Monarch23

Thank you both for your replies. They are very helpful. Gemma7, I had a course of CBT last year, which I found really useful. I will go back to the notes I made and read through everything again to refresh myself on the techniques. I think that because I am focusing so much on my physical health condition at the moment, those strategies have taken a backseat and the OCD has been able to creep up on me again. It can be quite difficult to establish the techniques again once you're 'down the hole' almost without realising. I will order the book you suggested which might help with that, thank you. Angst, it's good to hear that someone else has had similar experiences in the past. Thanks for your advice.

Hi everyone. I struggle with both chronic pain and OCD. I currently attend a therapy group once a week. I had a really severe OCD episode this morning in relation to this. I decided at 9am that I would not go to my therapy session session because it was snowing and I didn't know if the weather would get worse, as well as the fact that I started some new medication for my pain yesterday and am experiencing some side effects today - I feel quite sick and drowsy. However, at 10am my OCD took over - I felt extremely guilty about not going in and felt like I absolutely had to. So I gave into the compulsion and booked a taxi to go in. However, in the taxi I felt quite sick and didn't want to arrive to the group and be sick during the session (also, I have some OCD-related fears about catching a virus/bug and being even more ill than I am currently, and I didn't want to go in when I wasn't originally planning to and end up catching a bug). So I asked the taxi driver to turn around and take me home, pretending that I had received a text that the session had been cancelled. I can't believe I did that and am sitting here now wishing I had just gone. I'm worrying "what if the taxi driver crashes his car now after he drives away from the place where I live, all because I caused him to make an unnecessary journey?" I also feel guilty about wasting £10 on the journey and lying about the reason I wanted to go home. I also lied to my dad when I got in about the reason for coming back and said the session had been cancelled, to avoid telling him that it was OCD. I have been crying about it for an hour or so and it feels like the anxiety will never go. I feel like I've done something really bad and this also worries me because it means my OCD is out of control again after I was doing so well a year ago to control it. This is all amplified by my chronic pain. I'm not sure what I can do to stop this kind of thing happening, because my OCD seems to be becoming more and more severe again (it seems to have gotten worse as my pain has got worse). Thank you for taking the time to read and I hope it makes sense.

Hi, Firstly, I’m sorry for the long post. I felt that you need to know all the information to understand my problem. I’ve had OCD since I was about 10 years old and it worsened significantly when I started university in 2014. By April 2015 it had become very severe (rituals, repeating, having to do everything the same way every day, guilt) and I went to the doctors. I was put on the waiting list for CBT and told that it would be helpful to try Sertraline (Zoloft). I was reluctant to try medication but was desperate at that point, so I did. After starting it, I had awful gastrointestinal side effects and came off them (at the doctor’s recommended pace). The side effects subsided. The CBT was very useful for my OCD. In Summer 2015, the stomach pain came back, even though I wasn’t on the medication anymore. This got progressively worse until I had to go on an NG feeding tube at the start of 2016. Since then I have not been able to return to university and have very debilitating stomach pain which make me feel extremely unwell, all day every day. I’m currently still looking for a diagnosis, have had countless medical tests which always come back as 'normal' and the whole situation has made me very depressed. However, I obsess daily about taking the Sertraline and feel incredibly regretful, guilty, self-blaming etc. that I took it (I know this is at least in part aggravated by the OCD because I recognise the ‘OCD’/rumination feeling when I obsess over it and had problems with guilty/self-blame before any of this even happened). This is because I feel it could have caused my long-term problems. Many doctors have reassured me that the Sertraline would not have caused this and I, deep down, know that it probably didn’t, but this niggling doubt at the back of my mind won’t let it go. In my mind, I feel I threw my life away in the blink of an eye and what makes me even more regretful is that the CBT really helped my OCD, whislst the medication had no effect. I regularly think “If I had just waited a few more weeks maybe I could have avoided all this”. I am honestly at the end of my tether now and don’t know how much longer I can go on like this, both physically and mentally. If anyone has any advice from the perspective of the self-blame and obsessive thoughts, that would be so useful. I know that this is not the usual type of question you get here but I wasn’t sure where else to ask, regarding the OCD and obsessive thoughts part. Thanks for taking the time to read.