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The reason I'm not getting better


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Hi. I'm stuck because I still can't accept that it's ok for me to make mistakes. It's the cognitive step I guess. I think my core belief is that i don't know what I'm doing in general. I have to make decisions every day where I don't feel confident I made the right decision and I'm constantly pretty terrified that one of them will turn out catastrophically wrong. And I will deserve the blame because I made the decision even though I already knew that I didn't properly know   what I was doing. (I feel like I'm driving down the motorway without knowing how to drive, so I should stop, but that would be giving up on life and I'm not supposed to do that either....)
 Logically I can see that for most things in life other people don't have perfect confidence in their decisions but they are not all in the state I'm in, so possibly the difference is that I've spent too long thinking about it all and now I'm hyper sensitized to it. I can also see that even with my worst decisions, if it was someone else who made them I'd forgive them. So I'd like to be able to forgive myself. And sometimes I can, fleetingly, but it doesn't stick.
Does anyone have any advice on how I can start to accept bad decisions as just a part of life and not the sign that I'm dangerously incompetent? Maybe I do understand enough already and need to get on with exposures but these are so hard to design when all my compulsions are constant rumination and worry. 
I wonder if I need to work on it like this: I can choose to either be safe or live a proper life. I keep losing sight of that. I know I can't really be safe but I kind of feel safe when I'm at least trying hard to find my mistakes and fix them and prevent new mistakes. I feel safe from the possibility of accidentally being a negligent, bad person who doesn't care that they've been bad because at least I can make sure I care. But in practice that means constant worry and rumination because that's how I do my "caring". So of course I'm not getting better. I can see that I'm deliberately keeping my ocd going on this way.
So now I need to make it concrete with a hierarchy, don't I? I'm finding it hard to think of things to do here. I have done well with my checking compulsions (locks etc) but with rumination it's hard for me to see what I need to do exactly.
Thanks

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Hi Nellie :)

Are you using any self-help materials like Break free from OCD, because they give you a good framework on how to do behavioural experiments/exposures?

It seems like you understand that other people make mistakes and it doesn't mean they are incompetent and that how you currently act is not the best way to have an OCD free, happy and healthy life. That's good that you know those things, it can be really hard to see that :)

You feel like ruminating keeps you safe so one way to challenge this is to do a behavioural experiment, where you try not doing any rumination. It would need to be planned preferably using a method like Theory A/B (Break free from OCD), where you make predictions about how you feel and you note what your belief is about rumination keeping you safe. You'd then try not ruminating say for an hour, and record your results. This would help you gain evidence that your problem is one of worry about being incompetent rather than you actually being incompetent.

A behavioural experiment like this could be repeated for longer and longer periods until your belief about rumination keeping you safe is lowered and you see that you never needed to ruminate, you were always completely capable :)

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2 hours ago, Nellie said:

So I'd like to be able to forgive myself. And sometimes I can, fleetingly, but it doesn't stick.

Let’s say you are completely out of shape. Total couch potato. Walking up two flights of stairs makes you start to feel winded. 

Enough is enough you say, I need to get healthy, I need to live a better life. I’m going to set a goal to be able to run a 10k race. Maybe even someday a marathon. 

Inspired, you get up the next day and go for a jog. Not a huge one, maybe just 15 minutes of slowly jogging around your local park. It’s hard, it’s exhausting, but you did it, you took a step forward. You feel good. You get up the next day, you walk up two flights of stairs and you are still winded. 

What gives?  You started exercising?  Shouldn’t you be healthier now?  Well of course not you’d probably say. One day, one week, heck maybe even one month of exercise isn’t going to turn you from coach potato to star athlete!

The same is true of OCD recovery. You won’t get back to “normal” in an instant. There is no secret trick, no “ah ha!” moment. It’s methodical progress overtime. Continuing to make the right choices and avoid the wrong ones to retrain your brain. 

If you want to start accepting mistakes, you accept them, and then accept that you still feel bad about accepting them. You keep forgiving yourself over and over. You keep making the right choice EVEN THOUGH you still feel doubt. You tell yourself “it’s ok to make mistakes” and then you probably feel guilt about it, but you move on, you don’t try and address the guilt, you let yourself feel bad without trying to fix it. It’s hard, but you can do it. Your brain will get the message in time. “Oh, guess I was wrong to feel guilty about that”.

Methodical, persistent progress. Ideally with at least some guidance from a mental health professional. OCD is stubborn, you just have to be more stubborn, but in the right ways. 

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5 hours ago, Nellie said:

Hi. I'm stuck because I still can't accept that it's ok for me to make mistakes. It's the cognitive step I guess. I think my core belief is that i don't know what I'm doing in general. I have to make decisions every day where I don't feel confident I made the right decision and I'm constantly pretty terrified that one of them will turn out catastrophically wrong. And I will deserve the blame because I made the decision even though I already knew that I didn't properly know   what I was doing. (I feel like I'm driving down the motorway without knowing how to drive, so I should stop, but that would be giving up on life and I'm not supposed to do that either....)
 Logically I can see that for most things in life other people don't have perfect confidence in their decisions but they are not all in the state I'm in, so possibly the difference is that I've spent too long thinking about it all and now I'm hyper sensitized to it. I can also see that even with my worst decisions, if it was someone else who made them I'd forgive them. So I'd like to be able to forgive myself. And sometimes I can, fleetingly, but it doesn't stick.
Does anyone have any advice on how I can start to accept bad decisions as just a part of life and not the sign that I'm dangerously incompetent? Maybe I do understand enough already and need to get on with exposures but these are so hard to design when all my compulsions are constant rumination and worry. 
I wonder if I need to work on it like this: I can choose to either be safe or live a proper life. I keep losing sight of that. I know I can't really be safe but I kind of feel safe when I'm at least trying hard to find my mistakes and fix them and prevent new mistakes. I feel safe from the possibility of accidentally being a negligent, bad person who doesn't care that they've been bad because at least I can make sure I care. But in practice that means constant worry and rumination because that's how I do my "caring". So of course I'm not getting better. I can see that I'm deliberately keeping my ocd going on this way.
So now I need to make it concrete with a hierarchy, don't I? I'm finding it hard to think of things to do here. I have done well with my checking compulsions (locks etc) but with rumination it's hard for me to see what I need to do exactly.
Thanks

Hi Nellie :)

I can identify a lot with what you've put here and I've had many of the same issues.  it sounds like you have fantastic insight which is a massive step in the right direction :) 

One thing I have done which has really helped is to deliberately do things I know are wrong, incompetent, morally dubious, unkind, or whatever I am worrying about.  I wrote a huge list of things I could do and then ordered them in terms of how much they scared me.  I'm working my way up and it has already worked well.

It really puts OCD on the back foot if you not only embrace what it's trying to frighten you with, but deliberately go there first.  Your brain is then like "oh, I guess it can't be that scary if you're going there voluntarily". 

My advice would be to start really tiny.  Do something really small and low-risk which is wrong in some way that makes you a bit anxious.  So for me, my big worry was that I would make a decision which was morally wrong - my compulsions were many and included monitoring my actions, ruminating over what I'd done, putting things right, and so on.  So one day I decided to tell a really small lie to one of my colleagues and not correct myself.  It was really inconsequential I think I said something like I had pizza for tea last night when I didn't.  It made me anxious but not crazily so and my anxiety faded in time. And another thing I did was got off the bus and deliberately didn't say thank you to the driver even though I find that rude.  I won't bore you with all of them especially as my fears won't be the same as yours, but it really pays to sit down and think of as many situations as you can think of that really rattle your OCD.  I just sat down and wrote out about 100 ideas without censoring myself.  Some of them were stupid and I tossed them out.  But then I was left with a good number of ideas.

Hope that helps a little.  Good luck x

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I have a lot of the same thinking. I fear I'm lacking basic knowledge that others have and expect me to have. i imagine that my incompetence will lead to disaster.

One thing i do to work on this is let all the anxious thoughts surface-- imagine the disaster happening, imagining people blaming me--not going toward reassurance that people will forgive me, or that I'm generally competent. I find that does seem to work for me. It's the same as imagining there is a fire in your apartment because you didn't check the stove enough times, eventually the anxiety around the thoughts die down.

Of course this would need to be done in a gradual exposure way so that one doesn't just get overwhelmed by all the anxious thoughts. So you start with imagining smaller things around being blamed, and work up...

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That's some great advice, thanks loads people! The concrete steps are just what I was needing help with. Gbg's list of small risks sounds like what I want to get going on because I haven't really tried that yet with these fears, and I love the idea of going on the offensive. Thanks for sharing some of the actual items on the list - I couldn't think where to start but that might be enough to get some ideas going. I definitely also have the fear of being immoral thing but I will try to find ones that fit my fear of letting people down, and of doing things I don't feel 100% competent at, too. Then I can do what Gemma said and do a prediction of how it will go if I don't ruminate afterwards and try that for an hour to see how I feel after. I have read the Break Free book but a while ago, borrowed from a friend. Might borrow that again. I have Jonathan Grayson's book.  Then like Leif and dksea said, I can try to let myself feel the guilt and anxiety and try to accept it without reacting. Sounds hard but the new thing will be starting very small with things on the same theme as my massive fears. I haven't done that yet and I am almost keen to get going and challenge myself to feel those feelings and let them be there. Thanks so much. This will take practice I know but I have to start somewhere and have been stuck for months not seeing a good plan of attack for my main issues, so I'll see if I can get this together now and maybe start to see some progress. Thanks again so much. This is hard on your own, so your input is valuable to me.
X

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On 23/08/2019 at 08:06, gingerbreadgirl said:

not sure what your point is Handy? 

Being able to create long detailed posts that describe just how someone feels is one of the fine qualities of OCD. Either that or they are on caffeine. That reminds me a lot of things mimic OCD anxiety like caffeine, nicotine, meth, Ritalin, alcohol. To get better one must avoid these. 

 

Once they do that they can apply anxiety lowering techniques then apply books. Brain Lock is nice  but it’s 21 years old.

Edited by Handy
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