Good routines???

[Guest kirk27]

Hi ,many years ago years i suffered from a school phobia ,so this meant i stayed home alot and adjusted to life at home doing chores, one thing i did like doing was

tyding my room on a friday. starting at 2 o clock till three i did have ocd

at the time , but the point of this topic is i really ,enjoyed the routine!!!! .every friday it was somthing i looked forward to i would clean in order shelves, beds, carpet and it looked good, can i ask was it to do with ocd?

As i really got angry with people who interfeard with me doing that routine...........

Iwould always like my room a certain way and one night my brother and father

decided to change the room around .i was gutted and upset and very angry

as if they had taken away of what made me happy............

I think this may be about control or being in a controlled enviroment as in the past everything i had enjoyed was taken away from me .so maybe i found a way of being in control i often wonder this??

Has anyone else enjoyed there routine ??? or is this ocd in a different form??

I would love your opinions of this situation.

[Guest Marcus]

Kirk, it sounds like you enjoyed this routine.

It does sound a little ocd-ish in terms of the precise timing and order that you did the cleaning in.

I think ocd is very much about being in control - perhaps by going off into our rumination worlds we are hiding away from our situation or feelings of anxiety. In an ocd situation we are the ones ultimately in control ?

I think we all need a routine to live by. Perhaps it becomes ocd when the routine becomes totally inflexible.

[Guest kirk27]

Very true thanks for your reply, I no longer do the tidying routine of course. I like neatness for example my brother stayed for 5 months while he looked for another job now he is a messy person and i could not wait till he left i was on the web looking to get him a job so he could go !!! talk about brotherly love. this may be off topic but i could not settle with an untidy room,

Now my room is tidy and how i want it ..............but now i miss my brother

[Guest Dragonfruit]

Has anyone else enjoyed there routine ??? or is this ocd in a different form??

38611[/snapback]

I think both, in a weird way.

I would definitely say that many of my OCD rituals were comforting to me. I prob wouldn't go as far as to say enjoyable - but knowing that I was going to be doing certain things at certain times made me feel "safe" somehow. Most of the rituals etc caused me a lot of pain and misery and I hated them - but there were a couple that were almost a relaxation exercise for me. Even so I would still count them as OCD rituals because they were pointless and I did feel I HAD to perform them in order to ward off bad things - but I did get a sort of comfort from them.

Maybe I'm just even weirder than I already thought??

[Adamski]

Hi,

I think the routine debate going on here is kinda interesting and wide open.

To all intents and purposes we all have routines...in that respect we aint no different to non-ocders i guess. As an example some people thrive on doing routine work and people go down the pub on a Friday, every Friday without fail.

I feel that there is a fine line between your enjoyment of your particular routine that you enjoyed and ocd. As i have always associated this kind of ocd with a thought that is troublesome and worrying, the very fact that you say that you enjoyed it would lead me to think that this aint ocd. But reading a couple of posts on here in which people said they kinda liked doing some routines has obviously made me think.

hmmm...

[Caramoole]

I think you'll find there're many people who enjoy cleaning, always clean Friday for the weekend and do it in a similar order (partly because the order you work in often is based on good sense). The fact that it took you just an hour and caused you no distress would suggest that it wasn't particularly an OCD trait. Even having things moved from the manner you've chosen to have them in would annoy many people.

People all have routines, my late Mother In Law always had the same meals on particular days, shopped on the same days and did the shopping in a particular order.

I shouldn't worry too much, it's obviously not causing you any problems