Work Emails, Napoleon, and Exposure Therapy

The following is a story I wrote about sending emails, a mundane task, but one of my tougher work struggles. It touches on the topic of exposure therapy, which I will discuss more in-depth in a later blog post. Hopefully, it will resonate with some readers who are in the middle of their battle with OCD.

It was Friday at 6pm and I was the last one left in my workplace.  And I was absolutely terrified.  My heart was beating much too fast and I was breathing heavily.  I could feel anxiety’s dual effects already starting to manifest: the tingles buzzing in my cheeks and the intense pressure in my chest near my heart.  My mind and body were reacting as if I was in a life-threatening situation, but the actual cause of my distress was something much more innocuous: sending an email. 

            While most office workers look forward to sending their last email on Friday as that means that they are onto the weekend, for me the last email on Friday was a consistently traumatic experience.  My OCD, which had started with just one obsession, gradually morphed into anything and everything, meaning that it affected me as much at work as at home.  And at work, my OCD affected me the most when sending emails.  Especially the last email of the week as I knew that once I sent that email I was “free”, so my OCD put extra pressure on that very last email.  And in terms of how my OCD actually worked in these scenarios, it did the same thing it did for every other aspect of OCD in my life.  It tried to convince me that I was something I did not want to be or that I would do something I did not ever want to do.  For example, on this particular Friday, I was sending my last email of the week to a black coworker.  Now obviously, for a “normal” person, this situation would not be problematic at all.  However, for me, as someone who had racism OCD, this was extremely difficult.  As with other forms of OCD, my mind tried to convince me that I was something (a racist) that I never wanted to be.  So, every time I was typing an email to a black colleague, my mind would be screaming the n-word at me and it would try to convince me that I had used the n-word in my email (even though I knew that I had not).  And this would lead me to check emails obsessively and compulsively (see what I did there) many times.  I would re-read the same email over and over, and sometimes this process would take up to 30 minutes.  I knew I hadn’t typed the n-word, but my mind would try to convince me I had inserted it and my mind would often “project” the n-word somewhere into my email.  My brain would also then go through all the consequences of my “usage” of the n-word, such as my immediate firing and inability to ever be hired again.  As you can imagine, this situation was a massive hindrance to my work productivity.  And my email struggles were not just limited to black coworkers, but also applied to female, LGBT, and disabled coworkers.  Basically any group for which my mind could conjure up a slur caused problems for me.  I often likened this experience to waging a battle against my brain, except the OCD forces of my brain were being led by Napoleon.  Whenever I thought I made any sort of headway, OCD always counterattacked and found something else for me to obsessively worry about.  Due to OCD’s persistence, my anxiety was constantly at a high level and any respite was always brief.  And this was just at work for something as mundane as sending emails!  It was hard enough to deal with this on top of my other forms of OCD, such as harm, rape, and self-harm.  Work had always been the closest thing I had to a break from these “more serious” (while they felt that way to me, I know every type of OCD presents challenges for each person) forms of OCD as I could focus in on whatever my current work project was and kind of forget their presence for a while.  But OCD was not about to give me any sort of a break and thus invaded every aspect of my life, from home to work, and from the significant to the mundane.

            Reducing my OCD responses to sending emails presented a particularly daunting challenge due to the real-world implications of sending emails.  For me, exposure therapy (combined with cognitive behavioral therapy) was the critical factor in lessening the impact of my OCD.  It really helped me learn to treat my OCD thoughts as insignificant rather than as something I needed to worry about.  And the natural way to apply exposure therapy to my OCD problem of sending emails would be to send as many emails as possible to as many people (that I would find difficult to send to).  But there was a large difference in say writing a story at home about acting on some form of OCD (and then re-reading it as a form of exposure therapy) versus writing an email that I actually had to send to other people.  In the former instance, no one else sees what I have written, and I thus I am protected in a sense.  However in the latter scenario, I have to bring someone else in and so there is no safe ground, meaning a “mistake” could mean my job termination.  And this was not easy.  The idea of sending tons of emails, each of which would cause me to have a mini panic attack was not a process I was looking forward to.  But I knew that unless I fixed this problem, I would soon become extremely unproductive in any sort of work setting.  So, I worked with my therapist to break this exposure treatment into separate, manageable parts.  We started slowly as during the first couple weeks, I would just try to re-read (check) each email one less time than I had been doing.  Also, we set a time limit on how long I had to wait before I could check the email again after sending it.  And then every week we would lower the number of times I could re-read and raise the time limit before I could check it again.  All this while I was sending as many emails as I could.  And I was far from perfect throughout this progression.  There were times when I backslid or went over the limit or just couldn’t effectively deal with how high my anxiety was getting.  But I made sure to communicate all of this with my therapist and we made adjustments and slowly, methodically, sending emails got easier and easier until I am at the point today where I can fire an email off without even thinking about it.  OCD will target whatever it can, whenever it can.  Even the most mind-numbing tasks can become fodder for OCD-related stress and anxiety.  But thanks to my therapist and exposure therapy, I now have the tools and mindset to deal with my OCD and render it impotent.  Now when I send an email, it is a wholly and truly boring activity.  And I love being bored.