Kissing Doorknobs by Terry Spencer Hesser

Kissing Doorknobs
by Terry Spencer Hesser

There’s a difference between obsessions and compulsions. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder can bring them together into one terrifying package for the person suffering either obsessive thoughts and worries or compulsions to do something they really don’t want to do.

Tara is eleven years old when the compulsions really start to hit her. She’s ashamed and tries to hide it from people. Fire drills are terrifying for her. Her friends and well-meaning teachers try to console her, but it doesn’t work. They don’t understand the basis of her fear. Neither does her mother. Confessions at church are a marathon session because she feels the need to confess everything.

Fifth grade starts off a bit better. Her fears seem greatly diminished. Then, for no reason Tara can discern, the worries return. It snowballs. After a class about drug abuse, she finds out her mother once tried marijuana and becomes obsessed by the fear that her mother is using drugs. Her teacher and parents are worried but, because she is doing okay in school and has friends, they decide not to pursue it. Then she hears the phrase “step on a crack, break your mother’s back,” and things get immensely worse. Her brain repeats the phrase over and over, constantly. She begins to avoid her friends.

“It was a nightmare and I was awake. It was hell and I was alive. It was unbelievable and yet it was happening. Over and over and over again.”

She channels her obsessive behavior into praying. Tara becomes obsessed with praying for people when they swear. Her obsessive behavior strains her mother who has no idea to handle it. She simply treats it as bad behavior. She finally begins taking Tara to doctors and they work their way up to a psychiatrist.

“Odd when you think about it. I’d been counting cracks for almost a year, but it was the praying that I couldn’t conceal and that couldn’t be tolerated.”

Unfortunately, all the doctor sees are insecurities and self-esteem problems. More and more doctors offer different diagnoses but the behaviors continue to mount. She begins touching her front door knob then kissing her fingers, always thirty-three times in a row.

“Instantly and instinctively, I spread my lips out as wide as I could and touched all ten of my fingers to my lips with the exact same pressure. I don’t remember what I was thinking when I did it. It was involuntary and yet voluntary. It was natural and yet unnatural. It was the birth of a ritual that would be repeated many, many times. In fact, from that day on, I was compelled to perform that ritual almost any time I came in contact with my front door. It wasn’t easy. It was exacting.”

Her mother screams and slaps her, acting like it’s her fault that this is happening to her. You want to ask, how can her mother and all these doctors not understand this is obsessive compulsive behavior? And yet, I know that at some point in my life, I have been on both sides of that equation. I have looked at others and said, why don’t they just stop doing that? They need to stop! We tend to look at hoarders that way, as if they are misbehaving, but hoarders are suffering from OCD behavior too.

Finally, a friend of her father’s recognizes the disorder. He is a high school science teacher with a student who has OCD. He connects the two and Tara learns of a doctor who offers behavior therapy for the OCD, but it isn’t easy. It requires her to think about the things that worry her and then not do any of her OCD behaviors. Tara calls the compulsions tyrants in her head and she finds the courage to fight them through her therapy. Her friend, Sam, relapses when his pet dies.

Though this story is not biographical, the author has suffered from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and some of the very compulsions she describes Tara having in the book. OCD, in different levels of severity, is believed to be much more common than previously thought, with 1 in 100 children and 1 in 40 adults suffering from it. It can combine with many other disorders as well. This book provides a moving story of insight into what people with OCD may be suffering. I highly recommend it.