Jump to content

Some Good Ideas That May Lead To A "Lightbulb Moment", Hopefully


Recommended Posts

 
Here are some great ideas that  I Have learned:
1.    OCD intrusions are, to others, just worthless mental rubbish – so our aim Is to see them just the same as they do.
2.    Compulsions are futile – carrying them out only strengthens the power of obsessional thinking.
3.    Learning not to “sweat the small stuff “– we need to cauterise blips, and stop them spreading into large blobs.
4.    Shutting out the past – what happened then is gone and over. Getting stuck into thinking about it, and letting OCD make us feel guilty, will just make us stuck.  
5.    When we get into repetitive obsessive thinking, our brain is “locked” according to Jeffrey Schwartz in his book “Brainlock”. We are stuck in gear, say 2nd, and can’t get out of it. But there are ways we can use to ease around the lock. Jeffrey’s “The Four Steps “ in the book help with this. Put the four steps into the search field on the main OCD-UK website for details. 
6.    Time travelling. yes you read that right, I have discovered how to time travel! Well, sort of. This method I dreamed up is all about convincing ourselves to believe that we can do this, and seeing if we get a result from doing so. I discovered this when my laptop took a dodgy update and I couldn’t get rid of some fault messages. I discovered from a laptop guide book that if nothing else fixes a problem like this, we can reset the date in the laptop to before the update. I followed this procedure and it worked. The fault messages had gone. So, if we experience a recent blip, a setback, with our OCD, we can ask our brain to reset back to the time just before the upset – then wilfully believe that by doing this, we can lose the upset. Our brain is a powerful device and works on belief (in OCD false or exaggerated core beliefs) – if we believe we can take time back to before the upset, so that it no longer exists, we just may find ourselves able to start again from where we were, in the good place we were in, with the upset ignored.  

In addition to these my forum friends have given me ideas to use. From “lostinme” comes this great idea which she finds very useful. We are calling it the “lost technique”.


When we find ourselves having a blip and struggling, we can simply take a time out. Leave our OCD efforts where they are, mark the page as it were, and get ourselves really busy on distractions that are beneficial and enjoyable, and that we ought to be doing anyway. 
Once we have shifted away from the issues that threaten to floor us, and are back feeling in mental equilibrium, we can simply restart the therapy work from the place we stopped. 


From Caramoole I learned that when feeling overwhelmed with OCD the worst thing we can do is give up, label ourselves sick and retreat to bed. All that does is surrender to the disorder, and leaves us open to awfulizing and compulsive thinking with rumination. 


A little excess anxiety won’t hurt us. If we get up and take some exercise, we will burn off the unpleasant excess arousal cause by the “fight or flight “response. And doing things that make us think beneficially will help shift emphasis.


Snowbear is like me and others here a believer in mindfulness as a helpful state of mind to take us out of our OCD thinking. But she has also introduced me to    Positive Emotion Generation.

When we get an intrusion, we gently but wilfully ease our mind away and into something kind or loving and in the present, in the moment - and we keep focusing on that. These emotions, along with joy, happiness - and the refocus into something else in the present in the moment, rewire our emotions from bad to good - plus also takes our mind away from the upset and into beneficial things. 


The  stop loss/make appointment method is a good way to  restrict ruminating. We need to get tough with ourselves to do this – remember, when the going gets tough, the tough get going.


Let’s decide exactly how much time we are prepared to lose to rumination – give it a little rope.  But after that, determine to give no more – at least for the time being. We can set ourselves a time for rumination -  maybe say, not now I am at work, I’ll ruminate at 19.00 hrs. with a bit of luck and a fair wind, we might be too busy at 19.00 hrs to ruminate. 


Hal said that he might acknowledge an intrusion with the mental thinking “oh, here we go again, OCD up to its usual tricks – but I am not going to deal with this now.” He slips the intrusion into a mental box he calls his “rubbish thoughts” box, and only allows a small amount of time later on to review its latest contents.   

Please share other powerful or just simple methods that were defining moments for you in your dealing with the disorder. 

Edited by taurean
Link to comment

If anyone wants to copy this post, open a word document then minimise it. 

Drag the mouse to highlight the post, then right click in the highlighted area then click copy. 

Minimise the forum, maximise your word document click in it, then right click and click paste :)

 

Edited by taurean
Link to comment

Well Roy I've just excelled myself, was reading your post regarding copying it in word document. 

However ive got an iPad, I copied it from here and pasted it directly to my notes ? . Wow didn't know I could do this. I can now save posts I find helpful instead of keep searching for them :yes:

Link to comment
2 minutes ago, lostinme said:

Well Roy I've just excelled myself, was reading your post regarding copying it in word document. 

However ive got an iPad, I copied it from here and pasted it directly to my notes ? . Wow didn't know I could do this. I can now save posts I find helpful instead of keep searching for them :yes:

Yes you can copy it to notes, to a "drive"  type app or whatever for own personal use - courtesy of our wonderful charity. 

Link to comment
2 hours ago, taurean said:

The  stop loss/make appointment method is a good way to  restrict ruminating. We need to get tough with ourselves to do this – remember, when the going gets tough, the tough get going.

Sorry, dont understand this Roy. BL

Link to comment
13 hours ago, lostinme said:

However ive got an iPad, I copied it from here and pasted it directly to my notes ? . Wow didn't know I could do this. I can now save posts I find helpful instead of keep searching for them :yes:

This is the wonderful result of sharing and exchange of information. You just had a "lightbulb":Lighten: moment Lost, for you to keep useful posts where you can refer to them off-line and anytime. I have created an OCD folder in my cloud drive where I save all useful posts and information about OCD and that allows me to access them through my phones, tablets and computer whenever I want without the need to access different websites all the time.  

Link to comment

That's a good way Mike. 

I keep the topics I write in a word document in a folder that is stored in the laptop but backed up in cloud storage. They are of course retrievable too via the forum. 

Any extracts from topics that could make a difference to me can be copied straight to my office suite in the mobile, or into that folder in the laptop. 

But I keep the latter minimal - and I have deleted from my storage all but my most recent topics! 

Link to comment

I am currently working on resetting time back to lose an upset. 

I haven't mastered it yet, but the logic is good and I can see how and why the place I was in before was so good - so essentially I am looking to retake that position. 

Link to comment
3 hours ago, taurean said:

I am currently working on resetting time back to lose an upset. 

I haven't mastered it yet, but the logic is good and I can see how and why the place I was in before was so good - so essentially I am looking to retake that position. 

I like the idea of time travel, Roy. But I question the idea of going back in time. :unsure:

Three things immediately come to mind:

1. Einstein, Stephen Hawkings and all the great minds of physics have agreed that time travel is theoretically possible but only forwards in time. It's (apparently) impossible to travel backwards through time. (Something about the way time-space bends and time graphs with forward and backward vectors and lots of complicated maths that I happily followed while it was explained to me, but that had clearly gone way over my head when I came to explain it to anyone else!) :laugh: 

2. Windows are a commercial company out to make a profit who don't give two stuffs for the welfare of their users. Why take any kind of life lesson from them or apply any principle they've invented? :dry: If Windows had their act together they'd sort malfunctions by fixing them in real time and moving forwards, not by conceding defeat, undoing and resetting to an earlier time.

3. Since we can mentally time travel both forwards and backwards (the rules of physics don't apply to the imagination) :)  then why not imagine yourself leaving the problem behind and moving forward in your time travel to a place where the problem no longer troubles you?

This last point is actually good cognitive therapy.

In imagining yourself projected forwards to a time where [insert personal OCD theme] no longer affects your life you are mentally preparing for the day when it happens for real, enabling it to come true. Much the same as an Olympic athlete does mental preparation for a race over and over - visualising themselves making the body movements. 

One of my CBT exercises is to picture my future at a time when I have no more belief in contamination, to imagine myself doing things when I'm fully recovered. Not a 'wouldn't that be lovely' kind of imagining, but actually visualise myself touching things that I currently wouldn't touch, visualise myself out in the world doing normal things I haven't done in years...down to the finest detail it's possible to imagine of how I'll do it and how it will feel. 

What I'm finding is this forward projection in my mind is helping to break the belief that things are contaminated. My brain has known for decades the contamination stuff is all nonsense, but my gut wouldn't let go of the belief it was somehow true. By imagining my future without contamination beliefs in it I'm strengthening the understanding that my fears aren't real. 

So forwards, Roy. Time travel FORWARDS. :) 

Link to comment

Roy, this is fantastic. In regards to your first point - this was highlighted in my CBT therapy. He mentioned that in any situation, there are multiple things that can happen. He used the example of a light that is shining on a sidewalk containing your "thoughts." 

The light will shine on a small portion of the sidewalk for those without OCD. They may see the intrusions, assess the risk, and shrug their shoulders and move on.

For those with OCD, the light shines on the whole sidewalk. We have a multitude of scenarios that can play out and we walk down the sidewalk picking out different ones and asking "what if this?" "what if that?" 

I found that taking this approach was really helpful to me and helps me assess situations in a more normal way. 

Link to comment
8 hours ago, St Mike said:

This is the wonderful result of sharing and exchange of information. You just had a "lightbulb":Lighten: moment Lost, for you to keep useful posts where you can refer to them off-line and anytime. I have created an OCD folder in my cloud drive where I save all useful posts and information about OCD and that allows me to access them through my phones, tablets and computer whenever I want without the need to access different websites all the time.  

Thankyou so much StMike for sharing this, I've heard of iCloud but I'm not sure how you use it :lol: I will look into trying to use it but I'm not very technically minded :( so I'm hoping it's straightforward :lol: 

Link to comment
23 hours ago, taurean said:

Compulsions are futile – carrying them out only strengthens the power of obsessional thinking.

No offence Roy, but that's akin to a therapist telling us to 'stop it'!  I am sure if we could resist compulsions none of us would be here!    Here is a little light hearted video (that Prof Salkovskis first showed at one of our conference a few years ago) that emphasis the point...

 

Link to comment

We cannot of course, Ashley, stop doing compulsions just like that - we have to work on it. 

But for some who don't realise that their compulsions are what keep their obsessional thinking alive, it's important to make this point :)

Snowbear's working towards a future without the dominance of the OCD is right of course, and the aim of therapy - to prove to us that the obsession is false or exaggerated, and to wean us off giving meaning to it and reacting to it. 

My little bit of tongue-in-cheek time travel is simply an idea to remove the power of an intrusion that comes upon us when we are in a good place, and throws us right out of kilter - like the ruction I experienced with the computer. 

This idea resonates with me, who does indeed himself find such sudden unexpected intrusions, when I am doing well, often quite devastating. Just calmly reminding myself what it is, what the OCD is trying to say, then positioning myself back in my mental equilibrium where I was before it has worked on occasion and I think if I can master it it will really do a, specific, job for me :)

 

 

Link to comment

Another simple but stunningly effective idea that I picked up along my journey was this saying from Jon Kabat-Zinn " we can't stop the waves but we can learn to surf" :surfing:

It's quite brilliant and a definite lightbulb moment for me - I realised that if we accepted that we had OCD but didn't let it overwhelm us, we could really begin to get to grips with ways to overcome it. 

Edited by taurean
Link to comment

I think Snowbear's take on dealing with upsets is great.

Seeing an upset for what it is, and not letting it mushroom up, is important - and there is of course no need to dip into the past to do that, but rather apply what we learn about the cognitive and behavioural side of OCD. 

Link to comment

This is fantastic Taurean, a massive thank you!

I've started an OCD folder too on my iPad and this was my first entry. Thank you Lost, for the idea of putting it in to notes. Didn't know how to copy and paste either from the iPad , but I now do!

Ashley, just to say, I'm new to understanding OCD and I'm just starting out but I understood completely what was meant by 'compulsions are futile'. I didn't think for a second it was akin to 'stop it'. I totally understood that it meant that they keep us stuck and cement our false beliefs/fears and keep them alive. Like oxygen to a fire. 

?

Link to comment

Something else you might like Emsie and others. 

Jon Kabat-Zinn produced a guided meditation called the mountain meditation which I think is really brilliant. 

It helps us to build resilience. Shows us how the mountain takes every storm every weather upset but remains strong and unflappable. 

I have it on my phone in a free MP3 download, which is findable from the Internet. 

Link to comment
Quote

 I am sure if we could resist compulsions none of us would be here!

I'm going to slightly disagree with you here (and possibly Paul, albeit I haven;t watched the video clip yet).......but I do believe we can resist the compulsions, it may be painful, we may feel compelled, we may be distressed by not doing them.....but I believe we can

Link to comment

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...