Our House star Tuppence Middleton has revealed the bedtime routine that confused her mum when she was a child. The Bristol-born, Clevedon-raised actress has said she 'still battles with self-imposed routines' to this day as a result of dealing with obsessive compulsive disorder.
Last year, Tuppence conducted a series of interviews with the BBC which she opened with by discussing her experience of living with OCD, an experience she has since elaborated on in an interview with The Telegraph. In BBC's 'One to One' in May, the Downton Abbey star recalled: "I’m 11 years old. And like all 11 year olds, I hate going to bed.
"I avoid it using all manner of different distractions until my parents finally give me the marching order, and I say 'goodnight' to them before heading upstairs to my bedroom. I stop just short of the doorway and flick the lights on staring intently into the room.
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She added: "Around half an hour or so later, I hear my mum climb the stairs, and she’s surprised to find me standing in the same position at the threshold of my room, with the door only barely ajar, looking at something inside.
"'What are you doing?' She says. 'I’m doing my routine' , I say. She looks at me in confusion: 'What routine?'"
Tuppence confessed in the 14 minute programme that, to this day, she still battles with self-imposed routines, that sometimes prevent her from leaving her house. In addition to obsessive mental counting and compulsive checking behaviours, Tuppence suffers from emetophobia, an intense fear of vomiting.
Speaking to The Telegraph, she said: "I got quite sick with a horrible virus when I was 11. I was ill throughout that whole Christmas and a few months later developed post-viral fatigue syndrome.”
For the six months following her illness, Tuppence did not go to school, and could not even face getting out of bed. She said: “It was a confusing experience. The doctors didn’t know what was wrong with me.
"I was passed around to lots of different specialists. Then I just got better and again nobody really knew why.”
Nobody could explain why Tuppence got ill or why she miraculously recovered, so she made up her own irrational rules in her head to ensure her safety as a child. Left with severe emetophobia, Tuppence believed that counting rituals would prevent her from being ill again.
She told The Telegraph: "It all happened in my head, so it took my parents a while to realise what was happening.
"[My mum] had put me to bed, then came upstairs 45 minutes later to find me still standing at the threshold of my room, looking inside. I told her I needed to look at each of the corners for a count of eight.
"That included every corner in the room: the corners of the bed, the TV, everything. But I was upset because I realised that if I started with one corner then it wasn’t fair on the other corners and I’d have to start again.”
One of the interviewees Tuppence had a conversation with last year was clinical psychologist Dr Gazal Jones, who explained that OCD manifests itself in different ways. According to Dr Jones, obsessions can be intrusive thoughts, images, impulses, or doubts that cause ‘an incredible amount of distress'.
She said: "These intrusive thoughts could be about you know giving someone a fatal illness, or inappropriate sexual thoughts, or thoughts about harming someone. So the intrusions tend to go against the individual’s wants and desires as the worst possible thing they can imagine happening and that's why they cause lots of stress.
"And then the other element to it is the compulsion. So, after these intrusive thoughts and images pop up, people with OCD feel they’ve got to do something again and again repeatedly to either neutralise the kind of distress that obsession’s caused them, or make sure that obsession just doesn’t come true in anyway."
Tuppence Middleton will appear on our screens tonight for the first episode of Our House, which airs on ITV at 9pm.
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