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Jun 26
  • Written By Scott Drochelman

    • #190 – Ask The Expert – Stacy Quick

    #190 - Ask The Expert - Stacy Quick

    Understanding And Treating OCD

    Stacy Quick grew up with intrusive thoughts starting at age 5. As a teenager it progressed to an attempt to throw away her whole bedroom. She’d begun to find that the thoughts could attach themselves to things. So if she could just get rid of the things, then the thoughts would go with them.

    At 15 she first learned about OCD on Dateline, but help wouldn’t come for years after that. In high school she dropped out 3 times because of her anxiety and the time she was out of class attempting to clean herself. A task that was never truly complete.

    In her early 20s things hit a low. At that point, she was experiencing most of the categories of OCD. She was basically not leaving her house. She could only eat food that wasn’t prepared by her, which devolved into a hamburger from McDonalds every four days. She lost 100lbs and began cleaning her mouth with cleaning products. It was then that she finally got help.

    After getting help, she went back to high school, then college and finally got her master’s degree. Today, she is a Licensed Professional Counselor. She uses the therapies that helped her recover and her lived experiences to help others understand it is possible to live a life in recovery. She is a mother of 3 children, 2 of whom are also diagnosed with OCD. In addition to being a therapist at NOCD, Stacy is also a writer and content creator on the topic of OCD. 

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    Episode Transcript

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Coming up on this episode of The Courage to Change sponsored by Lionrock.life.

    Stacy Quick:

    I went to some psychiatrists, I went to some counselors, but nobody really knew what to do. They tried some medications and that was really rough. I remember going from somebody who doesn’t even really like to take Tylenol to now all of a sudden I’m prescribed six psychiatric meds and it wasn’t helping. So I bagged it all up and I took it to them and I quit treatment for another two years or something. I went a couple times, not good results. I finally found a therapist. It took me probably a good year before I told that therapist much of what I was going through. Thankfully, this therapist knew somebody who specialize in OCD because at that time, I was pretty poor, I couldn’t afford care. So I was going through a local agency, and so I would’ve never gotten any specialized care in OCD.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Hello, beautiful people. Welcome to The Courage to Change: A Recovery Podcast. My name is Ashley Loeb Blassingame, and I am your host. Today, we have Stacy Quick. Stacey grew up with intrusive thoughts starting at age five. As a teenager, it progressed to an attempt to throw away her whole bedroom. She begun to find that the thoughts could attach themselves to things. So if she could just get rid of the things, then the thoughts would go with them. At 15, she first learned about OCD on Dateline, but help wouldn’t come for years after that.

    In high school, she dropped out three times because of her anxiety and the time she was out of class attempting to clean herself, a task that truly was never complete. In her early twenties, things hit a low. At that point, she was experiencing most of the categories of OCD. She was basically not leaving her house. She could only eat food that wasn’t prepared by her, which devolved into a hamburger from McDonald’s every four days or so. She lost 100 pounds and began cleaning her mouth with Comet and other cleaning products.

    It was then that she finally got help. After getting help, she went back to high school, then college, and finally got her master’s degree. Today, she uses the therapies that helped her recover and her lived experiences to help others understand that it is possible to live a life in recovery. In addition to being a therapist at NOCD, Stacy is also a writer and content creator.

    This is such a great episode because it is incredibly informative. I think a lot of us misunderstand OCD or downplay it as something simply related to wanting things clean. I know I’ve done that, and Stacy really helped me understand all the different ways that OCD can show up, all the different ways that we see it in children, what the warning signs are, and how OCD can look like a lot of other things.

    After talking to Stacy, I am wondering how often things are misdiagnosed that are actually OCD, and maybe if more of us know about this, we might be able to get better care for our loved ones. So in the interest of learning more of this disorder and helping as many people as we can, I give you Stacy Quick. Let’s do this.

    You’re listening to The Courage to Change: A Recovery Podcast. We are a community of recovering people who have overcome the odds and found the courage to change. Each week, we share stories of recovery from substance abuse, eating disorders, grief and loss, childhood trauma, and other life-changing experiences. Come join us no matter where you are on your recovery journey.

    Stacy, thank you so much for being here.

    Stacy Quick:

    Thank you so much for having me.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    So I want to ask you before we get into your story because I do want to talk about your story and what your childhood looked like and how you figured out that you had OC, but just to start with, can you give us a definition of OCD?

    Stacy Quick:

    Sure. OCD can affect really anyone at any age. We always say that it is one of the most well-known mental disorders, but also one of the most misunderstood. So a lot of people think they know what it is, but when it really comes down to it, they have this idea of what it is versus what it really is. So it involves obsessions and compulsions, obsessions being unwanted, intrusive thoughts, images, urges, and sometimes feelings, and compulsions are really use the individual attempts to neutralize them or reduce the anxiety and distress that’s caused by the obsessive thoughts, images, urges.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    What are some of the types of OCD that you deal with maybe most regularly?

    Stacy Quick:

    Sure, sure. Growing up with it, there wasn’t nowhere near the information there is today. So today, you’ll hear a lot about themes, and so they’re really building on that lately. Back when I was a kid, it was the classic contamination and that’s all you really heard about, but nowadays, there’s so many I probably couldn’t even name them all, but at its root, it’s always the same and it’s doubt and uncertainty. Some of the themes or common themes are health OCDs, so really focused on fears surrounding, “Am I sick? Do I have an illness? Do I have something that’s undiagnosed? Does a loved one have that?”

    There’s also harm OCD. That one’s pretty well-known, but also taboo. People don’t talk about it as much, and that can take on many forms. It can be people with fears that they’re going to kill somebody, stab somebody. Hit and run OCD, where they’re afraid they might accidentally hit somebody or not be aware that they’ve hit somebody. Relationship OCD, so fears that, “Am I in the right relationship? Is this the one for me?” Goodness, the list could go on and on.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    So how did your symptoms start?

    Stacy Quick:

    I tell people a lot that I don’t remember a time without it. I was really young. I was five or six, and mine started off with some religious themed, which is interesting because at the time I wasn’t raised religious, but I had just taboo thoughts about religion and whether or not I had done something wrong. I’d have to say lots of prayers in my head to make sure everybody was safe. I would tie that into turning on and off light switches. I had to do it so many times, where it meant something bad would happen to my family. I also had some tic-like behaviors, which isn’t uncommon in OCD. I didn’t know it at the time, but just certain things I’d have to do with my body like suck it in a certain way, my stomach or breathe a certain way, just things that were really bothersome.

    When my family really started to realize, “Oh, there’s something really going on,” was when I was confessing. I really started to just confess every thought. Everything that I thought could be potentially bad I felt like I had to tell my mom. So yeah, that was my really early on starting to see some of that.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I think most of us who are just superficially familiar with OCD think of OCD as everything has to be really clean. You mentioned a minute ago the contamination, and when I have thought about OCD, it isn’t even the thought of contaminations. It’s more like it has to be clean, but it sounds like it’s not just that it has to be clean, it’s that it’s contaminated and that it has to be clean, and that would make it feel more urgent. Can you talk a little bit about that feeling of emotional contamination that you experienced?

    Stacy Quick:

    Yeah. That was definitely, I got older, that was the main theme, emotional contamination. Really, to explain that, it’s tricky, and it’s a little different, I think, for everyone, but for me, it was this idea that if you think something, it was tying it to objects or items, and then those objects and items would become dirty. So if I could clean the items, I could somehow neutralize the thought. I think that’s how it is with a lot of people who have that type of OCD. We know it doesn’t make any logical sense. Most people with OCD have a great deal of insight. They know that what they’re doing and the way that they’re thinking is pretty illogical, but because OCD is known as the doubting disorder, it implants doubt, and if there’s even a 0.001% chance it is somehow dirty because of the thought I had, I’m going to wash it just to be sure. That’s how OCD works, “Just in case, I need to do this.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    So I heard two different things. I heard dirty as in dirt, and then I heard the emotional contamination. So if you have … I’m just going to make something up. If you have a dish that’s dirty, what could an emotion be contaminating that and also a dirt? How do you think about that as it relates to emotional contamination versus just dirty?

    Stacy Quick:

    Yeah, sure. Like I said, everybody is unique and different. There are some people with classical contamination where they are worried about germs or diseases or dirt in general. For me, that was not really my thing that I focused on. So I guess a good example of emotional contamination might be if I was watching something on TV, let’s say a show came up about sexual abuse or somebody was molested or something like that, and let’s say I was using a certain blanket or I was eating off of a certain plate or sitting in a certain place. What I would do is maybe tie a thought that would pop into my head. Let’s say I thought, “Well, what if that happened to me and I don’t remember it? What if I was molested or what if …” and then somehow in my mind I would say, “Well, if I can clean this blanket, it washes away the thought in a sense.” So I knew that didn’t really make any sense, but at the same time, it was that pull that I need to do it just to feel better.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    What was your childhood like? Do you think that the need to control was in part a response to environmental or just genetic?

    Stacy Quick:

    The general consensus out there is that we don’t know what causes it, that so many things factor into it like any other mental condition. We know that genetics plays a huge part. I often tell people I have three biological children, two have been diagnosed with it. I’ve had it since I was very, very young. I have two other immediate family members with it. So for me, it really is genetic and I see it as a brain disorder. I really do. I see it as parts of the brain that are malfunctioning.

    I do think that environment definitely can play a role. The flavors or the themes that you see in OCD for people tend to come from environments like what’s important to you. You’ll often hear people say that your symptoms or your themes attack your values or things you care a lot about. So in that regards, I definitely think some of that is learned, not even at a small environmental level, but society. We’re starting to hear more and more about OCD and the taboo themes. I think the reason why so many people have those themes is because it is so taboo by society. In that regards, I do think it’s a lot to do with environment.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    You did things like put your stuff in the pool and get rid of all your belongings. Was that something that brought you any relief?

    Stacy Quick:

    Yeah. So I was just a weird little kid. I was. I didn’t know what was going on. This would’ve been the ’80s. OCD was not what it is today. People just did not know what it was, and certainly not my family, certainly not me in rural Michigan. I was just from a very young age doing quirky stuff. I went through a gas theme that was really big, where I was scared of gasoline. I’m assuming somebody had told me, “Hey, weird kids, we like to smell gasoline when our parents [inaudible 00:13:07]” or whatever. I imagined somebody said, “Hey, that’s harmful. Don’t do that. You can die.” Then for whatever reason in my little brain, it latched.

    My dad was a mechanic, and so he would often come home covered in grease and oil and gas. So I constantly was thinking about all of the things in which he would touch, and then I would try and get rid of the things. I would either try to throw them away like somebody wouldn’t notice or I would constantly put stuff in the dirty clothes. Really, that’s what gave me away at a young age was my mom really started to notice all the laundry that would just build up. Then one day I folded a bunch of laundry or she had just folded a bunch of laundry and I had somehow thought it was contaminated with gas, so I hid it in a closet, and she came back and she’s like, “Where’s my pile of laundry?” and I was like, “I don’t know.”

    Then I would have certain things I had to say out loud. So I became really afraid of lying, ridiculously afraid of it. Everything I said I had to follow it up with maybe, I think, I don’t know. I remember my parents saying, “It’s a bad habit. You have to stop doing it. It’s really noxious,” but that was a big one that was not very easily hidden. Then right around that same time, I tried to throw away almost everything I owned. That one was sad because, obviously, you have a lot of memories and things, and they were important stuff, but to me, that’s how dirty it was. It had to go. I couldn’t clean it. I was exhausted because it was never good enough. I could try to clean it and it still was dirty. It’s such a hard thing to describe to somebody.

    It was like … I’ll give you another example because otherwise I’ll never be able to explain it. Let’s say you’re eating a hotdog or a hamburger and you have ketchup on it, let’s say, and let’s say you either have an intrusive thought or somebody says something about blood or something. Something’s triggered in you that says, “Okay. This could be blood.” Even though you know it’s ketchup, but it went through my mind. So just the possibility that that could have been tinged with blood, I couldn’t eat it, and then I couldn’t eat anything red. Then before you knew it, it’s like dominoes. It’s like every time I’m eating, now I’m thinking, “What else could be in my food? What other colors?” Then yellow could be urine, and it just builds. Before you knew it, for me, I stopped eating almost all together, which is crazy because I really like food. So obviously, that one got me some notice as well because that one was really hard to hide. I don’t know if that makes sense, but it’s tying the emotion into actual things.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    It actually is a really interesting coping mechanism in the sense that these emotions are these amorphous things that we have, and you were trying to make them concrete so that you could manage them, and then that actually makes sense, trying to put it into an item and then, “Now I can do things to this item to try to remove the emotion,” as opposed to having to try to figure out how to deal with this amorphous thing that’s floating around in your head and, “Even though it’s maladaptive, it really does make sense to me.” What were some of the … I’m thinking of, were you called a picky eater, weird? What were some of the things that you were called? I ask this because I’m sure there are people out there listening who are either thinking about their kid … I know I’m thinking about my kid who has … There’s some weird food stuff or people are like, “Oh,” they think about things that either they’re doing, they’ve done or other people that they might relate to that you mentioned.

    Stacy Quick:

    For sure. My nickname was Bones, which is just ridiculous and given my current size, but everybody just always called me super skinny. I was known for that up until I was an adult. We joked the other piece to this too. There’s so much here, but I also went through a few years where I was really afraid of choking. So I basically lived on mashed potatoes and gravy and ice cream for two and a half years at least. Oh, I just wouldn’t eat anything because to me, those were safe. They were squishy. So we would go to restaurants and everybody would make a joke like, “Oh, Stacy, she doesn’t eat much. She’s just going to have mashed potatoes and gravy,” and the waitress would … My brother would be ordering steak and all this crazy stuff, and then they’d look at my parents like, “Why aren’t you feeding your other child?” but it was just that’s what I did.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Were there some comments or characterizations about you that people made that ended up turning out to be OCD?

    Stacy Quick:

    Oh, yeah. I think a couple things with that. My whole life I was called timid and shy and bashful and all those things, of course, and that was just a lot of anxiety. Then with the food, it was, “Oh, Stacy, she doesn’t eat. She eats like a bird. She’s super thin,” that kind of thing, but really, it didn’t bother me much until my early 20s was when I was the sickest with OCD, the most Ill I’ve been, and that’s when I really stopped eating. I had bouts of that throughout the years because of the OCD, but it wasn’t until my 20s it hit really bad. I could go days without eating, but it was all tied to OCD. It was all tied to thoughts.

    I had some family members at that time who said I had eating disorders and who would say things like that. I would try to explain to them, “I don’t,” but I’m not also going to tell them, “Oh, it’s really these crazy thoughts,” but you couldn’t tell anybody why you weren’t eating and you could be literally starving, wanting to eat, and everybody’s thinking, “You’re just not eating because you’re worried about your weight,” but it wasn’t that at all.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Can you describe for people what an intrusive thought is and maybe give a couple examples?

    Stacy Quick:

    We always tell people, when you have OCD, the thoughts are ego dystonic, which means it goes against who you are, your values, the things that you would really want to do. It’s really the opposite. That’s what makes it intrusive. That’s what makes it unwanted. Then it’s persistent. Everybody has thoughts, the same thoughts people with OCD have. The only difference is they don’t get stuck on them, and they don’t try to attach meaning. People with OCD want to know, “Well, why did I have it in the first place? It must mean something.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    So an example might be like one I’ve had for years. It’s not that often anymore, but I used to … I would be driving and the thought would come through my mind that if I just jerked the wheel, I don’t know what, that I’d cause a car accident and how easy that would be, but not something I wanted to do. Would that be an intrusive thought?

    Stacy Quick:

    Absolutely, but you’re able to dismiss it when you don’t have OCD. It’s like your filtering is working. It’s spam. It’s a spam thought.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Got it. For someone with OCD, that thought would repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat until it was so bad they couldn’t drive or something like that?

    Stacy Quick:

    Yes. If that was something that the OCD latched onto because it’s so nuanced because there are many things … I can still have intrusive thoughts, but they don’t phase me because it’s not something that, for whatever reason, I’ve attached any meaning to. So when COVID came out, some people closer to me who know about my OCD were like, “Oh, my gosh, you must be really, really bothered by this. This must be really, really …” It didn’t phase me in the least. If anything, my life got 100 times easier because I didn’t have to socialize. It didn’t phase me, but people thought that it would because that’s how people see OCD like, “Oh, my gosh. Stacy’s going to be a nervous mess thinking she’s going to get COVID.” Well, I didn’t even because it wasn’t one of the things … Now, I’m sure there were people out there whose OCD did latch onto that, but that’s just how it … It’s so personalized. It’s so individualized to each person and it can change.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    When you were in your 20s and it got really bad, you stopped eating, lost 100 pounds, eating every four days, washing your face so much that you were getting these burn marks, what was the response from people in your life and how did you end up getting to a place where you got help?

    Stacy Quick:

    You learn from a very young age or at least I did to hide it because it’s just something where something’s wrong. You’re not like other people, but you don’t know what it is. So I think I was nine or 10 and my parents actually threatened to send me to a psychiatrist. I didn’t know what that meant, but I knew it was bad. I was like, “That means I’m crazy and I’m not going.” So I did work really hard to disguise it. When people would say things about, “Oh, Stacy, she’s a picky eater,” I would go along with it because it helped me to keep my way of doing things.

    So over the years, very few people, if anyone, knew the extent of it. Like I said, I think the majority of the people just thought it was a weight issue or a stress issue. I very clearly remember my dad saying something to the effect of, “You’re lucky. You’re one of the ones who when you’re stressed, you lose weight,” and I was thinking, “You have no idea. No, this is terrible.” It was hard. It was tormenting.

    I don’t know the answer to that. I was married, but I don’t think my husband really understood. I don’t think any of us really understood what was happening. So the final breaking point though was I had went to a grocery store one day, and I almost passed out. Everything was spinning, and I just said, “Oh, my gosh. Something’s got to happen,” because I knew why I wasn’t eating. No one else did, but I did. So then I was able to get some help.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    What was the response from your husband like and your family like while this was going on in your 20s and it was clear that something was really wrong and they thought it was the eating disorder thing? What were they doing? How were they responding to you?

    Stacy Quick:

    I think this is a sad part because I don’t think anybody really responded, and I don’t blame them. I’m not upset about it. I feel like nobody knew what to do. I feel like everybody just was waiting it out. I think at the end, towards the end, before when I started to get really, really probably dangerously thin, there was more worry, but again, nobody really knew. We knew I had OCD, but not to the extent.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    How did you know that you had OCD?

    Stacy Quick:

    So how I found out, I was 15 when I found out I had it. So many years went by where I didn’t know I had it, but at 15, we were watching, I think it was a 2020 or a Dateline episode, and they featured OCD. It was this boy that couldn’t leave the bathroom. It talked a lot about how he had to have his food prepared special ways, and he just would not leave this room. I very much remember my mom saying, “Stacy, you got to come see this,” and she said, “This is you,” and I was like, “Yeah, it is.” So she knew something was wrong, we just didn’t know what.

    Then once that happened, it still was probably a couple years before I actually got treatment because like I said, it waxes and wanes. So there were times it was really, really intense and then times when it wasn’t. So probably when I was 16, 17, we got some help. Nothing-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    What did that look like?

    Stacy Quick:

    Nothing. I went to some psychiatrists, I went to some counselors, but nobody really knew what to do. They tried some medications, and that was really rough. I remember going from somebody who doesn’t even really like to take Tylenol to now all of a sudden I’m prescribed six psychiatric meds, and it was awful, to be honest, and I’m not against meds on a side note. I do take medications, but I remember at one point I was just on so much stuff. I had no idea and so many side effects, and it wasn’t helping. So I bagged it all up and I took it to them and I quit treatment for another two years or something.

    Long story short, I went a couple times, not good results. I finally found a therapist. It took me probably a good year before I told that therapist much of what I was going through. Thankfully, this therapist knew somebody who specialize in OCD because at that time, I was pretty poor, I couldn’t afford care. So I was going through a local agency, and so I would’ve never gotten any specialized care in OCD. So they consulted back and forth and did ERP with me through that.

    So exposure and response prevention, that is the gold standard therapy for OCD. It sounds a little scary, but it’s not. I think it gets a bad rap. It basically encourages you to let the obsessive thoughts be there without neutralizing them or trying to get rid of them and not engaging in compulsion. So we’re really teaching you to respond differently. So for me back then, if I wasn’t eating red foods because of the thoughts, I needed to eat the red foods and then not do anything to undo that.

    That can be different for everybody. If you think you’re going to get sick and you have to wash your hands so many times, okay, well then ERP might look like we’re only going to wash our hands one time and then we’re moving on even if it’s not clean or even if … and we’re risking. There’s always risk, “Maybe I could get sick. Maybe these thoughts are true and I don’t need to know. I’m going to keep living my life, and if someday those come true, I guess that’s when I’ll face them,” if that makes sense.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    You said it took you a year to tell this therapist what was going on really with you. What were you telling them for a year?

    Stacy Quick:

    That’s a good question. They knew about the OCD. The very first appointment I said, “Hey, I have OCD,” but we still went through the whole assessment and everything. I just left out the parts that in my mind were too shameful or guilty to share for probably a good year. I’m estimating, but probably it took me that long to feel comfortable with this person to share those things because that’s the other thing with OCD. There’s so much shame attached to so many of the thoughts that people have. I think especially having had it for just … It was so ingrained in me for so long, and it wasn’t like it is today where you can Google it. For me, it was I was the only one and something was really weird and wrong with me and I couldn’t possibly share that.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    How did that affect your marriage? What did your marriage look like?

    Stacy Quick:

    Well, I’m still married. I’ve actually been married 25 years. I got married young probably because of my OCD. So right in the thick of my illness was … Those years, my early 20s were definitely the worst. I’m in my 40s now, so I’ve come a long way. My husband is just the most chill person you would ever meet. He’s so laid back. He didn’t even know what anxiety was.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    What? That exists?

    Stacy Quick:

    It just didn’t phase him.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Wow.

    Stacy Quick:

    He didn’t know the feeling of … He knew people had it, but he couldn’t-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    He hadn’t experienced it.

    Stacy Quick:

    He had never experienced it.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Wild.

    Stacy Quick:

    He can’t even wrap his head around it-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Wild.

    Stacy Quick:

    … up until just a couple years ago, to be honest. So part of me really admired him and thought, “Wow, that’s cool,” but part of me was like, “How can this be?” So that’s the other piece is that I certainly … I couldn’t explain it to him or to anyone, really, other than my mom. My mom really did get me through a lot of it. She was the one I did confess a lot of these thoughts to that I thought I couldn’t share with anyone. She, of course, did what we advise parents not to do, which is give me reassurance and tell me, “Well, Stacy, of course, those aren’t true. That’s so not you. You would never do that,” and to some degree it helped, but as we know, it’s a temporary fix. It’s a bandaid on a deeper thing.

    It obviously affected my marriage in some really rough areas, but overall, I know that he would say, he has said this to me many times that without the medication and therapy, he had said it’s night and day. He said, “You’re a different person for the better.” So I know that once I got help, there was a lot of changes.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    So now, you help other people heal from OCD and you work for NOCD. What does that look like in terms of how you help treat other people and what is NOCD?

    Stacy Quick:

    So treatmyocd.com, NOCD. We offer specialized treatment in obsessive compulsive disorder and body-focused repetitive behaviors, which is trichotillomania, skin picking, hair pulling, things like that, but really, when I first started there, it was just OCD, and that’s what caught my eye and that’s what I said, “Oh, my gosh, I’ve got to look into this place a little bit.” So rewind to my 20s, I had actually dropped out of high school three times due to my symptoms. Ended up going back, ended up getting my high school diploma. Started working with this amazing therapist and I said, “I want to help people,” and I said, “I really want to just work with people with OCD,” and bless their heart, they laughed at me and they said, “You’re in rural Michigan. That’s not going to happen. You’re going to have to work with everybody. That’s just not a thing,” but I was like, “Okay. I’m willing to do that. I just want to help people.”

    So I went through all the schooling, went back to school, college, all that. Got my degrees. Started working at the same agency as my therapist did, which is funny. Worked there for probably over 15 years total. Had actually worked my way up. I was a supervisor when I left there. So I had went from somebody who had gotten services there to somebody who … It was just a cool transformation. Then had this awesome opportunity to specialize in OCD and something that would’ve never happened 10, 15 years ago.

    So they have a free downloadable app you can go on. I call it a little Facebook, but it’s this community of people who either have been in recovery or who are on that process, and it’s people helping people. You don’t have to be getting therapy through us to utilize that part. There’s some self health tools and things like that and lots of education, lots of advocacy for the disorder. Personally, I’ve seen so many people get so better. It really is just this amazing thing that I wish had been there in the ’80s. I can’t say enough about it.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I love it. I love it. It’s wonderful. What are the medications that they’re using for OCD these days?

    Stacy Quick:

    Sure, sure. I’m not a medical doctor, so I can’t give medical advice, but I will say some of the most useful are SSRIs.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Oh, interesting.

    Stacy Quick:

    Those tend to be extraordinarily helpful. For me, that along with the ERP that I got was life-changing. I can’t imagine my life without it. I still see a psychiatrist every six months just to check in. Very much in recovery, and I tell people, “It doesn’t mean I don’t have symptoms. I’m not symptom-free.” It is considered chronic. Some people don’t like when people say that, but it’s like anything else. I also have hypoglycemia. That’s not going away. I treat it and it’s very manageable and it doesn’t affect me. That’s how I look at the OCD. It’s still a part of my life that flares up at times. Then there are times where it’s very, very quiet and I live. Most people, other than this is my job, wouldn’t know I have it.

    So I very much live a good life. It’s not that torment that I think a lot of people when they’re in like I was in my 20s when you’re at your sickest point, you feel like it’s never going to get better and it’s always going to feel like this. If there’s one thing I could say to people who have the disorder is hang in there because if you get the right treatment and you really, really keep fighting this because it can be so much different. It’s night and day from how it was.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    What is the difference … As someone who struggles with substance use disorder and when you talk about obsessive compulsive, that compulsion, I relate to the compulsion, I relate to the obsession. I obsessed about different things. I obsessed about things that brought me relief. For me, the things that brought me relief were substances. I wonder, do you think that there’s a component of OCD in substance abuse?

    Stacy Quick:

    That’s a good question. I think that, undoubtedly, there is a lot of comorbidity there. We know that people, a lot of people with OCD suffer with addictions and with those types of behaviors, for sure. To be honest, it’s not my area of expertise, so I don’t want to say too much on it, but I think almost all behaviors that are maladaptive, they come from wanting relief. We’re all looking for relief from really painful things no matter what those things are. It’s just in some ways the avenue in which you inadvertently, I guess, because I don’t think anybody picks what they’re going to go to. You know what I mean? I think for whatever reason, we just go to something as, like you said, a coping mechanism, and that’s really how I see that being very similar. For me, my mind developed these ways of handling these really tough emotions, and for somebody who has addictions, it’s the same thing. It’s just a different avenue and why. That’s the million dollar question. Why do we do that?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Tell me about what you saw in your kids. How early did you see it? Was it different between the two? What did you see?

    Stacy Quick:

    My oldest was about six years old and became extraordinarily worried about serial killers at six years old. Mind you, we don’t really watch a lot of that stuff, but schools do these safety things. I was very safety conscious. I wouldn’t let them play outside alone. I wouldn’t let them stay at a lot of people’s homes, all of that from my own anxiety, for sure. So that was really the first sign is my daughter wouldn’t want to be alone in her room. She would want to sleep in on our floor. She wouldn’t go places. She would talk about, “Well, what if I get kidnapped or what if this or what if that?” So that was really how it presented, and I knew she has a lot of anxiety. Then for her as she’s gotten older, it’s more health-related where she worries a lot about, “Am I having reactions? Am I having these types of things?”

    My other child actually had it pretty similar to me, and I was able to recognize it. He actually struggles more with … A lot of the signs for him were similar to the things I used to do when I was a kid. So it was really, in my mind, prominent with him. From a very young age, he’s always been very specific or rigid. He wants things certain ways. He’s the typical classical neat person, which I often talk about myths with OCD, how people think it’s always this super clean person or this neat, organized person, and although that’s not all OCD is, it can be a part of it, and it certainly has been in my life and his.

    So I noticed that probably from the time he was three, honestly. He’s just always had a super clean room, woke up every day, crack of dawn, did his routine, just very specific compared to my other two. What I really started noticing though is very emotional, very sensitive, especially to any sign of critique, and not even critique, but just simple things. If you were at all little stern with, “You need to do this,” then it was like, “Are you mad? Are you mad? Why are you mad at me? What did I do wrong?” this hyper focus on that. So a lot of reassurance seeking.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Is that something that you see a lot is hypersensitivity just generally?

    Stacy Quick:

    Yes. I would say in general. Most people that I’ve worked with, I can’t say everybody, but most people do seem to be very sensitive, hypersensitive to things and very aware. We talk about this sense of hyper responsibility. We see that a lot in OCD. A lot of people that have OCD will say, “I’m not worried something bad’s going to happen to me.” Sometimes they are, but most of the time, it’s how that will affect someone else.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    How did you start to address it with your kids? They were very young. What are some of the interventions that you employed for them?

    Stacy Quick:

    I wish I could say I did it really great and I was the best at it, but it’s a learning curve. Even though I recognized it, it doesn’t mean that I didn’t fall into a lot of the traps that I see parents fall into, which is how you want to respond is to love them and to tell them, “No, that’s crazy. Of course, you wouldn’t … Nobody’s mad at you. You’re the best kid ever.” You want to give them reassurance. You want to tell them all of the great things about them. So did I do that? Absolutely. Do I tell parents not to always do that? Yes, but I think it’s balance. I think it is doing ERP more times than not.

    So really, what I did, especially with my son who had the more severe case, my daughter went into therapy and we got it really quickly under control. My son, not as much. It’s been an ongoing process, and a lot of what tools or interventions I guess are really making him sit in uncertainty. So every time he asks for reassurance, “Are you mad? Do you think so-and-so’s mad at me? Do you love me?” it is shrugging. It’s saying, “I don’t know, bud. I don’t know. You’re going to have to sit with it.” They get really irritated at first, but it’s become a family joke now where if I ask a question, they’ll say, “Mom, you got to sit in the uncertainty,” even if it’s something goofy, not anything OCD, but really learning, teaching them that even if I’m mad, “Even if I’m mad at you, what’s the worst that’s going to happen?” and playing out these fears.

    So asking him, “Well, okay, let’s say so-and-so’s mad at you. Then what?” Then he might say something like, “Well, then they’re mad at me and they must hate me.” “Oh, wait a minute. Those are two different things. We don’t know that. We don’t know. Maybe they hate you. Even if they hate you, what would that mean?” and really getting down to it. It’s almost always this idea of, “People are disappointed in me. People don’t like me. I’m bad.” At its core, if you keep digging, almost always with OCD, it’s something to do with, “I’m somehow damaged or bad or evil,” or whatever. So in some ways, the treatment is as scary as it is, allowing yourself to think that maybe someday those things are true, maybe. We don’t know.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Really getting into the uncertainty of it and becoming comfortable or at least able to sit in it.

    Stacy Quick:

    Most people who don’t have OCD can be pretty confident that they’re going to behave in a manner in which they’ve always behaved. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. If I’m 40 something now and I haven’t killed anybody yet, I’m probably not going to kill anybody, and we don’t know. If somebody broke into my home and attacked us, there’s no guarantee I wouldn’t kill them. I probably would if I could, but this is to protect us, but that’s the thing with OCD. It wants to know for sure that nothing bad is ever going to happen or that the thing that you fear will never happen. Paradoxically in treatment, you have to come to that confidence that, “Even if it’s possible, I guess I’ll have to deal with it when that happens.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    How old were your kids when you got them into therapy for this?

    Stacy Quick:

    My oldest, she was six or seven. It was right away because I was going through my own treatment at the time, and it was really forefront. My son was a little different because I felt … This is going to sound bad. I felt like I knew what I was doing, and so I didn’t feel that it would necessarily … We had tried some different things. Again, this has been years, quite a few years ago, and so there really wasn’t this availability of specialists. So by this time, I was really just using the tools I had to help. We had tried some therapies, but they were very general and he didn’t like them, honestly. They weren’t very helpful for him. So I just were doing the things that I knew were helpful for me in treatment.

    Then of course, with him especially, medication was a big part of it, to be honest, the same medication that I used and that was really helpful, but he still struggles. It’s very chronic. I will say my oldest is pretty much, it doesn’t bother him much, but he definitely still struggles. It’s a process.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Absolutely. It’s very interesting how relatable it is to so many different aspects and so many different types of recovery with substance use. I remember in treatment talking about the fear of being abandoned and just the inability like, “I can’t deal with that. I can’t deal with that,” and, “Okay, but you also can’t deal with this addiction, so we’re going to have to figure out how to deal with maybe that’s going to happen,” or loss or we call it life on life’s terms, living life on life’s terms. That’s part of recovery is, like my girlfriend says, “Life is getting very lifey right now,” and it’s like these things happen. Really, recovery is this abnormal response to things that happen to everyone, loss, uncertainty, thoughts, things that happen to all of us as human beings.

    Then we have these abnormal response. I have an abnormal response to normal pain and human suffering. It sounds like this is a lot like that, where it’s an abnormal adaptation to discomfort, and in order to recover, we have to get comfortable with the normal life discomforts that other people experience and don’t kill themselves in one way, shape, or form, whether that’s on the suicide on the installment plan or actual is we have to figure out how to handle that and how to work through it.

    Stacy Quick:

    So a big part of ERP is teaching people you can tolerate it. You won’t like it. I’ve never met anyone who says, “Stacy, I love feeling anxious.” That’s not going to happen because it’s not a good feeling, but it’s a necessary feeling. It’s there for a purpose. It’s just, in some people, it malfunctions. I think this goes along with people who are in recovery from addictions too is that it isn’t even necessarily that you are overreacting to things that no other people wouldn’t. It can also be that you’ve experienced things on a deeper level and on an intense level for whatever reason. It can be a million reasons why. So for you, I’ll speak for OCD because I know more about that, but with OCD, it’s this alert system in your brain feels as if there’s a tiger in front of you or a bear and you are going to die. It feels the same.

    So the person with OCD has a really difficult time recognizing that that’s a false alarm. I suspect the same is true with people who struggle with addictions. It feels very real, this pain and this feeling that I want to escape from. So it is as if it’s life or death in that moment. That’s really the hard part of treatment for OCD is that getting them to see that, “Yes, it feels real and we still have to go through it because you have to see it’s not, and even if it is, even if on the off chance your fear comes true, bad things happen all the time and people figure it out.” We can tolerate a lot more than we think we can.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    The program, NOCD, what you’ve been doing is amazing, and I’d love for people to have the information and where they could contact you or if you have a website. For listeners who’ve heard our episode who want to reach out, where could they get in touch?

    Stacy Quick:

    If they go to treatmyocd.com, there’s a couple different things. You can call. There’s a free 15-minute phone call to get started. It is a more affordable option than a lot of places out there. I can genuinely say I don’t know of another place that has the amount of specialists in OCD and the training. The training that they provide is amazing. They have some of the world’s top leaders who are training these therapists. We also have the free downloadable app. Many, many people interact in that community. There’s tools to help teach people ERP. Now, obviously, it’s best done side-by-side with a therapist, especially in the beginning, but there are certain tools people can use even if they’re unable to get therapy.

    Then my own personal Instagram, I list a lot of educational stuff about OCD, a lot of funny stuff because I really do believe that humor, I think it helps, maybe not for everybody, but for me, it certainly does help. That’s StacyQuick.Undone for Instagram. Otherwise, we just want to help people who are suffering not suffer so much and get help sooner. That’s my big thing. Like you had said, with kids, how my life might have been different had anyone known what was going on.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Do you have resources for parents who are looking for help for their kids?

    Stacy Quick:

    Yeah, for sure. NOCD does education sessions with parents too. So a lot of times kids, especially teenagers, they don’t want treatment. So a lot of parents will just feel stuck like, “What do we do? What are we going to do because our kiddo is refusing to do?” because what kid wants to sit in uncertainty and not do compulsions? So that comes up a lot. So we do offer educational sessions for just parents. We offer support groups for parents. We have lots and lots of videos and just more stuff coming out all the time, articles, lots of articles about how to parent kids with OCD, how to recognize it. NOCD treats, I want to say, four years old and up. We do treat pretty young kids. I’ve worked with a lot of kids and I’ve seen really great results.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Awesome, awesome. Well, thank you so much for being here. This is incredible. This information is incredible, your story, all of it. I learned a lot and enjoyed it. So thank you so much.

    Stacy Quick:

    Thank you. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. I really do.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I learned so much.

    Scott Drochelman:

    I second that. This is a topic that’s close for me. This is something that’s part of my family. So I’ve had a lot of experience with it and there’s still a lot of ideas that I had about what it is and what it isn’t that weren’t correct. I think I’m thankful for anybody who’s listening to us right now because that means you listened all the way to the end. I think it’s important that you did because I think there are a lot of misconceptions about this. There’s a lot of this that’s just not intuitive. You have an idea of what it is or what it’s about for people or you picture some caricature like monk or something like that, something you saw on a TV show. There’s a lot of other ways that it shows up that people wouldn’t necessarily realize.

    A big one for me, honestly, was the fact that people are looking for reassurances oftentimes, that your natural impulse is to say, “There’s no reality to that,” or, “That’s not true,” or, “That’s not a real thought,” or, “Nobody believes that about you.” That’s just the natural response when somebody brings something to you that’s false, but in this context, if this is someone who’s in this form of treatment, you’re not supposed to reassure them. You are supposed to allow them to live in some of the uncertainty, which is just life, which is part of being a human being. So I think that that’s just a really interesting thing and not something that people would necessarily intuitively get.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    It’s like when I talk about helping parents with addiction and I always say this stuff isn’t intuitive. That’s why it’s really important to get help from an expert because the thing that you’re doing that is intuitive, which totally makes sense with regard to this disorder, is actually not helping and/or making it worse. See, I’m not even saying this. I really learned a lot about this and how … I think I told you that I went to my psychiatrist and we were trying some different … I was asking about a different medication for something and she was like, “Well, we do use this to treat OCD,” and I was like, “No, no, no, no, no. I need to clean more. Is this going to make me want to clean less than I already do because I can’t …” I literally said and thought that. I was like, “I’m not touching that with a 10-foot pole. If this cures people who like to clean a lot, I am so …”

    It’s funny, funny and also embarrassing and sad, but so many of us really just think of it as the touching of the doorknob, washing the hands that many times or someone who’s like, “Ugh, she’s so OCD, she has to clean everything,” but I heard all these other things. One of my kids, she described one of my kids, and I never, until this episode listening to her talk, it never occurred to me that he might have … It did occur to me he had intrusive thoughts because he would say, “I have something stuck. I have a thought stuck in my head I can’t get out,” and I was like, “Relatable. Have you seen the J. Crew sale? Not going to lie. [inaudible 00:52:36]

    Scott Drochelman:

    “70% off? What?”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    “Feel our cashmere sweater,” but, “I know. Let’s buy it. That’ll help,” but sitting in the uncertainty of, “What happened?” No, but I was like, “Oh, my God. He definitely has those aspects.” It never would’ve occurred to me, and then eating disorder, not eating the way she had, I’ve never heard that that was going to be something related to OCD, and I wonder how many people are being treated for something that isn’t related to OCD when it’s really OCD. However, the good news is everyone’s on antidepressants, SSRIs. So a crossover, SSRIs, they can treat it all.

    Scott Drochelman:

    It brings up a tricky thing with all of diagnoses, where it’s like whether you’ve gone to a specialist or you get a particular diagnosis, it’s like then an awful lot gets filtered through that lens. So like you mentioned, if somebody went with the … they had the food stuff that Stacy had and they were in treatment at an eating disorder clinic, it would not go through that filter.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Nope.

    Scott Drochelman:

    It will just be like, “No. We know what this is about and we’re going to treat it this way.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    They might add to it. They might say, “Oh, you also have this,” but there’s no world in which they would say, “You don’t have an eating disorder.” No world. I don’t. If I’m wrong, email me, but-

    Scott Drochelman:

    No, I think it’s true. I think it’s normal is that because things aren’t crystal clear and diagnoses can change, and I don’t know what I even want to say about it, but it’s just a tricky situation for everybody figuring out what are their own little things because it’s so easy to view it through … For you, you might interpret the same things, “Oh, well, this is just part of the addictive behavior.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I actually decided in this episode that OCD is the umbrella and that addiction is under the umbrella because what is addiction? Obsessive compulsive. You also have the physical pieces of it because you’re ingesting the substances, which grab ahold of parts of your brain, but you’re obsessing and doing the behavior compulsively, and you do it to seek relief. You can’t stop thinking about it. They’re intrusive thoughts.

    Scott Drochelman:

    I think you need to write a paper-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I was just thinking that.

    Scott Drochelman:

    … and get it peer reviewed and we can come back a couple episodes, we’ll talk about it.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I solved the problem. (singing)

    Scott Drochelman:

    We are waiting. We are waiting to hear back from the DSM.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah, exactly.

    Scott Drochelman:

    We think we’re onto something.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    We’re onto something.

    Scott Drochelman:

    They have now categorized all disorders in the DSM underneath OCD.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    OCD. New World. No, that’s not … I was going to say new world order.

    Scott Drochelman:

    We’re talking about the wrestling, professional wrestling.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I was going to say it’s brave new world, new world order. Take me seriously.

    Scott Drochelman:

    New world order, lizard people, Illuminati, all-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    OCD.

    Scott Drochelman:

    All of what she’s talking about.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    All under the OCD umbrella. Got it. Winning.

    Scott Drochelman:

    Well, I’m very thankful for Stacy to come on here and give us so much. I’m so glad that she could put some context to what it really is and what it really isn’t. This week, we’re rooting for you. As always, anyone who is listening, who’s struggling with anything at all, we are rooting for you. Ashley, anything you want to leave the people with?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    In all seriousness, thank you so much for listening and we hope you have a fantastic week and please reach out if you’re struggling. We have an email, podcast@lionrock.life. We’d love to hear from you and we look forward to next time.

    This podcast is sponsored by Lionrock.life. Lionrock.life is a diverse and supportive recovery community offering weekly over 70 online peer support meetings, useful recovery information, and entertaining content. Whether you’re newly sober, have many years in recovery or you’re recovering from something other than drugs and alcohol, we have space for you. Visit www.lionrock.life today and enter promo code COURAGE for one month of unlimited peer support meetings free. Find the joy in recovery at Lionrock.life.

    Scott Drochelman

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