Never knew it was OCD!

[Guest Praful]

Hello People,

I'm Praful, 29 yr old from India. Seriously, I never knew I was fighting with OCD condition all this while until I came across the book "Brain Lock" recently. I was so unfamiliar with my situation that I never even bothered to look at the OCD acronym. May be it’s because, I live in a country where there are no support groups and hence no awareness amongst majority of people in knowing about various human suffering conditions.

It is very unfortunate indeed that most people esp. family members remain numb and put a blind eye towards the one who is suffering with this condition. The result is that, you somehow drag yourself all though your childhood/critical teenage years and adulthood and even education getting low grades without knowing what it is that you are fighting with. This is such a dreadful medical condition that it eats you alive if unobserved and left untreated.

The worst thing is that, it keeps on manifesting in many areas of your life such as causing trouble with your reading and re-reading sentences in exact manner as it is written vocally/non-vocally to yourself, performing nagging rituals while preparing for your semester exams, normal jokes going over your head in a casual conversation and asking people to repeat it in all embarrassment and sometimes even cleaning your butt becomes a disgusting experience that you re-run the entire scenery in your head throughout the day and thereby heating up your head ruminating about things.

For me, it was the book “Brain Lock” that finally provided some breakthrough in working around and managing OCD. But still the fight is going on. Sometimes I wonder and keep asking myself “Why do I have to deal with this? What wrong did I do?” The answer could be lying in the subconscious as a result of past karma or past life cycle. Whether you believe in life cycles or not, the most proactive thing you can do is to undo or cancel out the past karma with present karma/actions rather than simply folding your hands playing out the victim of causality and doing nothing about it. And also, I guess, many of the troubles we face in life is the result of not living the life mindfully. The quality of life would take on a different curve if only we could bother to live our life mindfully moment to moment.

The mindfulness based cognitive behaviour therapy is a new revolution in the field of psychotherapy. And Dr Jeffrey Schwartz work of 4 steps (relabel,re-frame,refocus and revalue) in his book "Brain Lock" is also a progressive mindfulness based cognitive bio-behavioural therapy that advocates self directed neuroplasticity where "mind's attention" plays a central role in one's recovery. So, let not our attention be grabbed by those false alarming OCD circuits but rather work around those blankety-blank alarming sensations by refocusing onto some constructive activity and thereby enhancing our attentional circuits.

I have lessened the severity but still long way to go. Let's take a pledge to live life OCD-free!

Thank you,

Regards,

Praful

[dksea]

Welcome Praful! It can be such a relief to learn that this thing you have been struggling with not only has a name but also that you aren't alone in struggling with it! Brain Lock is my go to book for OCD and I always recommend it, glad you found it helpful too. Best of luck moving forward and feel free to jump in on the main forums, lots of great advice and support there.