Alcohol and OCD
Is drinking a trigger or reward for obsessive rituals?
I wasn’t always a daily drinker. From college to my late twenties, alcohol was something that I enjoyed with friends, never on a schedule, never a part of the habits I’d created to soften the blow of anxiety attacks. For a long time, I didn’t use alcohol to make me feel safe in a world filled with uncertainty and danger.
That all changed in my thirties. Trapped in a marriage that was a sham, married to my business partner, we worked together in the horse industry where danger was a given, and the minute rituals of my OCD were rewarded. Carefulness kept a horse from escaping a stall or dying from ingesting a toxic substance. Attention to detail kept these massive, but fragile, creatures alive.
Always the last one to leave the horse stable at night, I compiled an intricate checklist of things to examine, monitor, triple-check. Were all the light switches off and power extinguished by flipping the breaker box? The barn was old, wooden, filled with dust. Barn fires are an industry nightmare and a legitimate fear, dust and hay igniting around huge creatures who are biologically driven to panic at the first sign of smoke. It’s difficult to remove the horse from danger or, worse yet, if they are trapped in their stalls with no way to escape, they’re doomed.
