Mental Checking

[MentalChecker]

Hi All, another OCD victim here.

I'm wondering if there are any more members on here with the problems I experience? 

I've been struggling since a child with OCD, however only diagnosed approx 4 years ago and I'm now late 40's.

I'm a mental checker and reassurer, I don't have the usual physical checking symptoms of OCD, all of mine are inside my head. 

I have to go over things constantly in my head to get the feeling of reassurance that things are fine and nothing is wrong with the thing I'm worried about. 

There's loads of worries I have, one may be with me 1/2 weeks, only to be replaced by another one that previously was bothering me but subsided when the current one started.  And then the cycle continues. 

The problem I have is when I go over the thing that is bothering me, I get the reassurance and things are then fine. But I then get the thought again of the thing I went into detail checking and if I don't get that reassurance feeling again when I next think about it then I think there's something wrong with it and I NEED to get the reassurance feeling again. 

Does anybody else have this type? 

Even though logically if I checked it previously and I was reassured, it surely can't change in the fact that I was previously reassured about it therfore there can't be anything wrong with it? But if I don't recheck it and regain the reassurance feeling then it's as though there is something wrong with it and the anxiety peaks again until I've redone the thought process and become reassured again.

It's causing me serious issues....

I'm seeing a therapist who is really good, and Ive had it explained to me that reassurance doesn't work, and I need to sit with the anxiety without doing the compulsions until it subsides on its own, but even if the compulsion and anxiety does subside, I can never live a life with uncertainty about the things I worry about....

[PolarBear]

You can learn to live with uncertainty. Everyone else does. You have to teach yourself that it is okay. You do that by stopping the checking.

[MentalChecker]

Hi PolarBear thank you for your response.

This isn't meant as a sarcastic response, however purely out of interest, you do have OCD right? 

If its whether I'm going to die in 1, 5, 10, 20 years time etc, then that type of uncertainty is acceptable to live with.

But if your worried about something you may have done, you can't just accept uncertainty so easily and sweep that under the table, as that could have a multitude of consequences and therefore it requires checking and reassurance to ensure you haven't done it.

I am aware the reassurance doesn't last and then requires rechecking which makes this illness unbareable and such a time consuming loss of life.

They say information and education on OCD is of paramount importance and I have read a lot of articles on OCD treatment.

The problem is the articles you read talk about exposure to prove that the worry won't ever happen, however with my worries, it's not about what might happen in the future, it's about what might have already happened.......

[Cub]

*waves hand around* Me! I mentally check! Ask anybody!  

Yeah, thanks for bringing this up; this is something I have trouble with and am really trying to fix. And when you're worried about something you've done, or thought or said - or else may not have done at all, well yeah, it's worrying. I keep wondering if there's more I could be doing to make amends for past thoughts and worry I've said them out loud without meaning to; then I go over it in my head just to check. I find myself doing it a lot at work, or also when I'm writing something I think, 'is this allowed?' and go back to 'check.' It really is a terrible nuisance and can be very damaging; I don't know about you, but it gives me a tight chest/chest pains. It's a vicious cycle, as my brother (who also has OCD) has stated.

I guess all you can do is jump over the ravine; feel the fear and do it anyway. I often 'check' to see if there's another way of doing it, something I could be doing, but truly there's nothing; I can only try my best. I'm haunted by past thoughts I have and I worry that the worry for it is never going to go away completely but I can learn to live with it. One thing I find that helps tremendously is to brainstorm a story idea, which distracts away. If you look for relief, sadly, you won't get it. I think it does help to remind yourself that no amount of rumination will change the past, although I realise how difficult it is to put it into practice.

Just remember; if it feels like OCD, it probably is. And you're not the only one, kiddo. 

 

 

[dksea]

6 hours ago, MentalChecker said:

But if your worried about something you may have done, you can't just accept uncertainty so easily and sweep that under the table, as that could have a multitude of consequences and therefore it requires checking and reassurance to ensure you haven't done it.

Sure you can, you accept uncertainty all the time, you just don't realize it.

Consider the following: 
Can you recall in perfect detail every time you have ever driven a car?  Doubtful.  That means you could have hit someone in the past.
But surely I would remember if I had done that at the time.  Possibly, but maybe not.  What if you were distracted at the time?  What if while you were distracted you clipped them?  What if the impacts effect on the car was minimal?  You were distracted, you felt something but it felt just like a bump in the road, you didn't see anyone get hit so your brain just wrote it off as normal road feel.  This is a possible event, you can't prove it didn't happen right?  You are therefore uncertain about an event in the past.   Yet you don't spend your entire life worrying about every time you have driven somewhere where this might have happened, or if, perhaps that is your intrusive worry, YOU do worry about it, but the rest of us don't.  Replace this scenario with one involving, say driving a boat, or cooking dinner that gives someone food poisoning, or any number of scenarios where you can't be sure of the outcome of your actions.  Every second of every minute of every day you are accepting uncertainty, because you are a limited human being who does not control the universe and therefore can not control all possible outcomes from your actions or inactions.

In a non-OCD person or a person with OCD who doesn't have a worry about a particular topic, the brain analyzes the roughly probability of a situation and decides how to act from there.  You don't worry about hitting someone with a car NOT because you are 100% certain it never happened (its impossible to be 100% certain about anything) but because the odds are high that the worst case scenario you can imagine didn't actually happen.

Every action can have a multitude of consequences, from the almost certain, to the almost impossible.  Some you can guess at, some you have no hope of predicting.  You can absolutely sweep things under the table, its the only way to function.  Yes if something is genuinely serious you should take action, but not everything is serious and learning how to correctly gauge that level, something that is more smooth and automatic for non-OCD sufferers is part of recovering from OCD.  You learn to ignore the unlikely situations not because you like the idea of them coming true, but because you don't have time in life to waste on doing that for everything.

[californiadreaming]

Dksea nailed it. I have this OCD, too! You can check my most recent post for details.

I will tell you that CBT/ERP absolutely does work. The way it works is - you go through the CBT first and recognize that when you do perform the compulsion, more are lined up right behind it (it sounds like you know this so - yay! - that’s the hardest part). 

Once you understand how OCD works, you then get into the ERP. ERP is not designed to tell you if you did the thing or not - it’s to expose yourself to all the possibilities and then ignore them. After time, your brain becomes desensitized to the thought and you’re able to just move along.

 

[leil]

Dksea’s response here is perfect; I deal with this sort of OCD and all the accompanying mental reviewing, doubt and assumed guilt and it’s exhausting.  This is one of the best explanations for dealing with uncertainty that I’ve read and I needed that right now so thank you.