behaviors to weaken OCD’s grip.
Tauscha emphasized the significance of understanding, acknowledging, and confronting OCD in a non-judgmental manner, advocating for external support and empowerment for those affected. She called for a change in societal perception and understanding of OCD, proposing alternative supportive hashtags to foster a community of support. Johanson’s talk was a powerful call to action, urging society to recognize the real challenges of OCD and to support those battling the disorder.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
A recent social media trend involves posting pictures of perfectly clean, color-coded, organized spaces followed by the hashtag OCD, or a short comment like, “I’m so OCD, LOL.” The phrases are used tongue-in-cheek as a joke, I know, I get that. Sometimes even as something to aspire to or celebrate, “Look at this, isn’t it great? Don’t you want some of this?”
My daughter Breeland has OCD, and I got to tell you, it’s nothing like the Instagram version that you post and hashtag. OCD, or obsessive-compulsive disorder, is neither a verb nor an adjective, as you use it on social media, you got to know that. It’s also a serious condition, a disorder that results from a chemical imbalance in the brain, and it is never a choice. Perhaps I can paint the picture of what the OCD that we came to know and live with looks like.
The Reality of Living with OCD
One night, about nine o’clock, Breeland came home from work. It was a freezing cold night in the dark of winter, and it wasn’t until after about three hours of her coming home that the OCD kicked in to convince her that she’d hit someone on her way home from work. She decided she had to go out and check the roadsides and ditches.
So, the thing is, going back to check to see if she’d hit something or someone, that was not uncommon for Bre. Driving was difficult and stressful for her. She was obsessively concerned with hurting someone with her car. The three-mile commute to her waitress job could take her upwards of an hour due to the repeated looping back and forth to check her path. You would think she would have known every pothole in the road, but the OCD demanded that those bumps she felt as she was driving were not potholes, but people.
So, this night, as Breeland went to leave the house, her then-fiancé tried to restrain her. It almost cost him their engagement. Her dad led her through good, solid logic of why going out and checking was absolutely not necessary. It was at this point that Breeland threw back her shoulders in a fit of rage and tears and emphatically announced she was driving to the police station to turn herself in if no one would let her go out and check the roadsides for bodies.
Here was this gentle soul who would never intentionally hurt anyone, who honestly believed she’d killed someone, left them injured and alone in a ditch in the dark to die in the freezing cold. Just imagine her anguish. It was moments like this that made me hate the OCD so bad I could literally taste it. But years of experience with this monster led me to deal differently.
A Strategy Against OCD
So I said, “Bre, maybe you should go turn yourself into the police.” The OCD was startled, shocked, and left Breeland without the support of a retort. So I continued, “What do you think the police are going to tell you, Bre?” She insisted they would throw her in jail, and she deserved to be there.
Again, I agreed to a point, “Breeland, I think they’re going to see that you need to be removed from society for a little while, but not thrown in jail. They’ll be able to tell you’re already living in a cage and being managed by a monster.” More than likely, they’ll suggest to stay in a mental hospital where you can get the help you need, and Breeland, you need help to beat this. The OCD was outwitted long enough for Breeland to regroup and summon the skills and strategies she had spent years practicing.
She didn’t go out, check the roadsides that night, nor did she go turn herself into the police. But let’s note, reason nor restraint were effective for her, but it was the strategies that she had learned and practiced for years that allowed her the escape. Breeland was first diagnosed with OCD when she was about eight years old, and as parents, we really struggled to understand and find ways to help her battle. What we arrived at was a strategy built on a simple analogy.
Confronting the Monster
We compared Breeland’s OCD to a monster. Not the kind of monster she needed to fear, but a hungry monster that constantly demanded to be fed. The monster represented Breeland’s obsessions that came into her brain uninvited, set up monster camp, or an intrusive thought loop that just played over and over. And the way it wanted to be fed was through the compulsions or the behaviors that she needed to perform perfectly and ritualistically.
The thing is, performing those behaviors never satisfied the monster, ever.