Chapter 1
“So, how did your visualization exercise go last week?” Mary-Louise Lovely asked. “You were supposed to picture your mom’s spice rack unalphabetized and record your anxiety about it.”
“Yes, I recall,” Quinn Carr said dryly, adjusting her struggle bun. As she arranged it while walking to her car this morning, she had the jab of an inkling of an idea that maybe—just maybe—she should perhaps start doing her hair in front of the mirror again because it almost felt like she’d been struggling just the teensiest bit less the last few weeks. A visit with her therapist often disabused her of that notion, however.
Quinn sat in Mary-Louise Lovely’s office in her favorite place, the corner of the love seat by the table. It was the perfect place to hold her notebook and/or binder, or notebooks and binders plural, depending on her level of anxiety and what she wanted to talk about in her session. She could also see out the large window to catch calming glances of the cobalt-blue Colorado sky, the dancing leaves of a stand of quaking aspen trees, and the occasional banded dove on the sill, offering a quizzical tilt of its head. Are you still in therapy? It’s already September, for heaven’s sake, Quinn pictured it, thinking. How hard is it to get over OCD? Just quit doing that stuff. The same thing Quinn told herself on too many occasions.
Quinn confidently handed her two-inch blue binder to Mary-Louise Lovely, who sat in the chair diagonal from her. Every week the chair seemed to be at a slightly different angle to the area rug. And every week it took almost all of Quinn’s willpower not to place it in its obvious proper place.
She wondered what Mary-Louise Lovely would write in her yellow legal pad about her if she found out Quinn had dug deep to uncover the name of the cleaning company for the office building and tried several different scenarios with her schedule to see if she could arrange a part-time job on this particular crew. She could not. She decided not to mention it, but knew, deep down in her soul, that if she ever came to own a cleaning company, on the first day of training, new employees would be tested on their ability to replace furniture in the carpet indentations from whence they came.
It didn’t take too many sessions before Mary-Louise Lovely invited, then waited for, Quinn to readjust the chair before she settled into it for their fifty-five minutes. “I want you to be able to concentrate,” she’d said. That’s when Quinn knew she was a good therapist. Or at least one she could get along with. Everything about Mary-Louise Lovely—whose full name Quinn decided long ago absolutely suited her and should always be used in its unabridged glory—calmed Quinn. Her unassuming honey-blond hair, which she wore unadorned, happily and freely brushed her shoulders whenever she moved. Her open, honest face devoid of all makeup except the tiniest bit of mascara and lip gloss. Her sensible clothes and shoes, so comfortable on her frame that it transmogrified into comfort for Quinn as well. Before Mary-Louise Lovely uttered a word of greeting, her simple presence comforted Quinn, even when taming her monster was as far from comfortable as allspice was from white peppercorns.
Quinn bounced in her chair a little as she awaited Mary-Louise Lovely’s admiration of her binder.
Mary-Louise Lovely flipped through the pages. “I thought we agreed you’d use a scale of one to ten.”
Quinn nodded.
“And I see here you used a scale of one to one hundred.”
“To allow for nuance. My thoughts are very nuanced.” Quinn leaned closer to the binder resting on Mary-Louise Lovely’s knees. She flipped to the blue tab. “Here’s the section for my thoughts and feelings.”
“Color-coded as to time of day, I see.”
Then the yellow tab, “Line graph.” Red tab, “Bar graph.” Green tab, “Pie chart.” Quinn babbled about her process while Mary-Louise Lovely silently turned the pages.
The therapist’s face showed no judgment. An impenetrable mask.
But Quinn penetrated it. She slumped against the back of the love seat, confidence dissolving like a tissue put through the spin cycle. “How is it possible to do an assignment to get rid of my OCD in a total OCD manner?” she wailed.
Mary-Louise Lovely smiled at Quinn’s dramatics and handed back the binder. “If it’s any consolation, the assignment wasn’t going to ‘get rid of your OCD,’ no matter how you completed it. And I probably should have told you to record your thoughts in a quick text to yourself instead. Let’s call this a case of poor instructions.”
Quinn smiled despite herself. Mary-Louise Lovely had that way about her. Quinn never felt criticized or reprimanded here. One glance into her therapist’s big brown eyes and ready smile immediately relaxed her. Mary-Louise Lovely would be the perfect therapist if she could only Shrinky-Dink into pocket size so Quinn could carry her around all day.
“Okay. So, we agree. It’s your fault I’m chock-full of OCD. You and your lousy non-OCD instructions. How’d you ever get a license, anyway?” Quinn grinned at her.
Mary-Louise Lovely laughed softly, making her hair dance. “I want you to remember that obsessive-compulsive disorder is an anxiety disorder, but it’s also a way to deal with anxieties, which makes it a tricky little monster.”
“Hey, I heard a joke I thought you’d like,” Quinn said. “A guy asks, why do you place a pine tree branch outside your front door every day? And his friend says, to keep the tigers away. So the guy says, but there aren’t any tigers. His friend replies, right? Pretty effective, eh?” Quinn leaned forward with a gleam in her eye. “It’s an OCD joke, get it?”
“Funny. Is that how you see your compulsions?”
“Absolutely. The tree branch is my counting steps or alphabetizing or whatever, and the tiger is my overwhelming need to organize and categorize everything.” Quinn glanced at Mary-Louise Lovely. “Do I win something?”
“Do you want a gold star in your chart?”
“Do you have those?”
Mary-Louise Lovely flashed her notepad at Quinn. “Nope. Sorry.”
“You’re such a tease.”
“I do like that joke, though. It’s a really good snapshot of the OCD mindset. With any repetitive behavior, the more you do of it, the more you need to do it. You brought up counting your steps. You started one day counting your steps to the end of the block. Then you progressed to counting your steps all the way home from the diner—”
“I wouldn’t call it progress.”
“Maybe that’s the wrong word. But then it turned into every time you were out walking. Some of my patients say they kind of disassociate while they’re doing their rituals.”
“That’s how it is for me sometimes, like I’m in a trance. I look up from filling the condiments on one table at the diner, and all of a sudden I’m done with all the tables and I have no memory of doing any of them. And when I got stuck in that walking loop over at Hugh Pugh’s house that day, I only realized how long I’d been doing it because I almost passed out from the heat. Imagine how poor Virginia Woof felt! A small dog like her isn’t built for all that. I’m just lucky Hugh’s neighbor Barbara saw me and made us come in her house and pour water down our throats.”
Mary-Louise Lovely nodded. “OCD is a way to feel like you’re controlling things, but it’s really the other way around. People believe something bad will happen if they don’t do their rituals.”
Quinn stared out the window for a bit, watching the aspen leaves flutter. They were getting the telltale golden color that signified September had finally made its appearance in Colorado. Sweater weather instead of sweating weather. “I don’t really think something bad will happen if I don’t do things a certain way,” she finally said. “But it feeeels like it will.”
“Exactly,” Mary-Louise Lovely said. “OCD is a feeeeling disorder. We need to figure out the feeeelings before we can straighten out the thoughts. Unless the lake is calm, we can’t see our reflection.”
“Deep.”
“I’m not just another pretty face.” She smiled. “This week we’re going to try some exposure therapy. You did the first step with the visualization exercise, but now you’re going to get your hands dirty.”
“Good thing I’m not a germophobe, then.”
“You might wish you were after you hear what I want you to do.”
“Uh-oh.”
“You’re actually going to randomize those spices. Maybe not even have them in the spice rack.”
Quinn gasped like a Victorian princess who’d just been told to empty a chamber pot.
“Or you can have your mom do it. Because your real job is to leave them there as long as you can. But no notebook this week. Just text yourself, or me, some quick thoughts as soon as you have them. You always have your phone, so just use that. I don’t want you to document this to within an inch of its life, just note whenever you feel the urge to re-alphabetize the spices, or even if you just feel the need to check on them. Note when you think about those darn spices, sitting there all willy-nilly every which way.”
Quinn shuddered.
“And note if you used any of your distraction tools or if it got too overwhelming and you had to fix them. Then next time we’ll talk about it and decide what to do next. We’ll either do the spice rack again, or you can choose a more difficult task if this was too easy.”
“Too easy? Climbing Mount Everest is too easy. Teaching my goldfish, Fang, to walk is too easy. Growing potatoes on Mars is too easy. This has already given me sweaty palms.” Quinn rubbed her hands on her jeans, then held them up to prove they were already sweaty again.
Mary-Louise Lovely smiled. “You’ll be fine. Have you ever jumped into a lake? It was freezing at first, but then you got used to it—habituated, we call that—and after a while, it felt like the perfect temperature. That’s the idea here, too.”
Quinn knew she was right, but immediately noticed her heart start pounding anyway. She was finding it hard to breathe and began “doing her finger thing,” as Rico put it: touching each finger of her right hand to her thumb, then her left-hand fingers to her left thumb, over and over.
“You’re feeling out of control.”
“Gosh, you’re not just another pretty face.” Quinn panted. Felt a trickle of sweat along the side of her temple. Willed her fingers to stop, but they refused.
“I want you to focus on exactly what’s going on right now, internally and externally.”
“You’re telling me I have to stop alphabetizing Mom’s spices, and it makes me anxious, out of control. I want to race home to protect the pantry.”
“Ask what your OCD monster wants you to do.”
“He wants me to alphabetize something. If not the spices, then maybe your files for you. If I don’t, he’s telling me I’m pretty worthless. He doesn’t want me to change.”
Mary-Louise Lovely leaned forward and rested her elbows on her knees, never breaking eye contact. “Quinn, you get to decide if that’s helpful or not.”
“No, it’s not helpful!” Quinn bugged out her eyes at Mary-Louise Lovely.
“Okay.” She leaned back in her chair. “So, establish two or three things you could do instead.”
“I could yell ‘baba ghanoush’ and go get a soda from your machine to break the cycle. I could give in and alphabetize something. I could”—Quinn groped for one more thing to do—“call my therapist and have her tell me what to do!”
Mary-Louise Lovely watched Quinn for a moment, a reassuring smile playing on her lips.
“What?” Quinn finally asked.
“Look at your hands.”
Quinn looked down at her lap, her hands neatly and calmly folded in front of her. She looked up with big eyes. “When did I stop? Are you secretly a witch?”
“I’ve been called worse. But all I did was teach you the FADE technique. Focus on what’s going on. Ask what your OCD monster wants you to do. Decide if it’s helpful. Establish two or three things you could do instead. Focus, ask, decide, establish. FADE.”
“You are a witch.”
“I love that the first thing you said was that you could distract yourself. But you can’t always leave a situation, so here’s another distraction technique. Wherever you are, find an object to look at. Start listing specific things about it. Practice on me. What do you see?”
“You’re blond, perhaps from a bottle.”
Mary-Louise Lovely snorted.
“You’re sitting. Ankles crossed. Yellow legal pad in your lap. Pen from that mystery writer you like, so you must have gone to her book signing.” Quinn felt her breathing begin to slow.
Mary-Louise Lovely looked closely at her pen. “Very observant.”
“Black pants. Expensive shoes. So cute, by the way.”
“Thank you.”
“Lavender top, white camisole underneath, probably—”
“Okay, that’s enough. I’d forgotten just how observant you are.” Mary-Louise Lovely flashed her smile. “Feel better? More in control?”
Quinn nodded.
“You moved out of your imagination and into observing the real world. If you can do this for yourself, it’ll be harder for your OCD monster to take control of your imagination and work it into a frenzy.”
Quinn nodded again.
“Did you notice earlier when you said your OCD monster doesn’t want you to change?”
“Did I?”
“Yes, and that’s very perceptive of you.”
“Guess I’m not just a pretty face either.” Quinn tossed her hair melodramatically over her shoulder.
“Change is hard and uncomfortable, even if it’s good change. I remember when I was moving into my own apartment after grad school. I was so excited and happy, but so scared. It takes courage to change things that have been the status quo for so many years.”
“Like my OCD monster.”
“Like your OCD monster.” Mary-Louise Lovely nodded. “Even though you’d rather he disappeared, you understand him. You’re worried that whatever happens next, you won’t understand. Some of my clients don’t even want to begin treatment because they have an illusion of control and coping mechanisms they think are working.”
Quinn thought back to that middle-of-the-night phone call she had finally made to Mary-Louise Lovely. Lost and completely broken by her OCD and depression, that business card on her parents’ corkboard was a three-and-a-half-by-two-inch lifeline. Nothing had been working for her, and she’d always be grateful for that four-hour conversation in which Mary-Louise Lovely had rescued her, providing a safe haven that night and ever since. Despite the rescue, though, Quinn still felt like she was flailing in the deep end, barely keeping her head above water.
With a thoughtful expression, Mary-Louise Lovely studied Quinn, watched as the emotions played across her face. Gently she said, “At least you’re trying hard to win this race with your monster.”
“Yeah, but I keep tripping over my own two feet.” Quinn sighed and slumped into her seat. “I can’t even see the finish line.”
Mary-Louise Lovely tilted her head and stared deep into Quinn’s eyes. “You will. Trust me. There’s a saying I like: Fall down seven times, get up eight. That’s you. You persevere. ...
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