Sputnik Bug

I’ll try and explain, despite it probably falling on deaf ears. What do all these things you worry about have in common? They’re the worst possible thing you think you could do. Why does someone driving a car think about running people over? Why do people think about pushing someone when they’re on a cliffs edge? and I know what you’re going to think “but I acted on it.” How, by laughing inappropriately or not speaking to someone enough? How do you think you treat OCD? Do you fight the thoughts and reason with them, and they go away and your head feels all nice and clean? Or do you sit with the thoughts, but live life anyway accepting that as a human you will have crappy thoughts sometimes?

This is something you can change that would probably help give you a bit more distance from your thoughts. Please when you do get your therapy tell them everything. I tried to hold back things I thought were not important or too embarrassing, but they came back later (admittedly I had better coping mechanisms but there’s a reason you have a therapist.) I think we all want you to get better, but you need to get your mind into a more receptive state because atm you’re deflecting anything positive.

Cora, I think you need to be proactive now. You’re on the waitlist for CADAT which is great news but like @ocdjonesy said you need to do some prep now as you can’t stay stuck till the end of the year. No one can force you to do this, you have to want to work on it and at least work on an assumption that this is OCD which I know is hard for you. https://www.ocduk.org/overcoming-ocd/self-help/ Pick a book from the above link, buy it from your preferred store and commit to it for a the time you’re reading it. Make a journal and see if anything changes in that time. It’s time to fight this.

I often have daydreams of going Robinson Crusoe and living on a tropical island somewhere for a while. Nothing too fancy, somewhere that's remote enough to re-wild myself. I'm not sure what ocean I would be in, possibly the Caribbean? I don't think I could go Tom Hanks in Castaway though, I'd have to have some basics like running water, cooking apparatus, a roof I can just see myself scuba diving with all the tropical fish and coral reef and later sitting around a bonfire watching the stars in the night sky. Yes I could have dreamed bigger, but there you go haha. Included a pic for visual purposes:

Because the confession is an attempt to ease your anxiety. Here’s how I see it going down from what you’ve said in this thread: confess > wife gets angry > arguments > depression and guilt come back and and a new obsession pops up and it’s back to the beginning next week I’m not going to tell you I get relationships because I don’t but that’s my view as just someone with OCD who is detached from your worries.

@malina has said what I was going to in a probably more sympathetic way. If you pull back from everything then you’ll have a decrease in anxiety before it eventually finds something else to worry about. I see a lot of myself in you Cora that’s probably why I’ve been a bit terse. I quit work and everything and it all just piled up until I hit 30 and had a breakdown. I don’t want any other young person to go through the same thing as it was hell. You can beat this, but like others have said before it takes a change in the way you think.

What happened is purely subjective though. It's not what you've done but just how you've judged it. As far as I can tell you touched a friends dress in an absent minded moment and maybe made a stupid off the cuff remark, but you've heaped a lot of meaning on all this because you have a fear of being a bad person somehow. edit: Re read your post and I'm sorry for your friends situation, that's not nice. The thing is you've somehow internalized the idea that you're the bad one in all this when surely the best thing to do is keep your friends close and keep in contact even though your mind is telling you that you're a groomer / whatever. It's all just an illusion, honestly.

The idea is to trigger your anxiety by bringing up a feared situation in some way e.g. if you have contamination fears you'd willingly touch something you believe is contaminated and ride the anxiety out without performing a compulsion. That said you don't need to be doing it all day, just maybe once a day until you move up your hierarchy. After ERP so the goal for me is just to not avoid anything / live life the way I want to, but that's a couple of years after my therapy. So eventually you have to try and bring the same idea to every spike of OCD. I think it depends but realistically do what you would be doing if you didn't have the complications of OCD. Say you were going to meet friends but after ERP you feel the strong urge to do compulsions then you should probably see your friends because that's more valuable than compulsions. Hopefully that made some sense take care

Cora, you’re getting caught in a loop again. Can’t you take a step back for a second and see this for what it is: distorted thinking patterns? Could you go back to the last thread you made and re-read the advice Snowbear gave you? Honestly, this is no different. edit: I know when you’re caught in the middle of this it’s all about fear and your mind trying to trick you but there comes a point where you just have to make a change.

Going back to repeating myself but why not treat it as OCD? You're stuck in a hole with a ladder and a shovel and you keep trying to dig your way out.

Well done! You did well to resist the compulsions and ride out the anxiety, definitely not an easy thing to do

While that's important it sounds like it wasn't tailored to your OCD which is the driving force behind all of that. I understand though that not all countries have nationalized healthcare so it's hard to access the right type of care. Possibly the most important takeaway of this thread. Until you accept these thoughts as OCD you will be forever trying to fight them rather than let them just wash over you. Why not work under the idea that it's OCD and try the required treatment. What have you got to lose other than time (which you're already spending on worrying about stuff anyway)?

A question: I think you've said you've had therapy before Cora but what did you actually talk about in it? Was it general CBT or was it really aimed at your fears about being creepy or whatever OCD throws at you? I'm interested because I had almost 16 years on/off of average therapies before I got one that addressed my real problem (fear of being bad, perverse, etc.)

I'm tired for you rather than of you. You deserve some time off and a bit of calm

Cora, it's the same thing just with different subjects. OCD is OCD whatever clothing it wears, you just seem to be under the spell of it telling you it's something new every time. Things can only change when you realize that everything you experience comes under this disorder.