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Trying to make OCD thoughts meaningful . . .


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I have a thing where rather than trying to prove to myself that my OCD thoughts are meaningless, I'm instead always trying to understand the meaning. I think that's why it is so hard to stop repetitive thoughts; because I always feel as though if I think about it 'properly' it will become clear to me why I thought what I thought at the time. For me there is rarely any moral element to it, in that I don't feel the thoughts are 'bad', just confusing. For example, I was in town once with some friends and lost my bearings, and approached the town centre from an unusual angle so that I didn't initially recognise it. After I had recognised it, I was convinced that I had 'seen' something differently before, like I'd filled in the gaps I couldn't see with aspects of some other town, or mentally positioned what I was looking at on some other part of the map in some nonsensical way. It was almost like I retrospectively assigned 'wrongness' to what I'd thought because I couldn't then reconcile my non-specific mental picture with an actual physical location.

Anyway, that's the kind of random abstract stuff that eats away at my mind; I'm not even sure what I've taken issue with; it's just that I'll have a fleeting thought or feeling followed by a gnawing feeling that I've missed something important about it, that I need to understand. I'd say that 90-95% of my obsessions are of this form, where I'm not even sure what's bothering me specifically, just that there's something wrong with something generally, and that I need to try and recapture my original thought processes to figure it out. Because of the usual 'variants on a theme' nature of OCD, I also find that I get recurrences of obsessions over something that only bears a passing resemblance to the original, that could occur to me days or weeks later.

All very strange. Does anyone have anything similar?

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Hey Koala, you're absolutely right that this is one of the reasons that it's hard to stop the repetitive thoughts. I do the same thing and it's hard not to when you get a distressing thought or you somehow feel that something isn't right, your natural reaction is to try and understand it. The problem is that the thoughts aren't really logical and you could spend forever trying to figure them out and it'll just make you think more and more. It's important to let go, you don't have to understand everything that happens to you. 

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