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When watching the news on the TV, my obsessive worry, “What if I am responsible?” is working overtime as are the compulsive actions that follow. Normally these obsessions cause me to believe that I am responsible for someone’s death either from a car accident or a fire that caused a lot of people to die or a transferable disease; I believe that I might have caused any of them. Most of the time, anything that has to do with death I feel I am responsible for.
There are quite a few do`s and don’ts for me when I am watching the news, as well as several checking methods that I must perform. For example:
- The TV must not be on when I am not in front of it or when I am in another room. The reason for this is that when I hear the TV from a distance and can’t make out exactly what they are saying, I start having intrusive and irrational thoughts. For example, I hear them talking about someone that was killed and immediately my name, “Mornay Fourie,” comes to mind, and I feel convinced that my name was just mentioned on the TV and that I have killed someone.
- The TV must be on at full volume when I am watching it so that I can hear clearly what they are saying to make sure that they are not talking about me and that I am not involved in something bad that has happened.
- My wife must watch TV with me so that if something is not clear to me I can ask her for reassurance. She will reassure me that nothing is wrong and for a short time I will be fine, but then I need to ask her again. This need for reassurance can go on for weeks.
- I must record the news on a videotape so that when I am not sure about certain details I can watch it again to get reassurance. I will watch it over and over again. I not only record the news, but also other programs and movies. For example, when I am watching a movie someone on a bicycle gets hit by a car, I know it is only a movie, but the next day flashbacks of the fictional accident are on my mind, and I am obsessed with the thought, “What if it didn’t happen in the movie but actually happened to me? I am responsible for someone’s death, and I am going to prison.” I will then go back to the recording I have made of the movie, and I will watch it again to reassure myself that it only happened in the movie and not in real life.
- I do not watch horror movies or tragedies because I believe that if I am watching these things it says something about me as a person. If I like watching these types of movies would I like doing the same bad things as a person? When I am watching evil movies I feel that I have betrayed JESUS and He is for sure going to punish me for it.
- When I am watching reality programs that show disasters that happened in the past, I must make sure that I wasn’t involved. For example, I was once watching a documentary about world disasters on Discovery Channel. This episode was about a fire that broke out in a tunnel in France and killed a lot of people. After an investigation, they determined that somebody had thrown a burning cigarette out of his car which landed on a fuel truck, causing an explosion in the tunnel. I am also a smoker, and I became obsessed with the thought, “What if it was me that threw the cigarette, and I am responsible for all those deaths?” I have never even been to France, and I knew it couldn’t be me, but the thought and obsession was so strong that I needed to watch the program again to reassure myself that it did happen in France and not in South Africa.
I don’t really listen to news on my car radio when I am driving, because I am constantly afraid that I am going to hear the wrong thing, and I can’t record it to get reassurance later. But sometimes when I am listening to music on a radio station, they will switch over to a traffic report, and I am not quick enough to turn it off. They normally report accidents and which roads not to take to avoid traffic jams. When I hear that there was an accident, I am once again having the obsessive thought, “What if I was responsible?” I must then perform all of the usual checking methods I always do, like: check my car for dents, confirm where I was at the time of the accident, etc.
Sometimes I must go to the extreme and examine the exact place where the accident happened accordingly to the traffic report. I will determine if I was in that area that day and will try to get more information about the accident. When all of my checking methods are finished and I am sure that I wasn’t involved I will drive away. But after a while—sometimes when I am more than 20 km away from where the accident happened--I start having doubts, and I will drive back to check again. This takes a lot of time and obviously costs a lot in petrol money, but I don’t care because the checking gives me some reassurance. Unfortunately, after a little while the doubts return, and I must start the checking over again.
While I am driving backwards and forwards to the spot where the accident happened, I often have other obsessive thoughts and must do more and more checking. I will, for example, see an ambulance passing me as it goes in the direction of the original accident, and I will think, “What if that ambulance is on his way to a different accident than the accident I have just checked?” Then the first obsession I had about the original accident gets shifted to the background as it is replaced by a new obsession. A lot of thoughts are running through my head, like “Where is the ambulance going? Is he on his way to a different accident? What if I caused that accident and someone died?”
This obsession is even worse because with my previous checking I reassured myself that I wasn’t in the area where the traffic report accident happened, but if the ambulance is on its way to a different accident it means that I could be responsible for this new one because I just drove up and down the area. At this stage my head is spinning, and my anxiety is sky high. I have to know where the ambulance is going, but he is already gone. Now old and new checking methods are kicking in to reassure myself that I wasn’t responsible for an accident, and that I didn’t kill someone.
I will go back in time and try to remember if I did something that could have caused an accident. I will try to remember if I felt any bumps in the street I was driving on because a bump could have actually been me running somebody over while I wasn’t looking. I will try to remember if I didn’t change lanes and forced someone from the road. By doing this, I know I would be responsible for someone’s death, and I will certainly go to jail for it where I will be raped. I will be rejected by my friends and family, and I won’t be able to forgive myself. I will listen to the traffic report again as well as the news, which I normally don’t do, but in this case I am doing it for reassurance, and it has become part of my compulsive checking methods.
If the traffic report doesn’t mention an accident in the area I was driving in this gives me no relief because the accident might not have been reported to the radio station. While I am still listening to the traffic report, they might mention a hit and run at a different location, and then the second obsession is shifting to the background and I am starting with another new one, “What if I ran somebody over without knowing it and drove away?” Then the compulsive checking starts all over again.
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