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Guest cassie

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Guest cassie

Hello everyone, i am so pleased i have found this support group, its never easy to find someone who understands how i am feeling.

I have been diagnosed with OCD and i am currently undergoing therapy to try and improve my life.

My OCD became particularly bad just over a year ago when i lost my baby and it has been downhill from there, i then got help just before christmas and have been having the therapy since then.

I have a lot of difficulties, i cannot leave the house or go to bed without doing endless checks, i have a fear of contamination and getting ill, i also have a lot of bad thoughts and think about bad events happening in my life. Quite a new thing is that i do not like people to close to me or touching me.

I hate the way i have to live and want to change it very much.

Life is very stressful and i find myself unhappy because i am fed up of every second of everyday relating in someway to a bad thought or a ritual or anxiety.

My therapy is going well but it just seems to have made me more aware of how big the problem is and how long it is going to take to change my thought pattens. I am trying to teach myself that i have to learn to accept that i cannot live in a 100% certain world all the time but this is not easy.

Anyway i could go on and on forever about my difficulties but i wont as this post is already long enough.

I hope i can make a difference to other peoples lives by joining this site and hopefully get some support for myself too.

Thanks for taking the time to read this :) xx

May i just ask something that has been on my mind.... is it common to suffer from more than one type of OCD at once or am i just bonkers?!

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Hello Cassie, and welcome to the forum.

I understand it when you say that you hate the way that you have to live - I feel the same and I know of other members who would say that. I am pleased that you got therapy and I hope that, step by step - or small step by small step - that you gain a better quality of life for yourself or that you get your life back to how you want it to be again.

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Guest Sisyphus

Hello everyone, i am so pleased i have found this support group, its never easy to find someone who understands how i am feeling.

I have been diagnosed with OCD and i am currently undergoing therapy to try and improve my life.

My OCD became particularly bad just over a year ago when i lost my baby and it has been downhill from there, i then got help just before christmas and have been having the therapy since then.

I have a lot of difficulties, i cannot leave the house or go to bed without doing endless checks, i have a fear of contamination and getting ill, i also have a lot of bad thoughts and think about bad events happening in my life. Quite a new thing is that i do not like people to close to me or touching me.

I hate the way i have to live and want to change it very much.

Life is very stressful and i find myself unhappy because i am fed up of every second of everyday relating in someway to a bad thought or a ritual or anxiety.

My therapy is going well but it just seems to have made me more aware of how big the problem is and how long it is going to take to change my thought pattens. I am trying to teach myself that i have to learn to accept that i cannot live in a 100% certain world all the time but this is not easy.

Anyway i could go on and on forever about my difficulties but i wont as this post is already long enough.

I hope i can make a difference to other peoples lives by joining this site and hopefully get some support for myself too.

Thanks for taking the time to read this :) xx

May i just ask something that has been on my mind.... is it common to suffer from more than one type of OCD at once or am i just bonkers?!

Hi Cassie,

I'm so sorry about your baby.

I don't like people too close or touching me either. I like to sit in the corner of a room with my back to the wall, never the middle.

I hate the way i have to live and want to change it very much.

Life is very stressful and i find myself unhappy because i am fed up of every second of everyday relating in someway to a bad thought or a ritual or anxiety.

That's how I have been feeling. You can take a bad joke so far. Something's gotta give.

My therapy is going well but it just seems to have made me more aware of how big the problem is and how long it is going to take to change my thought pattens. I am trying to teach myself that i have to learn to accept that i cannot live in a 100% certain world all the time but this is not easy.

I think it's a big mental adjustment and there are some weird and tricky concepts involved. If you google a thing called "neural plasticity", you'll see the brain is constnatly destroying or creating(or at least strengthening or weakening) neural patheways depending on what we spend our time thinking about. This helps explain why repeatedly re-analysing OCD thoughts makes them more prominent, but the good news is that if we can *somehow* stop dealing with those thoughts, these patheways will start to waste away until eventually there's nothing left. So we just have to look at ways of tricking ourselves out of responding to these false doubts as much as we can. Easier said thatn done I know! Doesn't have to be 100% of the time, just whatever we can, and if we keep working at it then one day hopefully they'll be gone. And then we just have to keep a watchful eye out not to get suckered into the same pattern again. So that's how I try to look at it these days - it's like a constant dance twixt us and our OCD thoughts. We are so used to responding to them it's hard to envision an alternative, but as other people have shown, there is one. So we can live in hope. And sorry if you've heard all that already cos you mentioned you were having therapy.

Anyway the main reason I was replying was you asked about whether it's possible to have multiple types of OCD and another lady asked this earlier so theres the link to that thread:

http://www.ocdforums.org/index.php?showtopic=61366#entry500305

All the best,

David.

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Guest cassie

Thankyou David, what you said about the thought process is very interesting to me and is not something i have heard about, i am so wanting to make this change i am going to google neural plasticity before my therapy session tomorrow and i can ask my therapist about it.

I have looked at that link you posted, answers my question :).

You seem like a very positive person, good luck with your journey too.

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Guest Sisyphus

Thankyou David, what you said about the thought process is very interesting to me and is not something i have heard about, i am so wanting to make this change i am going to google neural plasticity before my therapy session tomorrow and i can ask my therapist about it.

I have looked at that link you posted, answers my question :).

You seem like a very positive person, good luck with your journey too.

Oh thank you Cassie. Sadly though, much as I would like to be, I think I'm not a very positive person. But I can appreciate the logic behind positive thinking(that old neural plasticity again!) and I hope I can improve. I lived with OCD a long time before I knew what I had so it's early days for me see. Like turning an oil tanker round maybe.

Yes I'd be intrested what your therapist makes of that. I saw it in a 2 or 3 documentaries I watched about the workings of the brain. Fascinating stuff. I think it might bring up a lot of results about NLP which I'm not personally into so beware of that.

Thanks again and fare thee well on your journey too.

All the best,

David.

p.s. I do actually know how to spell "pathways" - I've absolutely no idea why I spelt it wrong twice in the other post. I've been doing this a lot lately. I think I may be going senile prematurely as well. Or I have a dodgy keyboard - yes that's what it must be.

Edited by Sisyphus
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Hi Cassie. It's not surprising that your OCD has got worse after losing your baby. I'm so very sorry.

I know what you mean about therapy. I didn't realise how massively screwed up I am in so many ways, until I had CBT. On the plus side - now I can deal with it instead of ignoring it.

I think it's extremely common to have more than one type of OCD. My main focus is vomit and germs but I also do excess checking, washing, tapping or touching things a certain number of times, have intrusive thoughts and problems with numbers.

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