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DRS1

OCD-UK Member
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Everything posted by DRS1

  1. I think in regards to your GP, from my own experience, I would tell them everything. You have backing from the counselors that they think it's OCD. I told my GP everything and that included intrusive harm thoughts and images, sexual intrusive thoughts and images, all the compulsions. I did take the risk that I would not be understood (I was already previously misunderstood by one of the local mental health teams mental health nurses who had to phone her boss for clarification of what I was experiencing was normal, and that I wasn't a danger, so I do get you there) but I needed the help. You also have OCD UK to help you too. There is a GP checklist page somewhere on the main charity website that you can use to break the ice.
  2. 1. Of course it can be difficult especially when you don't have the tools to deal with it properly and the understanding of being able to recognise what are the "signs" so to speak of it being OCD e.g. did the thought pop into your head randomly, do feel anxiety/uncertainty and do you feel that you "must" do something about that to reduce the anxiety/uncertainty. 2. Now? Laugh at it. It's ridiculous. It's OCD, it makes no sense. For me it gets to a point where it is that extreme and outside the box that I can look at it and go "okay, that's great and all but I'm just going to do what I was doing anyways". The way to help with this for me at least is ERP, exposing yourself to the situation/thought/image, I make it as bad as possible and then leave it to live in my head with all the uncertainty. Then from there it's about not engaging in the compulsions as that's what is keeping OCD going ultimately. 3. Yes. If it didn't feel real, you wouldn't care. 4. I wouldn't say relief, no. Respond the correct way at first can be mentally and emotionally exhausting and can feel morally wrong but over time it's more like switching to a different way of approaching it. There's no relief, just difference. When you do have ups and downs (I've had my fair share recently of blips), its important to recognise if you could respond without compulsions just once. You can do it time and time and time again.
  3. Hi, I'm from Scotland so this may not reflect where you are but I was referred to my local Community Mental Health Team which has a panel of Psychologists and at the time a Psychiatrist. I had to wait a bit but then was given a diagnostic interview appointment which spilled into 2 appointments but at the end was given my diagnosis of OCD and an unofficial diagnosis of ASD at level 1.
  4. I'd refer you back to @Handy's response to you for that one
  5. you are focusing too much on the content of the dream.
  6. Hi, hopefully I'm understanding what you were meaning.nI'd say this would be a bit of OCD about OCD. I've had it and still do about worrying that intrusive thoughts will come up and what the compulsions may be in response and what that may mean. It's difficult to disengage with it. You could, in theory, listen to everything OCD says as fact in trying to avoid every trigger ever and that way you'll not have to do the compulsions that you do and won't have the anxiety and intrusive thoughts necessarily but you'll be doing one giant amount of avoidance in the process - just another compulsion. I think its also a bit like not wanting to have someone else's OCD intrusive thoughts too and the thought action fusion of that being just by reading about someone else's experience, that somehow you could develop their obsessions too.
  7. Let's not go back to this same back and forth like before. You've got this!
  8. You know the answer to that, you are just asking that because you are full of anxiety and are distressed about it. Take a step back when you feel a bit less anxious about it then try and come back to this. You need to be able to evaluate this outside of the OCD logic of your brain first e.g. theory B
  9. You also know that you were doing the right approach initially in response there by dismissing it all. It doesn't matter about the guilt and the shame and your initial response to it shows the non-OCD interpretation of the situation
  10. So what if you were laughing at a joke? Why does it matter to you to figure it out? You could go on feeling trapped and punishing yourself saying you are a bad person or alternatively take a step back and try to look a little more from an angle of if it makes sense really. Often you will find that the judgement you have put on yourself here is invalid. How do you think you are supposed to react to intrusive thoughts? Should someone not be allowed to laugh or make jokes because of the content?
  11. The quick answer is yes. OCD doesn't like the fact you aren't doing what it wants you to do, so at this point, it's going to throw the intrusive thoughts at you more in an attempt to have you give in and do the compulsions (what it wants).
  12. Now that's a classic reassurance seeking response there. The reality is no matter how we answer those questions OCD isn't going to accept them if it was OCD... What do you think you should do?
  13. Hi and welcome to the forum. This isn't isolated just to your partner, it can be an issue for a lot of us with OCD. I don't have a partner and I've never even had a relationship but I still get this intrusive thought/image. I end up googling as a compulsion to convince me that it's okay the chances are low but despite that I still feel like I'd want to avoid all forms of sex that could result in pregnancy because of the fear. This can happen for both men and women, with a flip obviously, for women it seems to be that they will get pregnant and for men that somehow they will get someone pregnant. This also used to be a problem for me when I would share a bathroom with my family. I would worry that semen would be somehow on any surface that someone else may touch and then as a result any female who uses the toilet would somehow get pregnant. Here's the reality (and it's something I'm still struggling to accept), nothing is 100%. You can use all the contraception you like, you can even get a vasectomy or tubes tied and the percentage is never going to be 100% guaranteed and that's what your partner is looking for because that's what OCD is demanding. There is a risk involved when having any form of sex that is PIV that the condom will split or the other contraceptive methods will fail. The consequence of course is pregnancy (not in your case necessarily but for others may be the potential of STI's). The compulsion here then is avoiding having any form of sex. Has your partner had therapy for OCD? He can always go to his GP to be referred back or depending on the area self-refer back himself.
  14. I'm nervous about even trying to answer this because I'm not sure how to. The reality is you have OCD but I think you can really focus on two things here: Hyper-responsibility: You feel responsible for others actions and feel like you must control things so that bad things don't happen. The reality is you are in control and ultimately only responsible for your actions. I don't want to give reassurance but nothing anyone around you does should be something you should take the emotional weight of onto yourself. There's a lot of stuff on the internet: You might not realise it necessarily but you don't need to veer down the paths of seeing things like YouTube channels with these things or people that are saying they will be committing crimes. It's incredibly easy unfortunately for people to find things you don't want to find nowadays but try and reconsider and think about how you, yourself are coming across this stuff. Is it something that you could change your approach so that you don't come across stuff like this e.g. going on a psych forum, clicking on YouTube videos of topics like this. Now, some may say this could be avoidance but I genuinely don't think you need to expose yourself to this kind of stuff in order to recover, if anything, I think its more likely to keep you stuck. To add further, please try to be mindful that people whom you may speak to online may not be who they say they are or may have other motives. I'm sorry that you had to experience what you did. If you don't recognise someone on social media who try to contact you via private message/dm, please block them. There are a couple of things you can do here to ensure safety: Search for these people's names on Google and see what results come up. Does the information/picture match what the google results have available? Are they on anyone of your friends contact lists? If yes, don't assume they are legitimate. Ask your friends who they are to get more information about this person Only ever accept requests from people who you've verified and who you are comfortable with speaking to e.g. you know them Make sure your social media is not public and is private, this way not just everyone should be able to follow/be friends with you and chat with you If they message you with anything that makes you feel uncomfortable (e.g. explicit content, language or otherwise) do not respond, report them and block them
  15. And? Is this it? There's nothing I can tell you that will magically fix this because you aren't willing to take the risk here and you can't move forward until you are ready to do so. Until then, you are just going to keep confessing over and over again and I wonder how this thread is then just impacting you negatively by allowing you to continue to essentially make yourself worse.
  16. I'd refer you to Ashley's post above. Are you ready to accept that it is okay to have uncertainty here? Are you willing to accept you may have OCD? If you aren't really willing to commit to taking that risk, I don't think it's helpful to you for us to respond at all. You need to get yourself in a position where you are ultimately willing to take that risk. Until then, you are just going to be as you are and get further drowned by this. You get to choose here and only you can make that choice. Please for your own sake, really try to take this in and have a think about what you want to do. No one else can get better for you, you have to do that on your own.
  17. I won't try to make sense of what @Angst is trying to say because to be honest I may be just as confused as you on this one. It's a bit vague for me personally. Regardless, I think it's really important that you try to get the therapy you need here. This thread is massively long and no matter what we do say in regards to trying to help you correct false narratives/faulty logic you do tend to almost always ignore it and in nearly every message you write it always has the information that you feel needs to be constantly added for context or to make sure everyone knows exactly what it is over and over again. I'm not going to sit here and tell you what you need to do for that reason beyond looking at really trying to get therapy. The thing is whilst we all have OCD, you obviously feel that you are the outlier case where despite the fact that sometimes you do want to think it is all just OCD, you don't want to ever open your idea to the risk that it is all OCD (fully) and that this has been a massively overblown situation for 17 years. I'm sure if any of us were in your shoes, we'd likely have similar struggles to deal with the issues you are dealing with right now and maybe that's what we are missing here. Maybe we're missing our empathy. It can get so easy just to say, cut out the compulsions, this is how this works, this is this, etc. especially when people have managed to get to the other side of this and I get that. Facts and information here is well intentioned and generally can be a big help to those struggling but sometimes it really takes working with a psychologist that can really understand you and get to know you personally to help. I've personally found that whilst learning about OCD and reading self books got me so far, I needed that assistance to get where I got to. The reality of that for me is, I'm back on referral for therapy again because I'm struggling again. It's okay to need help multiple times and it might in your case take the right therapist before it clicks with you. I've been lucky in that regard.
  18. I've just had a look and the International OCD Foundation have a search function for therapists on their website that may be more useful. They also allow you to search for teletherapy options if that's more useful to you: https://iocdf.org/find-help/
  19. Your counselor has given you the information on this and you have even proved in your post that your googling compulsion wasn't even enough to satisfy OCD to give you certainty. Asking for reassurance here by it's very nature in this scenario can also be seen as a compulsion. As such I would rather avoid attempting to answer your question. However, try and think of it this way. If it isn't OCD, you can only deal with it as it comes. If it is OCD you have the therapy knowledge. OCD does muddy the waters a bit with doubt and certainty. Where someone without OCD would be able to take an answer and be okay with it, we may not. Even if you could prove to OCD about an obsession being factually 100% improbable, it would find some way to twist it, find that one specific weird scenario where there could maybe just maybe be a little bit of doubt and capitalize on it. It's not easy to deal with.
  20. I agree this would be better discussed as part of a different thread specific to this. The reason for my initial response was simply to clear up the fact the original poster can in fact have OCD they have described here and to in a way normalize what they are experiencing rather than trying to alienate them.
  21. Handy, firstly you know I don't agree with you on this but to go along with your ideas here: Is avoidance, or checking for arousal then a physical or mental compulsion? I don't see how separating into two forms of "OCD" or moving them into GAD helps here. GAD is not OCD, and regardless of whether or not it is physical or mental compulsions the format is the same. To take from Break Free From OCD (the Oldfield, Challacombe, Salkovskis book which is well regarded by OCD UK and they have been treating people with OCD in the UK for a considerable amount of time. Salkovskis is also the professor of clinical psychology at Oxford and as the director of the oxford institute of clinical psychology and of the Oxford Cognitive Therapy Centre.): The section on My Problem Doesn't Fit: I Don't Have Compulsions: "Sometimes people say that although they are not performing obvious compulsions in terms of what they do, the quality of their life is affected by the torment caused by their obsessions. Compulsions are in fact always there, but they can be hidden. In some cases the compulsions are very subtle and may be more related to avoiding particular activities. In others the compulsions are all internal (often referred to as "neutralising"), including not only mental checking by going over things in your mind and restitution in which you try to "put things right" in your head (by thinking a good thought to balance a bad one, for example) but also things like mental arguing (trying to convince yourself that there is nothing to worry about, a type of self-reassurance seeking) or by directly seeking reassurance from those around you. Whether your compulsions are external, like washing or checking or internal, like neutralising, it is still obsessive-compulsive disorder." This should be rather clear then, at least based on some of the most well respected psychologists in the field and who have contributed a large amount of research into the area of OCD that you don't have to have physical compulsions have Obsessive-Compulsive disorder. Pure O, I'll agree with. It's not helpful, it implies without any compulsion, but if Salkovskis, Bream and Oldfield's views are that mental compulsions on their own with obsessions in the pattern of the cycle that is OCD is present, it can be OCD. I think perhaps this is where the information on the Pure O page of the charity website is causing issue. I feel like saying in "nearly" all cases, there will always be physical outward compulsions too isn't helpful. I think this contributes to the confusion here rather than dispelling the misnomer of Pure O - the idea that there could be no compulsions, but this is just my view. We can do more to base information on views from well known clinical psychologists and psychiatrists who work with people with OCD and actively research it, especially to have a consistent definition on issues like this.
  22. I don't feel this is exactly fair. He's struggling and has struggled for a considerably long period of time. Whilst I agree that Eric has to be able to stop posting for compulsive reassurance seeking, suggesting that as he isn't currently engaging with the advice that he should effectively not be part of the forum anymore is not fair. He is struggling the same as you, the same as I do at times, the same as everyone else who's been here. We always go on this idea of "my OCD is the worst because X reason". The reality is, if you were in Eric's head with the exact experiences that he's going through then you would likely understand why it's difficult for him. Please be respectful of other users on the forum. We can be stern but to say things like he is making a mockery of others is simply not true. We are all humans at the core of it and we all have OCD mixed with our own life specific circumstances. I think it's important to realize that sometimes.
  23. It's really based on my own personal experience. My assessment took well over 1h 30 mins in total but maybe that was because of the ASD side of things more than OCD. In which case, as I'm not remotely medically qualified in this regard, ignore my original response as this is Inaccurate. I'll need to be more careful in future about my assessment experience as it seems then that mine could be an outlier to an average duration of assessment. Sorry about that.
  24. I don't know, a banana can be pretty phallic looking but in all seriousness, none of what you have said matters here. None of it. All I'll say is trying to masturbate away what feels like constant sensations isn't going to get you anywhere. Of course it's fine to do so but you are doing so out of a need to not experience uncomfortable sensations/feelings and yet you are proving it lasts for a while and then comes back. In an OCD context, we would say that is a compulsion but since you are so against the idea that this could all be OCD, I'm not sure you will be willing to accept that even this is a compulsion .
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