Koala17

Thanks all. Yes, it's pretty bizarre. I think there's a logical problem where if the anxiety is about meaningless thoughts, then explaining the thoughts means that the anxiety isn't justified (and therefore is 'meaningless'), but if the anxiety is justified then the thoughts are meaningless. It's sort of a logical loop. I find that if I think something is meaningless and then can work out the meaning, then that still doesn't help because I then think "that all makes sense, I must have misunderstood what the trigger was - there must be something else that was (or seemed) meaningless." Almost like I think something is meaningless, and then if it isn't, I have to work out why it seemed meaningless - the "meaning behind the meaninglessness". It's pretty crazy - like my mind goes out of its way to give me a hard time.

Hi, I'm pretty sure I have a combination of the Pure-O and 'Not-quite-right" OCD 'sub-types', but while there is a fair bit of information on them both online, I've never seen anything with them in combination. To summarise, I've always had a bit of an obsession with philosophical topics, but lately (for the last few years at least) I've found that I'm always getting hung up on really obscure 'triggers' - it seems like almost anything will cause me a spike of anxiety, and I'll go off into rumination about what it means. I think it's because of all my thinking about things like meaningfulness (the 'meaning of life', and in general), so any thought that strikes me as potentially non-meaningful, I'm then compelled to ruminate about, to figure out what it means. It's kind of like everything has to be significant in some way, and if I can't work out its significance, then I'm stuck ruminating on it. The reason I say it's combining Pure-O and 'Not-quite-right" OCD is that I feel something needs attention, but it's never something physical, like straightening an object up, it's always in my mind, like I have to sort my thoughts out, and if I have an anxiety spike about a certain thought or feeling, or even just a general theme, and can't figure out what caused it, then I'm doomed to ruminate. I never manage to confront the fear of not knowing either, because I'm always convinced I could miss something important (probably some philosophical insight or some insight into my own mind.) Any thoughts very welcome!

This might sound like a daft or insensitive question, but I also have OCD and have never been able to answer it for myself. For me, it’s a problem with obsessively trying to understand my thoughts – I’ll have something flit through my mind then have to go back and check what I thought; not really because I’m worried about it being immoral, more because I want to understand it (though I think it generates the same feeling of ‘wrongness’ as most people with scrupulosity etc. experience, and ultimately stems from similar obsessions with fairness, perfection, certainty etc.) I find it very easy to understand that all I have to do is accept that I might have had a nonsensical thought, but it’s almost impossible for me in practice to avoid my compulsions. Pretty much the only way is if the thought is so fleeting I can’t remember anything about it, although I’m still left with an unsettled feeling. Normally it’ll be some pretty obscure context that will set me off (I used to be almost exclusively obsessed with philosophical problems) and in that case I’ll keep rattling thoughts around my head, trying to understand what has triggered the discomfort, without rnormally being able to lay my finger on what exactly the problem or question is. For me, it’s easy to imagine someone with OCD about their sexuality needing to just label any thoughts in that context as unhelpful, and ignore them, while in my mind my problem thoughts seem to always demand attention because they are pretty much always about something new, or a repetition of an unsettling thought / context that I wasn’t able to satisfactorily ‘close out’ previously. However, I know that everyone’s OCD is unique, and that it would be foolish (not to mention insensitive) of me to assume that mine is a complicated matter, and everyone else’s is an easy fix. This being so, why is is so difficult to ‘give up’ OCD? Why do you think we can’t just accept that it’s a ‘doubting disease’, and the only way to deal with it is to accept that doubt, even though we all know that’s what we need to do?

I have a thing where rather than trying to prove to myself that my OCD thoughts are meaningless, I'm instead always trying to understand the meaning. I think that's why it is so hard to stop repetitive thoughts; because I always feel as though if I think about it 'properly' it will become clear to me why I thought what I thought at the time. For me there is rarely any moral element to it, in that I don't feel the thoughts are 'bad', just confusing. For example, I was in town once with some friends and lost my bearings, and approached the town centre from an unusual angle so that I didn't initially recognise it. After I had recognised it, I was convinced that I had 'seen' something differently before, like I'd filled in the gaps I couldn't see with aspects of some other town, or mentally positioned what I was looking at on some other part of the map in some nonsensical way. It was almost like I retrospectively assigned 'wrongness' to what I'd thought because I couldn't then reconcile my non-specific mental picture with an actual physical location. Anyway, that's the kind of random abstract stuff that eats away at my mind; I'm not even sure what I've taken issue with; it's just that I'll have a fleeting thought or feeling followed by a gnawing feeling that I've missed something important about it, that I need to understand. I'd say that 90-95% of my obsessions are of this form, where I'm not even sure what's bothering me specifically, just that there's something wrong with something generally, and that I need to try and recapture my original thought processes to figure it out. Because of the usual 'variants on a theme' nature of OCD, I also find that I get recurrences of obsessions over something that only bears a passing resemblance to the original, that could occur to me days or weeks later. All very strange. Does anyone have anything similar?

I’ve been trying to think of an analogy as to why OCD (pure O in my case) is so hard to beat. I would say that it’s a combination of both the mental distress caused by the bothersome thought, and the doubt that ignoring it is the right thing to do. My analogy is as follows; it’s like being in the jungle and told to wear an insect repellent that will itch like hell, but whatever you do, you mustn’t scratch at it. Later on you are trying to get to sleep and itching like mad. You could ignore the itching feeling if you knew for sure it was the insect repellent but you can’t shake the feeling that you’ve got a grotesque insect feasting on you, and you just have to have a look . . . In the same way, for me with my thoughts, I really hate the uncomfortable, unsettling feeling that comes with them but the reason I can’t let them go is more because I can’t shake the belief that these thoughts are actually important in some way. If we really believed the thoughts were just disturbing nonsense, I think we’d become used to them and just see them as an irritation, but the thought that they constitute something meaningful (about us, about reality, or about anything we consider important) makes it incredibly difficult to leave them alone and unanswered. This makes it (to my mind) more difficult to deal with than something like giving up smoking, where the mental struggle of dealing with the cravings is generally considered as a significant burden by the person struggling to give up, but they rarely doubt that they are making the right choice. OCD, with it’s guilt-overload, won’t gift us that peace of mind. Cheers for reading, any thoughts are welcome ?

Does anyone else go through this thought process? I mostly get preoccupied with ‘pseudo-philosophical’ questions, but it seems like this formula of doom works for everything at the moment, no matter how random the topic: I have a thought . . . Then I think something is wrong with that thought . . . Then I have to work out what is wrong with it* . . . If I find a convincing explanation (rare), then I am happy, but probably reinforce to myself that the feeling of wrongness was justified, and that I was right to try to figure it out. If I can’t find a convincing explanation, then I have to keep on searching. Generally, even a fully plausible explanation doesn’t remove the feeling of wrongness, which makes me think I haven’t actually understood it properly. The longer I can’t explain it, the more convinced I am that there is something deeper, possibly even incomprehensibly abstract, that I’m just not getting. *’Wrongness’ generally implies some abstract meaning that I think I’ve not quite grasped - the feeling of not understanding something properly generates the feeling of ‘wrongness’. As a fun variant of this, even when I figure out what the thought meant, I’m often then concerned about why I thought anything was wrong with it in the first place, and try to think about it in the ‘wrong way’ to understand where my thinking ‘went wrong’. i.e. I feel the need not only to understand how the thought was thought, but if it all ‘checks out’, I also need to ‘understand the misunderstanding’ that caused me to check it in the first place!?!?! Simplistic example: Colleague: “2 cubed is 8” My brain: “That’s not right” My brain: [pause] My brain: “No wait, that is right” My brain: “Oh no! Why did I think that was wrong?” My brain: “I must have confused it with 2 squared” My brain: “Or maybe I thought they said 2 squared and knew that was wrong” My brain: “Or maybe . . . “ This is particularly the case when I’m distracted by something else when trying to think about the thought, but even when I’ve got time to myself, I often find that while the general topic of the thought (i.e. what initially set me off) is easy to hold in my mind, the actual question of what is bothering me is very hard to pin down. It almost seems to slip between my mental fingers as I try to grasp it. I’m often also simultaneously bothered by the thought that I ‘shouldn’t be wasting time on this’, and ‘should sort it out quickly or let it go’, which just proves even more of a distraction. At a higher level, I’m not even sure what happens in our minds when we decide that we understand a thought or not. People often say OCD is an issue with the ‘danger off’ switch in our minds, which in my case is perhaps more of an ‘understanding complete’ switch. Thanks,

Thanks all for your speedy replies. It's just intensely annoying as I know I've reached that stage where I've overcome a few initial (mostly pseudo-philosophical) OCD worry beads and it has (predictably) just splintered into a whole host of new uncertainties. I know that with ~7 Billion people on the planet, the probability of me having had a completely unique thought or something that only I could understand is pretty remote, let alone the probability of having several a day, but the overwhelming feeling I get (that I'm sure is familiar to many of you) is that I'm always just on the cusp of some great insight about reality (as it is, or as it should be), my mind, or my purpose in life, and I guess feelings of guilt weigh into that in that I feel I need to make sure that I personally understand them to the fullest extent. It's pretty ridiculous really - me feeling that I've understood something is just that - a feeling - so really I'm chasing something pretty basic, and yet it always feels like I'm tangling with some impossibly abstract super-critical question, the answer to which can only be found if it is instantly grabbed before it disappears :-) It's ot even like I'm looking for answers, I'm still trying to grasp the question!

Hi, Apologies for the long post. It’s a long, if baffling, one. I was wondering if anyone else is obsessed with 'understanding their own thoughts'. I have this rather baffling thing where, similarly to 'just right' OCD, I feel I absolutely need to understand the (often bizarre) thoughts that go through my mind, but not really because of any specific fear, I just feel a sense of panic that I haven't immediately understood them and might forget them before I do (this is particularly bad when I'm engaged in doing something else, and so can't apply myself to the thought fully). My thoughts are normally semi-philosophical, but increasingly, I'm not even sure what exactly is prompting them, which is what makes them so addictive. It's like the answer is on the tip of my tongue, but I can't express what is bothering me, and so it drives me nuts! It's also strange in that a lot of people with OCD are encouraged to stop avoiding their thoughts and 'let them pass peacefully by', but I almost have the opposite problem, in that I'm continuously trying to grasp them but can never convince myself I've really understood them. Just today, for example, I’ve had the following thoughts (note that I’ve tried to present them as they occurred to me, as something of a jumbled stream of consciousness that I try to impose order on, but that I’m never sure I’ve really understood. This being so, they are very confusing, and yet I still feel that I’ve still not entirely captured the essence of the questions, and that I’ve only made them remotely understandable because I need to do so to describe them using language!): Strange thoughts: There is something ‘wrong’ about how only a thin piece of glass separates ‘inside’ from ‘outside’ in a skyscraper, because everything on the inside is split into discrete floors, but as soon as you go ‘out the window’ there is suddenly no structure and the idea of separate layers or floors is meaningless. There ‘should’ be something other than a window demarcating this transition. Also, communal areas ‘should’ provide some kind of buffer zone between private areas of a building and the outside, and ‘dipped’ or lowered areas of one floor are straying into some kind of ill-defined middle ground between floors, and are therefore also ‘wrong’ in some way that wouldn’t be the case for the floor in a single-story building! There is something ‘wrong’ about how averages are worked out because bigger numbers should have a heavier ‘weighting’ (I’m well aware that weighted averages exist, but for some reason had the indescribable feeling today that when calculating an average and looking at the results on a graph, a ‘big’ number should be weighted additionally to the fact that it is already ‘big’ by adding some extra factor) i.e. the mean average of 1 and 9 is 5, but I had the overwhelming feeling that it ‘should’ be pulled more towards 9, as 9 is ‘bigger’. There is something ‘wrong’ about how listening to different types of music make you feel like the ambience of the whole universe changes, rather than implicitly understanding that it only affects you and your immediate surroundings. Why is the effect lessened when other people are around? Do they provide some kind of anchoring to your baseline view of the universe? There is something ‘wrong’ about the recruitment process for companies, because it’s only by selecting people for a role that they change to be capable in that role. I asked myself; do people who are capable or incapable have some inherent property that not every recruiter can see? Does the recruiter retrospectively imagine that they had some property that may or may not exist, i.e. do we mis-remember how people performed based on their current capability level? Do ‘past-recruit’ and ‘present-recruit’ all exist simultaneously in space-time so their capability-property always existed in some way, even if they hadn’t been tested yet!?! The last example in particular illustrates how I have this racing set of thoughts that play out as I try and understand what felt ‘off’ about the original thought (“there’s something ‘ wrong’ about the recruitment process”). As part of my obsessing, I try and corral my thoughts into some kind of categories, and loosely this divides them into the general fears that the not-understood thought will: undermine my ‘purpose’ / meaning of life be a question (or perception or experience) that is one that no other people have ever thought of, or possibly could ever understand, so it’s ‘on me’ to make sure I understand it. somehow make things ‘unfair’ by not being understood, either on me or some other party. I think these categories are sort-of similar to what other people experience. The weird thought about the calculation of averages being wrong, I could sort of see as having been prompted by me thinking it was somehow ‘unfair’ on bigger numbers (ludicrous as that sounds). The recruitment process one sent me into a panic because I was talking to someone when it occurred to me, and was trying to multi-task figuring the thought out while holding up my end of a conversation, and could almost feel it as a once-in-a-lifetime insight that was slipping away from me (as per the second bullet point). Anyhow, does anyone else get this feeling of occasionally having a completely incomprehensible feeling of wrongness associated with something, either abstract or concrete, that they feel they absolutely have to get to the bottom of. If so, please answer! It would make me feel much better knowing there is someone similarly crazy out there! Thanks for reading!

Hi, thanks for the replies. No, I don't have a therapist. I went to one once, but it wasn't much use - it doesn't really help that I can't articulate any particular themes. I don't think my issue is actually with any particular theme, it's just trying to understand why my mind will snag on a random idea or memory and give me the feeling that there's something more I need to 'understand' about it. It's not like I feel the need to understand everything I come across though, or that I'm depressed by the idea that things might exist that I can't understand, it's just that it drives me nuts having the feeling that I understand something momentarily, and then lose it before I have chance to 'figure it out' properly. I guess an element of it might be that I'm not very driven in my working or personal life at the moment, so my mind will just create problems out of nowhere. I've had OCD for a long time, and it tends to crop up more when I don't have more pressing things on my mind.

I think I have a sort of strange version of OCD where rather than not wanting to think thoughts, I feel I have to think about them to understand them properly. I think it's the same basic problem of not understanding where the thoughts are coming from, but in my case I'll quite often be thinking about any kind of topic and suddenly have a feeling that I've 'missed something', in the sense that I've assumed or understood something implicitly, but can't describe to myself what it was. In a very simple case, I could be out shopping and totting up the cost of what I've bought, and get it wrong, and then not only do I feel the need to correct it, but I need to understand where I went wrong, in case there was some kind of logical gap. I.e., the need to 'misunderstand' the numbers again to figure out why I didn't understand them initially. Weirdly I don't have any issue with the idea that I might have done a '2+2=5' in my head, but I nonetheless get an overwhelmingly strong feeling that I need to know, and I'm not even sure what it is that I'm afraid of - some kind of logical void maybe? My thoughts are normally more abstract and sort of pseudo-philosophical, but it's almost always the case that I feel like there's some concept that has flashed through my mind very briefly, but and hard as I try, I can't bring it back. Similarly, but related to emotions rather than concepts, I sometimes feel like I have memories of being a kid, or I see a certain place, and it gives me a particular feeling or ambience (most of the time quite nice, to be honest), but again I get this inexplicable feeling of not being able to explain it, like remembering seeing a snowy scene as a kid and feeling it looked 'magical', but not quite being able to recreate in my mind exactly why it felt that way, or why looking at it as an adult would feel different. I understand that memories are imperfect, and I'll never be able to recreate exactly how I felt, but in the same way as the concepts, I feel like something fleeting has happened in my mind, and, extremely frustratingly, I can't explain it or bring it back. For me it's more a constant low-level irritation, but every now and again I'll get a spike of anxiety about something, especially where I'm trying to recall a thought while talking to someone or doing something brain-intensive, and I'm trying to both concentrate but simultaneously hold onto the thought. Sometimes it can be gone in seconds and I'm left with a feeling of unease about a general topic, but with this gap in my memory about exactly what I had an issue with. It's almost like a conceptual version of being able to experience a new colour and then losing it, and not being able to ever convince yourself that you could recreate it in your mind again. Trying to psycho-analyse myself, I've always been very 'purpose-driven', and often worries about things seeming meaningless. I now think that as well as trying to find (or create) meaning in life, I've now developed an intense fear of my own thoughts being meaningless. Weird as this sounds, has anyone else experienced anything similar? :-)

As another strange example, I was watching a TV show where one of the characters suddenly appeared with a beard, who didn’t have one before. It made me think (understandably) “he looks different with a beard”. I then however started thinking that maybe I was ‘seeing’ something more than the beard, in the sense that someone with a beard etc. might look more authoritative, or might have other attributes that might otherwise colour someone’s opinion. I started wondering whether these other associations were actually changing what I physically ‘saw’, in the sense that two people seeing the same person might be experiencing the same sensory data, but one might see someone as attractive while the other doesn’t due to different associations. In a similar vein, I recently saw a picture of a TV presenter, who used to be quite fat, who looked quite ‘good looking’ in this picture. However, I still didn’t find her attractive, possibly because of these pre-existing opinions on her. Again, I wondered if my pre-existing associations were actually changing what I was physically seeing in some indescribable way. Back to the beard thing; I wondered if I was seeing things differently to other people, i.e. they see ‘man’, then ‘man plus beard’, whereas I see ‘man’, then ‘bearded man’ as a sort of separate entity with all the associated associations. This then made me think; when I see ‘man with beard’, does someone else see ‘man plus goatee plus sideburns’? I.e. on a bearded man, even though I am ‘seeing’ the sideburns and the goatee, I just see them as ‘beard’, rather than seeing the subcomponents. This weirded me out, as I think that seeing someone with ‘sideburns’ or ‘beard’ has different connotations and associations in my mind, and, perhaps a bit like the ‘rabbit or duck’ illusion, people can only see one or the other. Perhaps there is a grey zone between sideburns and beard, where the two start to blur, and people see both!? As you can imagine, this kind of pseudo-philosophy is like fuel to the OCD fire, and the theme sticks in my head relentlessly as I try to unravel what exactly I mean, and what exactly the issue is! It’s not that I actually believe that I see something that no-one else can see, it’s just that I worry that I can’t articulate what I am trying to, and so while other people may experience the same thing, it’s a thought that has occurred to me that might not have occurred to others, but isn’t something that I can put my finger on to explain!

Hey, I was wondering if part of the reason why OCD is so persistent is that we end up in a confused state of half-trying to prove our obsessions are meaningless, and half-trying to prove that they have some degree of meaning, to avoid them seeming totally crazy. My OCD seems, like most people’s, to have mutated into different forms over the years, but I’m currently going through an annoying ‘trend’ of constantly trying to reassure myself that thoughts I am having are not ‘meaningless’, and then trying (normally unsuccessfully) to convince myself of what the meaning is (or was). For example, I was in a supermarket and was trying to work out how my shopping had come to an amount other than what I had expected. It took me only a short time to work out the right amount from scratch, but then I had an overwhelming feeling of having to go back to my original flawed calculation to understand where it had gone wrong, to reassure myself (I think), that my original reasoning was logical (or meaningful). Another sort-of-similar example happened yesterday – a book I was reading was cutting between descriptive text and a character’s speech, and it occurred to me that I quite liked the flowing style, without quite being able to put my finger on why. I had the usual creeping-dread OCD feeling, then realised it was because the writer had omitted the usual ‘he said, she said’ writing style to make it flow better. However, even understanding this didn’t make me feel better, as I began to doubt that this was why I had liked it, even though that was almost certainly the explanation. It sounds absurd to write down now, but I think I just need the slightest suggestion that I might not have thought about something ‘the right way’, or fully understood all the potential meanings and implications, and it sets me off into a crazy loop of self-assessment, trying to figure out why something bothers me, or to try and explain exactly my feelings about something, to show that they are logical and reproducible. As yet another example, a few days ago I was cycling along a cycle path with railway tracks on my right, and it occurred to me that before reaching home, there would need to come a point at which I would cross from having the tracks on the right hand side of me to the left, because I could remember another point at which I would cross the tracks, which would change the tracks from being on the left hand side of me to the right, so there would need to be some point at which my position relative to the tracks would need to change, before changing back. All entirely logical, but this thought reminded me of another thought I had had a few days prior to that, where I had been looking at car parking spaces on two sides of a winding road and noted that they were slanted slightly in opposite orientations. At that time I had been wondering (whimsically) about whether my mind had recognised the difference in orientation by keeping a mental image of one set, and then trying to overlay it onto the other. Nothing particularly wrong with that, but it was again accompanied by a slight feeling of unease, and this, in combination with the right-left thinking I was doing about the railway tracks, made me feel profoundly un-nerved – something was bothering me about the general idea of things having certain orientations to other things, but I couldn’t work out what it was, and the more I couldn’t provide a rational answer to what my ‘fear’ was, so I could ignore or deal with it as appropriate, the more uncomfortable I got! It’s almost like the problem of ‘known unknowns’ and ‘unknown unknowns’. Something will bother me but I can’t describe what it is. Even when I do come up with a rational answer, I can’t convince myself that I have answered the concern that set me off in the first place! I haven’t really got any questions to pose alongside this. I just wanted to try and articulate my current round of bewilderment, although I know that by looking for others with a similar story, I’m really just engaging in a compulsion by looking for reassurance(!)

Apologies; this has developed into quite a long and involved post! I know people say that everyone thinks their OCD is unique, but I think mine takes this to a particular extreme. I think this is because I hate the idea of being obsessed with something meaningless, and so my OCD takes particularly meaningless thoughts and makes an issue out of them, making things particularly difficult by me then not being sure about what exactly has bothered me. As an example, I was driving earlier today and saw a vehicle on the road that I was thinking about telling my friend about (by email). I started imagining in my head what I would write, and was considering whether it would seem pedantic to write out the full vehicle designation rather than its colloquial name. I then started thinking it was odd how adding a few extra letters to an email could make it automatically pedantic, and got the oh-so-familiar feeling of OCD-unease, which made me wonder what had sparked the feeling. I couldn’t tell if it was my feeling that ‘being pedantic’ was somehow linked to something absolute, such as the exact number of letters written, or if it was the idea that as an abstract idea ‘being pedantic’ might bring up different ideas/associations in two different minds (suspect it was the latter, as I’ve spent a fair amount of time recently thinking about ‘subjectivity’). It’s weird and frustrating now, as it bugs me not to be able to clearly remember what it was that bothered me, and therefore not to be able to reassure myself that what I was thinking was rational. As another couple of weird examples; I was watching a film about some footballers who were playing football in a park in London. As I was watching it, I felt like knowing they were in London put me in a particular mood, or frame of mind, almost as though I was watching the film and at the same time ascribing a load of pre-existing feelings about London onto it. I then started trying to picture the scene but imagine that it was somewhere else in the UK, to figure out how that would affect my feelings about it. As you might expect, this required quite a lot of concentration, but no real answers. This is something that has irked me a few times before – when I think of a particular time or place and it gives me a particular feeling, which could be positive or negative, and it feels as though my perceptions and outlook at the time were all quite unique and un-definable. I can fully accept that at different times of my life I have had different perspectives and outlooks on the world, but I feel as though there is something more to what I felt that I can’t quite put my finger on or explain, which bothers me immensely! My other example, which is somewhat similar, is that while sitting in a meeting a few days ago, which was going well, I had a sudden thought that while a successful meeting was a reason to be happy for the people in the room, the universe as a whole was completely indifferent to its success or failure, and that I was finding a reason to be happy that had no basis in an objective reality. So far, so philosophical. Depressing as the thought might be, I can state that idea and I think anyone in the world would understand what I mean by it. However, this thought didn’t come in such a logical reasoned manner; I had at the same time a whole host of other swirling thoughts, one of which being something along the lines of whether the universe is a generally positive or generally indifferent place being dependent on whether there is a God, and wondering whether the thought that feeling like there is meaning to life / that one ought to be happy requires what you are doing (i.e. having a successful meeting) to have an external observer (an omnipotent God) who can register and ‘validate’ that success. I almost feel that my brain picks moments when I feel I need to concentrate, such as in meetings, and chooses then to massively overstate the importance of some tangential thought knowing that it will distract and fluster me to try and concentrate on two things at once. Having said that, my previous example of a weird thought came to me when driving a familiar route, which I don’t find particularly stressful (though obviously paying attention when driving is important!) As a final thought / question; I’m much like most ‘pure O’ OCD sufferers in that I tend to ruminate endlessly about things in order to frame them in my mind in a way that I am happy with. However, a lot of the time, and especially lately, with my more abstract and hard-to-articulate thoughts, I tend to find that my mind almost willfully rejects thinking clearly about a problem, or remembering it clearly, while simultaneously keeping it there as a mental itch. I find that I can remember being bothered by things, but my mind actively tries to push me away from thinking about them directly, while simultaneously telling me that they were very important. All in all, not a particularly enjoyable experience!

Thanks Emily :-)

Thanks Polar Bear. I notice that you are down as an 'ex-sufferer'. Do you find that just ignoring the thoughts worked for you?

Hi, I have a bit of an odd question, and was wondering if anyone had any thoughts on it. Most of the obsessions that people have seem to be, although irrational, quite clear-cut in what they describe. For example, someone who has a fear of harming their child could obsess that if they didn’t pick up a particular object in a particular way, it might fall and injure said child. This could be very unlikely, but it is still obvious what they are worrying about, and some kind of exposure therapy could theoretically be planned to counter it. My OCD seems to be quite unusual in that I will quite often be having the usual stream-of-consciousness thoughts, but my mind will suddenly ‘snag’ (for want of a better word) on something without me really understanding why it might bother me, and it will then cause me an inordinate amount of stress wondering what on Earth had bothered me about it. For example, about 6 months ago my cousin was talking to me about our grandparents’ house, and I had a vague mental picture of what she was talking about. When I later went to my grandparents’ house, I realised that the layout wasn’t quite as I’d imagined it, and found this really bothersome, as I hadn’t had an exact mental picture of the house at the time, but it suddenly became extremely important to me to be able to remember how I had imagined the house, as a point of comparison with the actual layout. Even though I could quite clearly understand that this was not vitally important to me in any conceivable way, I really struggled to shake off an irresistible urge to try and think about what I had pictured, with all the associated stress of, firstly, not being able to picture it, and secondly, not understanding why I felt it to be so important. As a second example, today I was on a train (typically my OCD is worse when I am sitting about not doing much) and was reading a historical novel. One of the less important characters had a particular name that I remembered from childhood, and I remembered instinctively not liking the name at the time, though on second reading I found I didn’t mind it (so far, so normal). I then had the familiar ‘snagging’ feeling that there was something there that needed further thought, but shrugged it off with the thought that what had caused the ‘snag’ was probably the idea that a name may seem nice at some point, but later in life, further experiences may change your opinion on it. However, this concept is quite easy to grasp, and, true to form, my mind decided that this rational explanation could not possibly be the solution to whatever problem had prompted the thought to occur to me, and that there must be some other reason why my thoughts had ‘snagged’ on that particular name. Many hours later, I still have no idea, and still can’t even mentally frame the question that I want to ask myself. I just know that something bothered me about it. I described for the first example experiencing a sort of terrible duality of obsession – the obsession itself and then a sort of secondary obsession with understanding why I needed to have an answer, or worrying that any answers I do come up with are somehow ‘missing the point’, and that there must be another ‘level’ beyond what I have comprehended the 'second time around'. I think that when I was younger I used to suffer from a more ‘conventional’ form of OCD, and that my form of reassurance in later life has become to try and rationalise what my obsessions are about, as what really worries me now is having (or having had) an obsession with something for absolutely no reason. I think I can stomach the idea of wasting countless hours of my life being obsessed with something inconsequential, as long as I can articulate to myself what exactly it is that I am obsessing about! It’s almost like with ‘normal’ OCD I would focus on finding answers, whereas now I can’t even define the question! I apologise, as this is quite an incoherent problem to want an answer to. It feels almost like a generalised anxiety disorder, as though I always need to be worrying about something, but unlike generalised anxiety disorder there are definite ‘focal points’ for my anxiety, but I can’t quite ‘tear down the veil’ and see what they are. Any thoughts would be much appreciated!

Also, and this post might make more sense than the last one, I seem to have gotten into a trend of 'obsessing about obsessing'. I got really caught up in trying to figure out the logic behind my obsessions - why my brain seems to get so caught up in seemingly pointless things. The best conclusion I can come to is that I fear purposelessness, and so I try to find meaning in really unusual places. However, perhaps as a fear that I haven't really 'figured out the reasoning', I now keep trying to go over all of my previous obsessions to prove to myself that what they were about was a search for meaning / trying to avoid purposelessness. (I can at least see the irony in that - obsessively trying to make sense of obsessions, that I believe to be based around trying to make sense of things(!) ) I seem to have given myself a new fear that my obsessions are totally unique to me and completely meaningless, and that for that reason I'll never be able to explain them. My brain seems to be fixated on a fear that there was never any meaning to any of it! Anyway, anyone got any comments or ideas about this?

Hello all! Although I have previously had obsessions which caused me to panic a lot, I currently seem to be being bugged by really abstract ones that don't so much cause me to panic as get on my nerves as they are always there. Do you reckon it's better to try and understand these or just try and ignore them (they tend to be pseudo-philosophical). What's irritating is that I'm not really sure why I find them of concern, it's like I'll just see or read something that will set it off, and then I can't figure out why it bugs me. To give an example, I play computer games (though not to excess :-) ) and a few months ago I was looking at the fabric on the clothes my character was wearing, and started thinking about objective vs subjective properties of the clothing. I was thinking about how the clothes that looked battered looked cooler than the pristine ones, and then suddenly got rather bugged by that thought, and whether there is a perfect level of 'batteredness' something can have. I then have been on-and-off bothered for the last few months about what the perfect material to 'make battered' would be, and what level of batteredness is desirable, e.g. material being faded/ rubbed is tolerable, but badly torn isn't. Also, if batteredness is desirable, whether the material has to be 'objectively' battered, i.e. have lost some atoms etc. to wear and tear, or whether it can just 'look' battered. I'm really perplexed by this, because for a lot of the stuff I've been obsessed by, I could see the logic of it, but with this I don't really get it? It's like my brain is just trying to conjure up anything to pre-occupy my mind. Before anyone thinks this is just some camp over-obsession with fabrics, it's not something I get any joy out of, it's just weird questions that are always there. I'm not really expecting any kind of answer to this (I can't even formulate a question), but was wondering what everyone thinks? Cheers,