Nellie

Hi MentalChecker I just want to say a big thank-you for your inspiring post. I am going to try today to shift my focus to not chasing the feeling of reassurance. I don't think I've tried that before, or at least not thought about it in quite that way. I usually focus on trying not to do the compulsions but maybe have been hoping to feel reassured anyway somehow, which might have undermined my motivation. So I'm keen to give this a go! Very many thanks. And also many congratulations on how well you've done tackling your own OCD! N

Hi I recognise a lot of what you're saying. I also obsess about what's happened at work pretty much every day (in my case it's mistakes or bad decisions I've made, if I've offended anyone, if I've revealed myself to be incompetent, etc, all seeming catastrophic at the time). And I also return to obsessions about things I did decades ago. I agree that it is exhausting and horrible. I am having stretches of time now though where I feel calm and fine in between these flare-ups. Not exactly sure what's shifted it but I think it started wIth acknowledging that I'll keep on getting things wrong because I'm just not perfect and that's the same for everyone and there's no avoiding it so it simply has to be good enough. Even the bad mistakes that hurt people just have to be good enough because that is the best I can do. And I don't ever have to judge myself by what anyone else thinks or what I'm imagining they might think. I'm trying to put myself back in charge of my life I guess, and allow myself to mess up just like I'd allow someone else to mess up. For example, I'm intending to enjoy my work today despite the possibility that I might do something really stupid! So that's the principle I'm trying to guide myself by. And of course knowing all that doesn't just change everything so my mistakes now feel ok. It still feels really dreadful for a long while every single time there's a new incident. But when I can manage to give myself permission not to pay attention to all those thoughts about the future and the past and what people might think of me and how bad it feels, and just get involved in everyday real life, it can eventually settle down quite nicely for a little while. I'm in no way 'recovered' yet, but having spells where life feels feasible and enjoyable is pretty good compared with a few years ago. I hope your CBT arrives soon. In the meantime there are some really good self-help books around, and this forum is a phenomenal resource

Hi Scott I don't have an answer to your question about knowing any managers with OCD sorry but I do have a couple of thoughts on your situation because it overlaps a bit with mine. My OCD has also affected my work. I think it might be the reason I haven't applied for promotion for a long time, although to be honest I can find it hard to tell how much is OCD and how much is not actually wanting to do the promoted role. I'm aiming not to solve that one at the moment - I might be doing an avoidance compulsion or I might not, but I've decided to let that go for now at least. What I think I recognise in your description is the feeling of being trapped because you have worries on both sides of the decision, and both might be OCD-fuelled worries: on one hand, you're predicting that if you do get into a situation of having to manage conflict you might not be able to handle that experience so you're keeping yourself 'safe' by avoiding it, but on the other hand you're predicting that if you carry on with that plan you'll not progress and might not be happy/satisfied because you haven't taken the opportunity to progress. So you feel hemmed in - you can't keep yourself 'safe' from both things at the same time. I have that feeling a lot! I try to look at it as just a feature of life: there is no perfect, 'safe' way through life avoiding all risks including the risk of missed opportunities. People without OCD probably don't expect there to be. And I think our way out is to think the same way they do - we can't control it all and we haven't failed at life if we didn't get through without things going wrong. I guess I would suggest that you try to allow yourself some flexibility to choose what you want to do here (rather than trying to get it 'right' or risk-free). You don't have to prevent being involved in all difficult work conflict situations or manage them perfectly when they occur. And you don't have to progress as far or as fast as possible in your career. Either of those options might be reasonable for you. And you don't have to make the perfect choice either. Life for everyone is messy and complicated and that's fine. Also, you won't be able to suddenly turn off the worried feeling about any of this but if you can make choices regardless of that worried feeling and just let what happens happen without putting too much responsibility on yourself to control the outcome then that might be a good way to go? (I think that's what I'm aiming to do at the moment in my own life anyway.)

Hi Corrie I'm also having my own Covid worries at the moment. I understand that lateral flow tests say you should disregard results that appear after 30 minutes. There is clearly some mechanism that can lead to false positives after that time, such that they have to warn us about that. I don't know what that mechanism is, or why it might sometimes cause a line and sometimes not, but I don't have to. The people who made the tests know enough to warn us that we should read the tests at 30 minutes and not after, and that's good enough for me. There is only so much you can do and only so much other people will be doing. I think the worry you've done so far will leave a mark in your memory and your emotions, and will persuade you that there is a real problem, but it doesn't mean there is. X

This might not be quite the same thing, but I've heard that sometimes people's OCD can start to get focussed on the therapy itself where they're trying to get the technique perfectly right, and it can get confusing to them knowing what counts as the treatment and what counts as the compulsion. There's an episode on the OCD Stories podcast called Two Tail Spikes where they talk about it. As I say, probably not exactly what yours is doing but just another example of how sneaky OCD can be. I think maybe "testing" compulsions are along the same lines - they might not look like a compulsion but they still are. I'm guessing that this "if you enjoy it, it's not OCD" idea could get rather tricky because as you say the need to do a compulsion could be so huge it might easily be confused with enjoyment - so that's maybe not always going to be a useful guide. I think we can tie ourselves in knots using rules like that because OCD can often find a loophole somewhere to keep us confused.... I was also reminded that Mark Freeman sometimes talks about OCD as having similarities to addiction (regarding compulsive urges). Do you know him? He's recovered from OCD and has lots of YouTube videos. One in particular "OCD as an addiction" might be relevant. (He does say in it that forums can be unhelpful because people on them can normalise compulsions but happily this particular forum doesn't do that! ) It's great that you have experience that leaving things alone can help them get better. I expect you're a lot further along the recovery path than I am but I think I've just started to see that happen for myself after many years of struggling against letting go of the worries/compulsions and it is giving me a lot of hope. I'm sure that stress and tiredness will make you vulnerable, so stay strong and look after yourself

Hi. Your example of the kitten thing was so interesting and it makes a lot of sense to me. I think this might play some part in compulsions in general. We talk about them usually as if they're designed to get rid of uncertainty by giving us some very specific information (e.g. does someone think I did a bad thing, did I leave the tap on, etc.) But what you say here sounds like it's more to do with resolving something much more simple and basic, like "will I do it or won't I?". While we're not doing it, that is unresolved and for some reason it's uncomfortable, and it gets more uncomfortable the longer we keep paying attention to the question. But if we do it, it's completely resolved, at least until the next thing that you might or might not do comes along. Maybe that same thing could play a role in pushing us towards any kind of compulsion because once we've done it we no longer have to go through the experience of deciding whether or not to do it any more, which is some kind of a (temporary) relief. I think I've read something related to this in a book somewhere but I can't remember where. I think it was to do with someone trying to overcome an addiction and how to some extent giving in and doing the thing they were trying to give up resolved the uncertainty about whether they would ever give in or not, and maybe that had a part to play in them giving in and doing the behaviour they actually wanted to give up. When you ask whether the Googling etc. is an exposure or a compulsion it seems obviously a compulsion to me. I don't think we'd ever feel like we "have to" do exposures. They're simply exercises we'd choose to do in order to practise a healthy behaviour (i.e., not doing compulsions or avoidance). So e.g. as an exposure exercise, we can choose to practise doing something we'd usually avoid doing. Or we could simply choose not to practise that right now. I would say that in your case though you're feeling compelled, so even if your brain is telling you it's a chance to have an exposure to something you fear, it's still a compulsion. So maybe you're afraid of the feeling you'll get if you don't do the behaviour, and you're imagining having to go through that experience for some indefinite period of time which doesn't feel good, so you do it to get rid of that feeling, and therefore it's a compulsion. If you can decide that you just don't want to do that thing and you don't even want to engage with the idea at all, and then aim not to engage with it even when the possibility comes into your head that you will feel bad if you don't do it, then I'm guessing that would be response-prevention that you can practise instead. Hope I've understood you right here - I'm a bit nervous giving advice on the forum still, but I feel like I know where you're coming from and that kitten example just clicked with me

Hi BigDave If there are things that realistically won't change then yes, accept them - e.g. realistically, you won't keep everything perfectly clean to your preferred standards. But I don't think you should accept the idea that you need to feel constantly under threat from that situation. You can change your attitude. You can decide to let yourself live in a place that's less than 100% clean without constantly torturing yourself with the idea that it's not ok, that you aren't doing enough to keep it clean, that you're constantly in danger of feeling unbearable disgust. I think that deliberate change in attitude is an important step, otherwise you keep on fighting with yourself. Like Caramoole, I'm not saying you'll change your preference for cleanliness. But I think you can choose to live in the world as it is, even though it doesn't match your preference, and you can choose to let that be ok by you. I want to recommend something that's helped me massively. There's an OCD therapist in the US called Michael Greenberg. He has a website with articles explaining his ideas and a couple of interview episodes on the OCD Stories podcast. He is developing a version of ERP based on stopping ruminations, with the idea that it's when we're ruminating (mentally engaging at all) with the feared idea that we're anxious. In your case you might practise not engaging at all with the idea that your room is contaminated if you don't want that idea to keep bothering you. (I did this with my own worries - not contamination but I'm sure that doesn't make a difference. I started very brief - think of the thing for 30 seconds then don't think about it for 30 seconds, I did that maybe just three times each morning. You keep it easy and non-anxious - the aim is simply to learn that with practice you can actually not ruminate. I started with small worries that I could handle fairly well before trying the more difficult ones a few weeks later.) By doing this you can prove to yourself that you don't have to engage with what you fear, so you have control back and you feel in less of an impossible "trapped" situation. It then becomes your free choice whether you carry on treating the contamination thoughts as something terrifying that you have to try to deal with or as something that you can't be bothered to engage with any more - you feel the initial emotion still maybe but you let that come and then go, and then you get on with your day. (I'm not fully at the "can't be bothered" stage yet but I do think I'm making progress and getting over incidents more quickly and easily than before.) P.S. I think the idea of doing ERP in a way that doesn't involve anxiety isn't exactly standard practice so it might be that others, including your therapist, might disagree with it. But it makes so much sense to me that I really wanted to mention it anyway. If it causes issues with your current therapy method though, maybe it might be best to stick with what you're doing.

That's some great advice, thanks loads people! The concrete steps are just what I was needing help with. Gbg's list of small risks sounds like what I want to get going on because I haven't really tried that yet with these fears, and I love the idea of going on the offensive. Thanks for sharing some of the actual items on the list - I couldn't think where to start but that might be enough to get some ideas going. I definitely also have the fear of being immoral thing but I will try to find ones that fit my fear of letting people down, and of doing things I don't feel 100% competent at, too. Then I can do what Gemma said and do a prediction of how it will go if I don't ruminate afterwards and try that for an hour to see how I feel after. I have read the Break Free book but a while ago, borrowed from a friend. Might borrow that again. I have Jonathan Grayson's book. Then like Leif and dksea said, I can try to let myself feel the guilt and anxiety and try to accept it without reacting. Sounds hard but the new thing will be starting very small with things on the same theme as my massive fears. I haven't done that yet and I am almost keen to get going and challenge myself to feel those feelings and let them be there. Thanks so much. This will take practice I know but I have to start somewhere and have been stuck for months not seeing a good plan of attack for my main issues, so I'll see if I can get this together now and maybe start to see some progress. Thanks again so much. This is hard on your own, so your input is valuable to me. X

Hi. I'm stuck because I still can't accept that it's ok for me to make mistakes. It's the cognitive step I guess. I think my core belief is that i don't know what I'm doing in general. I have to make decisions every day where I don't feel confident I made the right decision and I'm constantly pretty terrified that one of them will turn out catastrophically wrong. And I will deserve the blame because I made the decision even though I already knew that I didn't properly know what I was doing. (I feel like I'm driving down the motorway without knowing how to drive, so I should stop, but that would be giving up on life and I'm not supposed to do that either....) Logically I can see that for most things in life other people don't have perfect confidence in their decisions but they are not all in the state I'm in, so possibly the difference is that I've spent too long thinking about it all and now I'm hyper sensitized to it. I can also see that even with my worst decisions, if it was someone else who made them I'd forgive them. So I'd like to be able to forgive myself. And sometimes I can, fleetingly, but it doesn't stick. Does anyone have any advice on how I can start to accept bad decisions as just a part of life and not the sign that I'm dangerously incompetent? Maybe I do understand enough already and need to get on with exposures but these are so hard to design when all my compulsions are constant rumination and worry. I wonder if I need to work on it like this: I can choose to either be safe or live a proper life. I keep losing sight of that. I know I can't really be safe but I kind of feel safe when I'm at least trying hard to find my mistakes and fix them and prevent new mistakes. I feel safe from the possibility of accidentally being a negligent, bad person who doesn't care that they've been bad because at least I can make sure I care. But in practice that means constant worry and rumination because that's how I do my "caring". So of course I'm not getting better. I can see that I'm deliberately keeping my ocd going on this way. So now I need to make it concrete with a hierarchy, don't I? I'm finding it hard to think of things to do here. I have done well with my checking compulsions (locks etc) but with rumination it's hard for me to see what I need to do exactly. Thanks

Hi greentop. I sympathise - I had a panic attack recently over a real event I've managed not to confess for a year and I was desperate to confess on the spot just to end the horror. Constant fantasies of confessing churning around in my head.... Managed not to, and now I don't really want to even think about the topic, certainly don't feel inclined to confess. (I'm sure the urge will be back but it's gone for the moment). I will try to reconstruct what I did. I think I told myself some version of the following: You are very anxious right now, so don't trust your reasoning. It might seem sensible to confess, but remember that previously it has seemed better not to confess. There might have been something in that view that you can't see right now. It's ok that you don't know right now what's the best thing to do, so decide to do nothing about it, at least for now. Remember that confessing is a compulsion, so for that reason alone be very wary of it and certainly don't do it just to escape the anxiety. You can live with the anxiety. Just take the next breath when you need to, and the next step when you need to (I got that from someone else's post on this forum and it really helped! So thanks for that, can't remember who said it.). The feelings will go and it doesn't matter that you had a panic in public. Other people will be fine with it, just look after yourself for now. Once I'd calmed down I think I talked myself through my "cognitive" view of the situation, to put things in perspective a bit (all of which I've worked out very gradually in less anxious moments): Maybe that thing I did was very bad, maybe it wasn't. I just don't know. It seemed ok to do it at the time but who knows? I will aim to leave it at that if I can and not try to find "the truth". I can choose to forgive myself for deciding to do the thing I did. And I can choose to forgive myself for deciding to not figure it out any further right now. Both those decisions might prove to be wrong in time but right now they are the best I can do and I can choose to accept the risk that goes with making those decisions. Hope some of that is relevant. This is so, so hard. Hardest thing I've ever done. X

Hi Taurean. Yes I think keeping up a challenge attitude is great. It keeps us practising and seems to give a feeling of control in amongst all the rubbish we are constantly dealing with. Well I'm pleased that I made a start tackling the replaying-conversations compulsion. It seems that tracking what kind of thinking I've been doing in a day is much more difficult than tracking whether or not I double-checked the cooker. So I don't really know how it went! But I will keep it on my list of challenges and maybe over the course of weeks I'll see a change. The challenges I posted up a few weeks ago are also ongoing. I seem to be taking a very small-steps route so progress seems slow but I do see progress which is heartening. I'm doing physical checks of cooker etc less than before and still aiming to cut out completely eventually. Hi Angst. I suppose your symptoms would be ocd rather than depression if they're done in a compulsive way? I think I do the thing with the conversations compulsively, although it doesn't feel deliberate but that's probably because it's such a strong habit. I'm guessing many of us will have some depression with our ocd and they might affect each other - so I think the strain of trying and falling to live up to ocd's demands can make me depressed, and depression can (I think?) bring a negative bias which our ocd tries to protect us from (as in, seeing the world as dangerous leads to safety behaviours)...? Whether or not these replayed conversations are deliberate though, a common issue might be that we associate the content with meaning in a way that others might not. So I remember saying something offensive and jump to the idea that I'm a dangerous person who shouldn't be allowed to talk to other people, and maybe you associate a meaning with the memory of feeling embarrassed? And in both cases someone without those themes might have the memory but shrug it off straight away? Ok, off for another day of attempting to avoid/quit replaying conversations, not check cooker just before leaving, and only looking the front door once. ...if possible! And if I fail, I haven't completely failed because trying is the first step and I'll get there eventually....

Today's challenge: avoid replaying past conversations in my head. This is a massive compulsion of mine. It often ends with me spotting something I said that I wish I hadn't because e.g. I might have hurt someone's feelings or broken a confidence or got someone into trouble. I can feel the urge to go over a conversation I just had right now. I know it wouldn't end well. If I didn't find anything I would just move onto yesterday's conversations and so on until I found an issue to grab onto and wrestle with for the rest of the day at least. Going to take a big breath, be aware of the urge and let the urge and anxiety be there while I hang out the washing then get on with some work. Also going to remind myself this is a very well practised habit and overcoming it is likely to take months. There will be lots of failed attempts probably. But the first step needs to be taken so that's what I will aim to do today. Thinking of you guys doing your challenges too and that is helping With all our different issues what I have learned from this forum is that we really are in pretty much the same boat. Deep breath everyone....

Hi Cub. I just wanted to say that I thoroughly recognise what you are saying. You are describing my own thought processes and I've had so many days dominated with huge anxiety, completely unable to make an ordinary decision and feeling awful and stupid about it. Whichever decision I imagine making, I can see that consequences might be awful, and on top of that I feel such a failure because other people don't seem to get in that state in a normal day. Not solved it yet but I'm working on the idea of accepting that things MIGHT go badly wrong BUT that it was still the right thing to do to make the best decision I could at the time. That seems like it has to be right, and I think it must apply to every decision actually. It's like a combination of giving myself permission in advance to make a decision that might not be the best one, and forgiving myself afterwards for having made it even though I can see that bad things might happen as a result. I'm doing it right now because I'm nervous about posting this, in case it's the wrong advice.... Anyway, I wanted to say I get this. I have frequently been hiding somewhere in tears at work, through the terror of not being able to make ordinary decisions. I think I am seeing these days that there is another way to go about things and very gradually moving towards it. Sending some hope your way. X

Going to try to not ruminate on a new panic that got triggered today, where I did something that seemed ok at the time although not perfect and now I think someone else might be thought badly of because of my decision. It could happen and I feel anxious but going to aim to let the bad feelings stay and not pursue the thinking any further. It's very obviously my usual theme so I guess I can manage to assume my worry is exaggerated although I really wish I could just fix it! Also going to try to repeat today's feat, of not checking the cooker within the last ten minutes before leaving the house, for the next couple of weeks or so.

Thanks for the replies I went out that night and as usually happens I said something I regretted saying and started the spiralling thoughts about being rejected by people because I'm so awful..... Then I thought, I could add a new verse to my song where I simply repeat the thing I'd regretted saying through the whole verse, loudly (still only on my head!) and with gusto! It does feel uncomfortable of course but I think it works because you're right in the face of the feared thing in a way that doesn't automatically draw you into ruminating because it's not ordinary thinking, and it's a bit silly. It also feels rather empowering to go on the offensive like this P.s there are various similar ideas in ACT therapy which is where I got this from