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Early Behavior Changes

ericaanne

Updated: May 27, 2022

Prior to Nick's tinnitus and OCD onset, he was the type of person to get up at 4:00am to go to the gym, somehow be energetic all day, be the first person at school in the morning, study for long periods, learn and explore new things, read regularly, and prioritize his goals.



A lot of this changed once the tinnitus and OCD started.


The first thing I noticed was that he didn't want to get up early anymore. This lead to working out less, and eventually to not working out at all. He would rationalize with me that he hadn't slept all night and he needed sleep, which initially made sense to me. But as it continued, I started to realize he wanted to sleep to avoid what he was experiencing. He started sleeping in later and later and started showing up late to class, if at all. He then started napping, which he didn't really do previously. This was my first insight into how avoidance can extremely hinder one's quality of life.


For Nick to not work out was a major red flag. When I first met him, telling him to not work out was like telling our dog to not chase the lizards in Florida. It sounded insane to him. But once the OCD started, he didn't seem to care about his health at all. He gained 40 pounds in 6 months.


As he cared less and less about his health, he started smoking. He started smoking weed briefly, but it was hard for him to hide from me due to the smell. The weed was a red flag because prior to OCD, he didn't really like weed. He eventually switched to a vape pen because the lack of smell meant he could smoke the vape pen without my knowledge. He was hiding it from me, lying to me about using it, and lying to me about how much money he was spending on vape cartridges. I would find the vape charger everywhere.


One day, he went over to a friend's house where the roommates habitually smoked weed. One of the roommates was playing Call of Duty - Nick's favorite video game from earlier years. He decided to play with him. As he was playing he realized it was the first time he hadn't thought about OCD. This was the starting point of an extremely slippery slope with video game addiction. I'll get more into this one in later blog entries. For now, just know that video games were the biggest hindrance to Nick's progress.


Smoking, sleeping, and video games were his ways of decreasing his discomfort or escaping his feelings entirely. They were his early avoidance behaviors. They were also the source of many of our fights. I knew there was something wrong once his behaviors started to change, yet he told me everything was fine and he should be allowed to do what he wanted.


I kept wondering "where the hell did my husband go?"

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