Reply To: Caring For Someone With OCD? We Can Help!

[Forum Moderators]

Has Your Family Suffered Disruption to Your Personal and Social Lives?

For many families, the burden of care can fall mostly to one family member. Disruption can take many forms, from demands to participate or cooperate with rituals to domination of almost every action in the home. Demands can often be accompanied by shouting and bad temper and in some cases with violence. It is difficult to imagine the great stress on the physical and emotional well-being of family members.

There is no doubt that OCD affects relationships. There is often a feeling of shame and isolation as well as great sadness about how relationships have changed. Carers and families often talk about a sense of ‘wasted lives’, and refer not just to the life of the sufferer, but their own as well. Before the onset of OCD, sufferers, families and individuals had often functioned at high levels at school and college, socially and at work and there is the sense that not only do they now have to cope with an illness, but with this sense of sadness and loss as well.

Relatives often make comments such as:

“We used to be so close”, “It’s like the son I had is gone. I sometime see glimmers of him but mostly it is like living with a different person. I just don’t know who he is any more”.

Other descriptions include: “a living bereavement”, “being in a different world apart from reality”. Some avoid friends and family because of the pain they feel when they see others enjoying the many good events and normal milestones of life. Comments include: “I can’t stand it when I am invited to a wedding or a party because I am so jealous”.

The examples and comments above illustrate some of the ways the emotional lives of OCD families are affected. There is some similarity to how the lives of the families of people with other ailments such as alcoholism are affected, but it seems that there is less awareness of the effects of OCD on the family and consequently less effort to treat it despite the above-mentioned high prevalence rate.

When carers get together, they often find they share many of the same feelings. Some of the most common feelings carers describe are: Frustration, Resentment, Guilt, Anger, Fear, Loneliness, Depression.We have some resources for carers and loved ones on our Resources page – just click on “I am a carer or loved one and want some resources.”