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Just now, Caramoole said:

It does seem genuine......it's almost like any other muscle memory, it becomes the default, go to mode.  You're doing the right thing and trying to catch yourself and change the response.  Keep at it GBG :)

Thanks caramoole :) 

Not seen you round these parts in a while, hope you're keeping well! 

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I've been quite busy but am always around watching with a beady eye!!  These days we have such excellent advice given from very knowledgeable members that Mods advice isn't as necessary as once was.  15 years ago I used to comment on most threads as people were really struggling understanding OCD.  Today I'm pleased to say it's very different, it just shows how much awareness has been raised :)

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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....

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Good luck with that Nellie. 

We have to challenge so as not to slip under the domination of OCD. 

If we don't, it's just going to add more layers of restrictions to our lives. 

I am still doing well, and it is certainly down to the hard work I did tackling my themes triggers plus other thinking distortions: kicking out avoidance: keeping up exposure work: and learning and applying mindfulness and, when needed, meditation. 

Is it a challenge to keep all this going? No, because the new thinking and behaviours have become the default ones. 

The challenge was to put it all together before. 

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12 hours ago, Nellie said:

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 Nellie

Wow. I am grateful to taurean from flagging this up.

Replaying past conversations as well as past scenes in my head is the central trouble in my life. My trigger is different to yours. It works like this. For example, I hear in a conversation a reference to Paris. My memory goes back to a visit to Paris in which I experienced embarrassment. I relive the scene and the embarrassment and feel bad. I do not recall the good times in Paris.

In this context I have to deliberately recall the good times. Though I know the good times exceeded the bad times.

Recall works like this. In the sense, somebody mentions something and we automatically recall something similar. It is how we engage in conversations. Somebody says x and we say we have experienced x in our recalling our experience of x. 

Conversations are about experiences. We know about other people’s experiences by remembering our past experiences. It is how we empathise. It is how we understand. It is how we understand the context of emotions. Somebody says they were ill with flu. And we remember when we were ill with flu. 

I know this memory bias of mine and frequently consciously switch to positive memories.

Please tell me how to defeat this memory bias. Clinical psychologists and psychiatrist generally fail to understand.

 A bright clinical psychologist at a specialist centre for anxiety understood and recommended a strategy for discounting the memory after it appeared in my mind but not how to stop this cognitive bias and the concomitant memories. They are spontaneous.

Incidentally the clinical definition of my malady made by the clinical psychologist was depression not OCD. Would you agree?

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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....

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17 minutes ago, Lost_in_a_Dark_Maze said:

My challenge is to step outside the front door. (I am agoraphobic and have been housebound for seven years.) I have done it a few times in the last week.

Well done lost, that is courageous. 

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Guest OCDhavenobrain

I have to brag today, I have done somewhat good considering the circumstances. My neighbor is said to do his house without a license which could mean well... 

but most importantly the toilets and everything are stopped, on a Friday... everything is my fault and I have to hear this, it probably is my fault to some extent because I use toilet paper but it is also the construction of the house and the tiny fragile system. 

HAd to brag because I find it extraordinary that I haven't got a breakdown because there sure are stressors enough to bring about something like that. At least the faulty processes we call OCD sees it that way.

 

Take care and try not to panic when panic seems to be the only solution to a tough situation.

Edited by OCDhavenobrain
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1 hour ago, OCDhavenobrain said:

I have to brag today, I have done somewhat good considering the circumstances. My neighbor is said to do his house without a license which could mean well... 

but most importantly the toilets and everything are stopped, on a Friday... everything is my fault and I have to hear this, it probably is my fault to some extent because I use toilet paper but it is also the construction of the house and the tiny fragile system. 

HAd to brag because I find it extraordinary that I haven't got a breakdown because there sure are stressors enough to bring about something like that. At least the faulty processes we call OCD sees it that way.

 

Take care and try not to panic when panic seems to be the only solution to a tough situation.

That sounds like a nightmare! Well done for coping with it all so well. I hope you can get things sorted soon.

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Guest OCDhavenobrain
20 minutes ago, Lost_in_a_Dark_Maze said:

That sounds like a nightmare! Well done for coping with it all so well. I hope you can get things sorted soon.

I mean yes the thing about the cloak* is a nightmare and me being the guilty one... Tired of it. Here I have to admit that me using paper probably is a part of it but I am not even using that much any longer, and I have a theory that it doesn't really matter if you have such a bad system as it is in this house. Like I said, have no idea why they even made such a fragile system back in the days. Maybe it was good back then but gets bad with time. 

The thing with the neighbor is a compulsion I guess, I care about it because if it is true then the risk of ther ebeing asbestos... and so on and so on. 

But when I came home and the toilet was full I felt "not one more thing oooh god". 

But guys and girls do you remember what we should do under stress? So let's do that


Edit: BTW Phil you see here? I have stopped toilet but I doesn't panic about it to the same extent you do. EVEN if I am a sufferer, that tells me that you too can move on. I do in fact have germs all over, well not now because I will try not to use it till monday but it has happened that it actually got flooded and I dind't panic. On the other hand I panic about there being asbestos in the air when someone is doing construction. This tells me that the problems are not actually out there, they are INSIDE us. 

Edited by OCDhavenobrain
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Guest OCDhavenobrain

When you are feeling calm and something hits you those are the last challenges we have I guess. Today I was cycling when a guy spited like 10 metres infront of me and I think I have feelt a small mist on my face. It was blowing in the right direction for it to happen. I will not lie because I did feel a short panic. 

Overall very calm but I do get those moments. 

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3 hours ago, Lost_in_a_Dark_Maze said:

I've been just outside the house again a few times.

That's brilliant.  Well Done You :) 

How did it feel?  Did you have any problems?  Did your chatterbox kick off?  Was it easier/harder than you expected?

 

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Thank you :)

In a way it was easier than I expected. I got the sun on my face and my glasses went dark - the reacting bit still works after all this time! I was squinting in the bright light and darting back in like a frightened animal whenever a car or person came by.

I didn't really notice what I was thinking. I guess the next challenge is to stay for longer at a time without running in.

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It might help if you fully understand what the seeding event or OCD core belief creating the fear threat and resultant disorder is. 

Do you have a good understanding of that, to help you gradually challenge it? 

Edited by taurean
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13 hours ago, taurean said:

It might help if you fully understand what the seeding event or OCD core belief creating the fear threat and resultant disorder is. 

Do you have a good understanding of that, to help you gradually challenge it? 

Thanks, I don't think I do have a very good understanding, but I'm slowly beginning to understand more.

It's complicated as there's a mix of the OCD contamination fears, plus agoraphobia and social anxiety.

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Maybe treat each of those as a separate project. 

Tackle the OCD by learning to accept that only contamination OCD sufferers see the "contamination" risk that OCD fabricates or exaggerates. And the contamination "links" it creates just don't apply. 

Then work some exposure and response prevention by, in a structured way, gradually exposing yourself to the "contamination" you fear, so that you become aware that the supposed threat is absent. The anxiety response will begin to fall as this becomes realised.

Follow the approach with the aggrophobia of uncovering what it is you fear by going out, then challenging the reality of that, again in a gradual structured process. 

There may have been some seeding event that created the fear or phobia that causes the unwillingness to go out. 

Whatever it is, follow that challenge process in order to overcome it. 

When these issues are being overcome, that social anxiety may start to improve on its own. 

Edited by taurean
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5 hours ago, Lost_in_a_Dark_Maze said:

Thanks, Taurean. I'll give it some thought. :)

I managed not to clean my footwear after going outside. In the past when I went out I'd have wiped them with dettol wipes.

That's a terrific start :thumbup:

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On 10/06/2019 at 02:58, Lost_in_a_Dark_Maze said:

Thanks, Taurean. I'll give it some thought. :)

I managed not to clean my footwear after going outside. In the past when I went out I'd have wiped them with dettol wipes.

That's brilliant, keep it up :)

Try & make this a regular challenge and gradually build the time you remain there.  It might only be a minute but watch out for that internal chatterbox.  It's those internal thoughts that create the fear.  Feel the pride from your achievement because you should be proud. Practise & plan in your mind.  Imagine yourself making these little achievements.  Think of some of those other little goals we've talked about as well.  Create idea's in your mind about how they can be achieved.  Even if you can't yet start them yet, think of successful outcomes.....it's surprising how your mind can start to find ways & desires on achieving them.

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