It is so very hard to sit and watch someone you love suffer. This is how it is with my son and his anxieties and fears. I have newfound respect and empathy for my parents as they watched me struggle in a similar fashion as a child. They were stymied by my fears, and I could not articulate them. They sought help, naturally. But OCD was not well known and I couldn't even begin to express the awful demons in my head, so diagnosis was not confirmed until I was in my early 20s and OCD had come out of the closet.
Fortunately for my son, he already has some metacognition about his situation. He knows he has OCD and sees it as something a part from him, that he combats. He named his OCD Adolf Ricochet, which is brilliant if you ask me.
Anyway, we had an intake appointment as a prelude to a full psychological evaluation which is coming up next month. I hate to subject him to the scrutiny of doctors, but we need to know what we're up against. We know he has some issues, but other issues (co-morbid conditions, in psych-speak) are less clear. So we're looking for a differential diagnosis. (Yet more vocab I'm learning) (And I thought I knew therapy!)
It is just challenging to realize that you can't fix your child's problems, that you have to just be there with them to the best of your ability and try to be the calm, assured grown up. This is so much harder than it looks.
The sheer weight of responsibility is a mantle you don the minute your baby is conceived, which you will wear it until you die. That's kind of intense. When I see pregnant women, I just laugh. They have NO idea what they're getting into. You think pregnancy's hard, try the next step. It's the toughest job you'll ever love, to paraphrase an old army/navy slogan. (Or was it for the peace corps? One or the other.)
Toughest job.
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