Franklin12

Your cortisol levels spike in the morning. It’s evolution’s way of getting you up and looking for food. But with cortisol comes stressful thoughts unfortunately. The absolute worst thing you can do is lie in bed tossing and turning. Get up, get breakfast, get busy and things will improve. But I agree it’s very unpleasant.

Interesting - I just read what you said about your partner saving you from yourself by reigning in your behaviour. I also think this - if I were allowed to go running about like a teenager behaving stupidly my life would be a mess! So in a way the fear of judgement has served me quite well, but also made me mentally ill. Go figure!

Hi GBG. This has been an interesting thread to read. I wonder if my experience has any similarities with your dilemma: you may or may not remember that a few years ago I had a really terrible theme of being murdered. This theme was the most intense I have ever had but on the plus side is what prompted me to finally put into practice what I had learned. Anyway, it seems so implausible now and I will try to summarise really briefly how I realise in hindsight that it all came about. 1) Ongoing rumbling source of anxiety relating to me being a bit adventurous in my late teens. I was fine about myself when I was a teen, but over the years I have settled down and become part of a ‘respectable’ community miles away from anywhere I grew up or anyone who knew me in those days. 2) The more years that go by with me as a respectable person, the bigger the gap there seems between the ‘old’ me and the ‘respectable’ me. 3) The bigger the gap, the more anxious I have become about being ‘found out’ as a ‘non-respectable’ person. It feels like not one person around here has had any kind of adventurous past, and that they would look down at that type of behaviour. 4) The more I hang out with these kinds of people (bet they all have skeletons really!), the worse I judge my own previous behaviour to have been. Then the more it feels I have to lose if I am ‘found out’. 5) Anyway, back to the plot - a house over the road came up for rent, and I had a classic sudden intrusive thought ‘what if someone from my past life moves in’. Cue spiral of catastrophising from my cover as respectable being blown right up until being murdered (I won’t fill in the crazy OCD fuelled blanks because they are all completely ridiculous). So really what had caused the episode was me trying to protect an image to prevent me from being judged harshly by others. I think the wider the gap between ‘my past behaviour’ and ‘others past behaviour’ was what fuelled everything, and felt like I had so much to lose. Of course there are loads of problems with my thinking - others past behaviour is purely my perception rather than realist, my past behaviour probably wasn’t even that bad in the scheme of things etc. But I guess the crux was a fear a judgment, allowing others to dictate how I should be judged, a fear a shame. Weirdly I always hate when I run into anyone from my past and try to avoid it (yes a compulsion I know), as I feel it would cause me to freak out. But, someone did contact me out the blue a little while ago and actually it was really great to be all relaxed again - around someone who hadn’t judged me harshly back in the day and just like me for who I was. That was very long if it was completely irrelevant! I guess a cautionary tale in there about how quickly our underlying cognitive issues can turn really bad if we’re not careful! I would say keep working at being more comfortable being judged, and more confident in being able to say ‘this is how I was, so be it’ without relying on others to decide whether you deserve ‘judgment’ or not.

I think that distraction can be confused with avoidance. If your compulsion is ruminating, when you are at the beginning of recovery and your mind is an absolute blizzard of scary thoughts, applying the cognitive principles is much easier said than done. I think one of the reasons people take medication is so that they can get their minds into a calm enough state to really start thinking about what they are doing/thinking. It’s the same for distraction I think. For those reasons I don’t really think that it counts as a cognitive tool - that would be all about addressing why you are so scared and how you can respond differently. I also think there is a distinction between avoidance and distraction from rumination. For avoidance the key aim is to not think about the fear, which I agree is simply pushing it under the carpet and hoping it will go away. However it is ridiculously difficult to stop a full blown 24/7 whirl of rumination. The rumination is what you want to stop because that’s your compulsion. The aim here then is to keep the fear full on by accepting the fear may be true, but then distracting your brain from debating with itself about whether it’s true or not. Basically thinking yes it’s true and I’m not going to argue with that. Further down the line it’s not necessary to distract because you don’t have the same intensity of thoughts and you can more easily go straight to the cognitive methods. So I half and half agree - I say there is a useful place for distraction but that it isn’t a cognitive approach and is more of an adjunct to be used at the start of therapy when you need to get your head into a decent place to learn actual cognitive principles.

I would say this is a bit too much like a written rumination. You have given both sides of the argument. You want it to be powerful and fully anxiety provoking - no explanations. Also being as you seem to have a huge issue with taking responsibility for decisions, I would suggest you could add a sentence or 2 about how you have made the wrong decision. I have chosen to have therapy and it was the wrong decision. I chose the wrong way. I have wasted money. I have wasted my time. I chose the wrong way. That makes me a fool. Something like that? Obviously I’m not calling you a fool personally. But say whatever you would say to yourself if you did something wrong.

Mine was reversible up until today. Today is the point of no return. Hence the migraine. For me, an outsider, the consequence of your decision is not a huge deal. You may waste some time, lose some money. For you I suspect the consequences of a bad decision are bigger than that. For me, the consequences of me making my wrong decision are huge, but I suspect to someone else they may say otherwise, and that I need to man up and face the fact that that it could be wrong and deal with any fall out later.

I just wanted to say that I feel for you Ryukil. Other people’s OCD themes can feel so straightforward and ‘easy’ - of course ‘just’ make a decision and stick to it, there isn’t a correct answer to this etc. etc. grey areas blah. Today I have to make a decision at work and I have been procrastinated for weeks and it’s starting to drive everyone insane as they are all waiting for me to make the decision. But it’s in no way easy or black and white, and no one can agree on what is right. I am finding it unbearable. This morning it became clear that I have to make a decision today and I have a huge migraine because it’s stressing me out so badly! I would love someone to come and give me a slap round the face and say just make a decision, any decision, its going to have to be the best judgment call at this time and if people don’t like it then so be it. But I feel for you because it’s excruciating wanted to make the right decision, but knowing you could easily be wrong! Just decide! Good luck to you.

Hi Jennie, I think I would have actually been stronger if bad things actually had have happened. I had a very lovely upbringing, and although naturally risk averse I also think being risk averse was encouraged. I think we need to fail to become strong, like you have to tear your muscle tissue for your muscle to heal and become bigger/stronger. All those cliches are there for a reason. Live and learn! What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger! Letting go of control and accepting risk is very liberating.

Not quite the same as you but I do feel generally distrustful of people. For me, it manifests as me not liking to share any news I hear with anyone in case it turns into gossip and it comes back to me, or it goes to Chinese whispers and I get blamed for saying things I didn’t say etc. I don’t like talking about work in case someone knows someone from work who might contradict something I’ve said, and make me look like a liar, which I’m not etc etc. These are different to your specific fears but it does lead me to avoid networking as much as I should. I have come to the conclusion that it’s an issue around control. I fear not being able to control what people do with information I give to them, and bad consequences happening as a result. So now I try to allow myself to feel uncomfortable with being out of control. It’s a combination of getting used to feeling emotionally uncomfortable, but also acceptance that I can’t control what people do. People DO network and chat about all sorts, they gossip, swap information about others, and probably sometimes they upset people. This is all normal human interaction. Most people don’t over think this at all. So for you, I guess yes, maybe one day you could tell someone something that in a worst case scenario could cause you to lose an opportunity. Accept that is a normal part of life that everyone also contends with. But decide whether shutting yourself off as you are doing is preferable to living with the risk that one day something you fear may happen.

1) I literally wouldn’t even think to think about this. It has never crossed my mind, even when I know people under my roof have been ‘at it’. And that’s with 4 years in a HMO full of students at uni. If you made me think about it, I might possible think ‘eeugh’ if I genuinely believed that they had fluids on their hands, and I might feel slightly uncomfortable if I definitely knew they had fluids and then they definitely touched my child. But in all my years I have never been in that situation so I’d have to put it in the very unlikely to need worrying about category. 2) Not at all bothered 3) Not at all bothered, I’m pretty slobby and would just change sheets at the usual time.

It doesn’t sound like you are being asked to judge whether your reasons for needing to know is either bad or good. Seeing without judging can be beneficial. You like solving puzzles. This can have benefits or it can cause unhappiness. You don’t have to work out why you like solving puzzles. Maybe it’s your personality. Maybe you learned to like it. Maybe you don’t always need to solve everything, and sometimes you can let things go without finding an answer, because trying to find an answer is making you unhappy. Maybe you can’t tolerate the feeling of being uncertain, so you try to make that feeling go away by working everything out. I would try to take the judgement and anxiety out of the therapists question and answer truthfully. I think putting your feelings into words is a great way for you to take an objective look at where you are, and what you can work on to move forward.

I think the thing to consider about brain scans is that doing something - anything - a lot means we make a lot of connections in that area of the brain. The argument is that it is this activity, ie ‘lighting up’ on MRI scans that we see. If we are a novice piano player, playing twice a week, then we won’t have created so many connections and we won’t light up as much on a scan when we play, compared to an expert piano player who has practiced hours a day for years. The same is true of ‘obsessing’, or ‘worrying’ - if we do it all the time then it’s possible that there is nothing inherently wrong or different to how our brain was wired in the first place, but the incessant practising creates a lot more connections and hence more activity in the relevant area of the brain. If the piano player stops playing, eventually these connections will die away. If we stop ‘worrying’, then you could theorise that the same happens. You don’t always get a clear idea of cause and effect from those scans.

There are no ‘laws’ of OCD therapy. People have different opinions. People try things, and what works for one doesn’t always work for another. There are differing opinions about the labelling issue. I personally have a preference for one method over another. The thing is, no one here or in therapy has any authority over you to tell you what to do. And no one has responsibility for your recovery more than you do. I know that taking responsibility is difficult. You might get it wrong. But it feels as though you are struggling to take responsibility for making decisions. We are all in the same boat. People suggest things. We try them out, they work, they don’t work. What seems to be a fact is that most people don’t recover by repeatedly doing compulsions over and over again. They don’t seem to just suddenly find an answer after months of trying to work things out. Just make a decision about what approach you will take and stick with it. Take responsibility for it. And persevere with it. Then if it works, great. If it doesn’t work, allow yourself to admit that you took the wrong decision, and try a different way. That is fine.

I totally get this - I would do stuff especially when I was younger that I really didn’t care or feel bad about at the time, but then afterwards would beat myself up about it. But rationally I wouldn’t really want to care or think it was that bad. And then do it all over again...Also I get it with carelessness and guilt - I’ll be slapdash about something and not care at all, and then afterwards I’ll start feeling really guilty that I wasn’t more careful. But it doesn’t stop me from being just as slapdash the next time. I kind of think you have to reach a point where you just accept who you are. Maybe you are a person who is sometimes conflicted and acts/thinks and feels in contradictory ways. Moving forward, is it making you happy to analyse why that is? Can you try to park the negative emotions to the side and get on with life with them just in the background? Can you try to cut down on the negative self talk, even though you feel like you deserve it? Can you try to give yourself more positive messages on a regular basis even though you don’t quite believe them?

I would disagree that ruminating doesn’t make you feel better. I say you as in ‘one’, not you personally as I obviously have not seen inside your head to listen to your ruminating. But for me, whilst it feels as though ruminating feels terrible and you want it to stop, if you ever break down the content of the rumination you might find that it’s a constant back and forth of argument/counter argument. All happening in split seconds. So for example ‘oh no I’m sure I cheated’ (feel bad), ‘but I wouldn’t cheat I’m not like that’ (feel better), ‘but then why do I have this terrible memory of something happening’ (feel bad), ‘it’s probably not a real memory’ (feel better) and so on and so on. Have you ever tried to stop ruminating? Again, from my experience, stopping ruminating increases anxiety hugely.

So was the therapy aiming to stop a fear of ‘not being in control’, or more to see that you would be unlikely to lose control? If you know what I mean?

A lot of my fears are about not being in control - fear of heights (falling), fear of flying, being the passenger in a car that’s near water/heights etc. How did you turn the fear around? I do still like to be in control, did you just ‘let go’?

You seem to have some pretty good insight, maybe what is needed now is practice in changing how you are thinking about this. You’re not going to be able to snap your fingers and think differently, but if you decide how you want to be able to think about this, the rational dose you mention but that you can’t quite believe, and just practice and practice thinking this way. Eventually you should catch up. I mean I say that - I do sometimes wonder whether the way we feel about things ever can catch up with how we want to think about things. But I think it can, it just takes perseverance.

Do you think you are mostly preoccupied with how others might judge you (in terms of goodness or badness), or is it that you are struggling with how you judge yourself? Do you care what others think? Do you think that people are binary ‘good’ or ‘bad’? I personally think there are spectrums of intrinsic goodness and badness in people. I have friends (who are in the minority), who are soooooo lovely and nice. They would do anything for anyone. They rarely have a bad word to say about anyone, and the niceness is completely genuine. They are truly nice people. Then I know people who couldn’t give two monkeys about anyone but themselves. They would steal from their dying grandmothers, etc. Then there’s me - I would say I was slightly off centre, but not on the nice side. I can be very selfish. I can push people away if I feel like they deserve it. I don’t forgive easily. I’m literally always late for everything. But I can be soft, I am very empathic and I don’t like to see people suffering. I would do anything for my kids, and I’m incredibly loyal to my family. Am I good or bad? Who knows, but I don’t care at all. So I guess on the one hand you have to have a think about what it means to you to be good or bad, whilst at the same time recognising that this is probably something that you have latched on to more than many people would because you are prone to obsessive thinking, and also maybe very sensitive to guilt?

When I was pregnant I was 100% convinced that I had HIV and it was finally going to come out because of the antenatal test they do. The more worrying/ruminating I did the more real it became. I didn’t want to tell any friends or family the happy news that I was having a baby because I was so so convinced that I would then have to tell them that I also had HIV. It felt incredibly real. I went around acting like that situation was really happening to me. Those were the days before I knew anything about OCD. Luckily I was able to stop worrying after the test came back negative, although my worries instantly morphed into something stupid about data checking.... Just keep plugging away at stopping your compulsions, and maybe start having a think about what terrifies you so much about cheating, and it’ll all start to come together. It just takes time.

I watched a documentary about extreme OCD. The therapist taught the patients to say ‘it might be true’, to any fear, no matter how ridiculous.

I have always noticed a real down after the anxiety has gone. My (totally made up) theory is that your serotonin is severely depleted during an episode, but that it’s easier to get rid of the intense fear. Once the fear is gone, you notice your down mood that probably came with the same serotonin dip as the anxiety. But it was being masked by the intensity and urgency of anxiety. Depression, on the other hand, has the opposite feeling. I think as you feel well for longer your brain will balance out. Get outside, get some exercise, try to ignore the depression telling you to stay in watching boxsets and eating chocolate biscuits.

Hi Headwreck - just to say, what Jennie said! I think you have truly made some progress and that’s evident with the types of questions you’re posting. Ruminating is incredibly difficult to stop so don’t feel bad that you haven’t instantly been able to. You may find it takes a lot of effort at first, but then over time you will notice it gets easier and easier to gently resist the lure to try and start working it all out. I think reading all the posts on the forum is a bit of reassurance seeking - I know I did it, and it was so comforting when you found a fear similar to your own. I would think ‘aha, someone else with OCD and a fear of HIV - that means I didn’t get infected by my manicure’ or whatever. But maybe that’s part of the process. I learned so much through this forum, a lot from reading other people’s posts, so as long as you take on board the advice that is being given out I wouldn’t worry for now.

I totally get this! One of my worst ever episodes spiralled to me being convinced that the man over the road was going to murder me and my family. It completely took over my life in many ways and was completely terrifying once my imagination has been running wild long enough. But it got so bad that it culminated in me finally putting my foot down am standing up to OCD. I 100% stopped all compulsions cold turkey (ruminating mostly but also not letting my kids out to play, not going out in case he came round murdering whilst we had a babysitter), and then I allowed myself to accept as true that I was going to get murdered. Terrifying but worked a treat. I have never looked back and dismiss all subsequent imaginings of potential feuds that end in murder.

It is definitely interesting. It highlights that the line between being a human being with particular needs, preferences and fears, which we all do, and being a person who is experiencing suffering of a type which has been given the label ‘OCD’ is not at all straightforward. Often on here we see people asking ‘is this thought OCD? Is that fear OCD? Is my behaviour OCD?’. But there is no easy way in my opinion to ascribe each and every thought, feeling or behaviour to ‘OCD’. We are still people too. Sometimes our thinking becomes disordered and causes suffering, and we need to work on improving how we think and act so that we give ourselves the best chance of feeling well. This probably involves tackling particular problem areas as well as learning general ways of approaching life experiences that will lead us on a healthy path.