Postpartum OCD and an OCD episode in general is very challenging to overcome. It does not happen overnight, and recovery takes so much work. For me, the intrusive thoughts and how I responded to them, was what took me a long time to change. Everyone has intrusive thoughts. They are random thoughts like “what if I hit that person with my car?” These thoughts are not pleasant, but they happen to everyone. For someone without OCD, they would just have that thought and then move on with their day. However, someone like me with OCD would think that they thought that for a reason and try to figure out why.

In therapy, I learned that how I responded when I first got postpartum OCD was my problem. I would get an intrusive thought, get terrified of the thought, and then proceed to obsess about the thought to the point of making myself sick. This vicious cycle prevented me from living my life. I had to learn that I had to let the thoughts be present, acknowledge them, and realize they are just thoughts. Like I said though, this doesn’t happen over night. For me, my intrusive thoughts surrounded my most precious thing in life: my daughter Caia.

I will give you an example from before my postpartum OCD recovery of me responding to an intrusive thought. When Caia was around seven months old, I was feeding her a bottle. I randomly thought “what if I purposely choked her with this bottle?” I got so scared of this thought that I had a panic attack and had to put Caia down. I obsessed over this thought from then on. Because of this thought, I decided that the safest route for me was to never be alone with Caia again. That way, I could never hurt her because someone would be watching. Looking back now, this makes absolutely no sense, but my mind thought it was protecting Caia at the time. I was in a hole of intrusive thoughts I could not get myself out of without help.

Fast forward to present day, I absolutely still have intrusive thoughts. I even have ones that still scare me, but I have learned how to respond to them so much better so they won’t put me back in that hole. Because of what happened, I have had a hard time watching any kind of true crime ever since my postpartum OCD episode. They were some of my favorite shows to watch on TV. I stopped watching them because I kept worrying I would become a murderer myself due to my intrusive thoughts.

Recently, I have been exposing myself to them slowly. I just watched the documentary on Netflix about Scott Peterson. My mind has been forcing me to think about the guilt I would feel if I did that to my spouse and child. It makes me sick, and it is not something I want to think about, however, I can’t stop. Those are intrusive thoughts. I have to remind myself that his story is absolutely not my story, and try to move on. Before, this would have made me sick.

Another story I keep getting intrusive thoughts about is Christ Watts. I keep hearing what his daughter said about how she wondered if he would do to her what he did to her sister. I barely could even type that because I am so disturbed by it. This is a thought that keeps popping in my head and makes me so upset. I know that his story is not my story either, but it is okay for me to be upset about it. I just can’t let their stories rule my life like they did when I had postpartum OCD. I love my daughters more than anything and could never imagine anything like that happening to them. It takes my breath away to think about it.

Intrusive thoughts happen to everyone, but they can really tear someone’s life apart that has OCD. This is what happened to me with postpartum OCD. I let my intrusive thoughts control my life, and it made me sick. I couldn’t get out of the dark hole my intrusive thoughts dug in my life. I learned so many tools to help me now to handle intrusive thoughts. If I had known back when I was suffering from postpartum OCD what intrusive thoughts were, I think my experience would have been so much different. Intrusive thoughts do not make me a bad person, and they will never control me again.