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Worried ? & False Memory (Merged Thread)


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I did, I did indeed.

So much bothers me at the moment including my family’s casual approach to the fact I’m not feeling well. My sister had bipolar and she was wrapped in cotton wool and I’ve always been told just get over it and here I am 30 years later hemmed up with symptoms again. 

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8 hours ago, Nikki79 said:

So I went to the Therapist and I told him what was going on for me. He said that I’m to do imaginary exposures and I also told him my current worry and he said for now you need to take one step at a time and just concentrate on what he told me to do. I’m to deliberately to bring the fears to mind and do the exposures and he wasn’t interested in what I am afraid of currently or my fears. 

Sounds like a therapist who knows what he is talking about when it comes to OCD! 
This is one of the things we've been trying to help you understand, the specific content of your fears doesn't ACTUALLY matter.  Yes it seems important to you, but thats an illusion, a lie.  The reason you have this particular fear is due to an accident of timing. Yes, it seems important to you, and absolutely it scares you, but part of recovery is choosing to treat the specific contents of the fear as unimportant.  And taking it one step at a time is the right approach.  I know (from your later posts) you have some doubts, but I think this therapist is definitely on the right track and think you should trust him more.

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1 hour ago, Nikki79 said:

So much bothers me at the moment including my family’s casual approach to the fact I’m not feeling well. My sister had bipolar and she was wrapped in cotton wool and I’ve always been told just get over it and here I am 30 years later hemmed up with symptoms again. 

I'm sorry to hear that, it really sucks that you aren't getting more support. 
Unfortunately we can't force people to change, we can only encourage them to.  In the meantime, as hard as it is, you still have to deal with OCD.  Its understandable to be frustrated/angry/dissapointed with your family and it would be better if they were more supportive, but since you can't change that you have to move forward with your recovery as best you can with what little support they give.  Like PB I wish it was different, but since its not, you've got to do what you've got to do.  Try to focus on recovery, on the goals you set with your therapist, on making the small changes and achieving the small victories that will lead to bigger ones.  You can do this!  Your family may not understand or support you, but we do.

Edited by dksea
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8 minutes ago, dksea said:

I'm sorry to hear that, it really sucks that you aren't getting more support. 
Unfortunately we can't force people to change, we can only encourage them to.  In the meantime, as hard as it is, you still have to deal with OCD.  Its understandable to be frustrated/angry/dissapointed with your family and it would be better if they were more supportive, but since you can't change that you have to move forward with your recovery as best you can with what little support they give.  Like PB I wish it was different, but since its not, you've got to do what you've got to do.  Try to focus on recovery, on the goals you set with your therapist, on making the small changes and achieving the small victories that will lead to bigger ones.  You can do this!  Your family may not understand or support you, but we do.

Thanks so much Dksea. I always really enjoy your posts and find them very informative and somehow seem to resonate with me. I am thinking now should I see a Psychiatrist and get some more help. My father thought I wasn’t really absorbing what was being said today in therapy and that the Therapist was rambling a bit. I’m not sure what to do as I am feeling a deep depression and exhaustion with all of this too.

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17 minutes ago, dksea said:

Sounds like a therapist who knows what he is talking about when it comes to OCD! 
This is one of the things we've been trying to help you understand, the specific content of your fears doesn't ACTUALLY matter.  Yes it seems important to you, but thats an illusion, a lie.  The reason you have this particular fear is due to an accident of timing. Yes, it seems important to you, and absolutely it scares you, but part of recovery is choosing to treat the specific contents of the fear as unimportant.  And taking it one step at a time is the right approach.  I know (from your later posts) you have some doubts, but I think this therapist is definitely on the right track and think you should trust him more.

I’ve done this before, I think I have. But perhaps I did it after a feeling of reassurance in hindsight so maybe not. I’m just asking but despite your deepest fear did you bite the bullet anyway and recover? And do it without reassurance and do the right things?

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Nobody just does the right things, Nikki. You try, you fail, you try again, you fail again, you succeed, you fail. On it goes. Progress comes in fits and spurts.

But, you eventually get it. And it suddenly gets easier.

Although we all say recovery is relatively simple, it is by no means easy. It's really hard. Perhaps the biggest thing is just to try.

Edited by PolarBear
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3 hours ago, Nikki79 said:

Thanks so much Dksea. I always really enjoy your posts and find them very informative and somehow seem to resonate with me.

I'm glad I can help :)
 

3 hours ago, Nikki79 said:

I am thinking now should I see a Psychiatrist and get some more help. My father thought I wasn’t really absorbing what was being said today in therapy and that the Therapist was rambling a bit. I’m not sure what to do as I am feeling a deep depression and exhaustion with all of this too.

I don't think there would be anything wrong with seeing a psychiatrist, medication can be a helpful tool for many of us in living with/recovering from OCD.  Its worth keeping in mind that a decision to try medication is not a permanent commitment, if you want to try later to go at it with out medication you can always do that.  Its also important to know that its not going to be a miracle cure.  How well it works will vary from person to person and medication to medication, don't expect immediate relief.  It may take time to find the right type and dosage level that suits you best.  Unfortunately like a lot of OCD recovery, patience is necessary.

As to the therapy, you don't have to understand it all at once, its like learning anything, it takes time to take it all in.  Thats why most therapy isn't simply a one time experience, you have follow up sessions to improve your understanding, discussion your situation and how its changing, reevaluate the steps, etc.  You don't have to get it perfectly right the first time (or ever really).
 

3 hours ago, Nikki79 said:

But perhaps I did it after a feeling of reassurance in hindsight so maybe not. I’m just asking but despite your deepest fear did you bite the bullet anyway and recover? And do it without reassurance and do the right things?

As PB says, no one does the right thing every time. Thats definitely true when it comes to recovery from OCD in my experience!  The goal isn't to be perfect, the goal is to improve.  If you can go from spending 10 hours a day on compulsions to 9 hours a day, thats an improvement!  If you can go from washing your hands 6 times after every toilet visit to 5 times, thats an improvement!  If you can go from ruminating right away, to putting off ruminating for 5 minutes, thats an improvement.

As for reassurance, this is an area a lot of people misunderstand.  Reassurance isn't inherently bad.  In fact, it can do a lot of good.  If you are having a bad day, it can help for someone to say something positive.  It can help to ask someone if you are doing something correctly (and be told yes).  Recovery from OCD does not require never ever getting reassurance ever again any more than it requires never washing your hands again.  Reassurance becomes a problem when it becomes COMPULSIVE reassurance.  When you seek it out over and over.  When you get an answer but go back because you don't feel "sure", etc.  Its important to reduce reassurance seeking as a compulsion from OCD, but you don't have to go straight to zero assurance for the rest of your life, I think that would be a bad thing.  Again its about making progress.  Right now you should focus on reducing the amount you seek reassurance and the time spent on reassurance.  The more you can do it the better, of course, but even if you go from asking for reassurance every time you have an intrusive thought to every other time you have an intrusive thought, thats an improvement.  The big caveat is that you have to keep trying to reduce the amount of times.  You can't just get to 50% and call it good.  And you can't simply give up and not even try once you've resisted once or twice.  You have to TRY at least a little to resist as often as possible.  Failing isn't great, but its not the end of the world either.  You just try to do better the next time.  None of us are Superman, we can't leap tall buildings in a single bound.  But it doesn't mean you can't get over something tall (like a mountain) by slowly climbing up it.  So climb that mountain, slowly at first if necessary, but keep trying to push forward.  Before you know it all those small achievements add up into bigger ones. 

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Hi guys just giving you all an update. So I basically met with a new mental health team yesterday and I’m waiting a psychiatric assessment and some new counselling and also taking a relaxer to help settle me a little. It’s positive steps. Thanks for all your support as always x

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3 hours ago, Nikki79 said:

Very frustrated this evening as had some thoughts that seemed to back up my fears being true. They have crept in a few times and be trying not to see them as important is pretty difficult.

Its normal and fair to feel frustrated, its a frustrating situation.  One thing I find I struggle with (and I think a lot of OCD sufferers struggle with) is trying to avoid ALL negative emotions and seeing them as a bad thing.  Of course we closely associate negative emotions with OCD, thats kind of its main weapon, but its important to realize (and again I still work on this) that feeling bad/frustrated/etc. is natural and normal and ok sometimes.

Another struggle I have gone through and others do as well, is unrealistic expectations about what recovery looks like, the idea that once we start feeling better its a continuous road up.  Experiencing those first relapses, either big or small, makes us lose hope.  Unfortunately you are almost certainly going to have moments like this where your intrusive fears and anxiety goes up again, even though sometimes it will go down.  Sadly recovery is not a smooth upward slope, but a bumpy one with many peaks and valleys.  You should expect to have these kind of moments.  Part of what you learn in recovery is how to handle them when they are small and prevent them from blowing up into big deals.

Its normal for resisting compulsions and sitting out the anxiety to feel pretty difficult.  Remember you don't have to be perfect, you don't have to get it 100% right every time.  Depending on how far along you are on your recovery journey resisting for even a little while can, itself, be a pretty huge victory.  If you are used to giving in to compulsions almost immediately, putting that off for 10-20 minutes even can be a big change at first.  While the ultimate goal is to resist compulsions indefinitely, at first that may not be reasonable.  

I find that when I am dealing with a particularly strong relapse, a particularly persistent intrusive thought, that journaling can help.  Sometimes the act of simply writing down my worries and the feelings/thoughts I'm having on paper helps me process things just a little differently can can ease some of the anxiety.  In order to avoid it becoming a compulsion I set aside a set amount of time each day to write, and I try not to rewrite the same worries in depth day after day.  Once I've written it down once, I try to simply refer to it in later entries briefly, or avoid writing about it again for a few days.  There are also exercises you can learn from books or therapists in how to better process these events like checklists or comparisons etc.

Finally, remember, feeling fear doesn't mean something is truly a threat.  You can feel scared and still be safe.  Also, its good to remind yourself that when it comes to this topic you are compromised, therefore your ability to reason about it is limited.  Basically you can't trust yourself.  What seems like logical proof of your fear is probably not when looked at by an outside party.  Remind yourself that you can't take these thoughts at face value because of your OCD.  

As a practical, real world example, consider the following:
For many people in the world cilantro/coriander is a delicious herb that can make food taste great.  However, for a select portion of the population, a genetic anomaly means that coriander tastes like soap to them (its true! you can look it up!).  Now, imagine you are one of those people.  One day you are eating food and it tastes really soapy.  If you didn't know any better you might think "OMG I'm eating soap".  That seems like a logical response.  HOWEVER, if you KNOW you have a coriander reaction, then you KNOW that some things that are NOT soap, will taste like soap to you.  So you have to analyze the situation with this additional knowledge.  You have to assume that "it tastes like soap" is not good proof that you are, in fact, eating soap.  You MIGHT be, but odds are you are probably eating coriander instead.

Likewise with OCD, if you were having these same kinds of thoughts, the conclusions you are drawing MIGHT be logical IF you did NOT have OCD.  But you DO have OCD, therefore you can't use the same logic, you can't play by the same rules.  You have to make different assumptions about your intrusive thoughts because you KNOW OCD is interfering with your handling of this topic.  Try to keep that in mind so you can reframe your thinking and break out of the anxiety spiral.

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10 hours ago, dksea said:

Its normal and fair to feel frustrated, its a frustrating situation.  One thing I find I struggle with (and I think a lot of OCD sufferers struggle with) is trying to avoid ALL negative emotions and seeing them as a bad thing.  Of course we closely associate negative emotions with OCD, thats kind of its main weapon, but its important to realize (and again I still work on this) that feeling bad/frustrated/etc. is natural and normal and ok sometimes.

Another struggle I have gone through and others do as well, is unrealistic expectations about what recovery looks like, the idea that once we start feeling better its a continuous road up.  Experiencing those first relapses, either big or small, makes us lose hope.  Unfortunately you are almost certainly going to have moments like this where your intrusive fears and anxiety goes up again, even though sometimes it will go down.  Sadly recovery is not a smooth upward slope, but a bumpy one with many peaks and valleys.  You should expect to have these kind of moments.  Part of what you learn in recovery is how to handle them when they are small and prevent them from blowing up into big deals.

Its normal for resisting compulsions and sitting out the anxiety to feel pretty difficult.  Remember you don't have to be perfect, you don't have to get it 100% right every time.  Depending on how far along you are on your recovery journey resisting for even a little while can, itself, be a pretty huge victory.  If you are used to giving in to compulsions almost immediately, putting that off for 10-20 minutes even can be a big change at first.  While the ultimate goal is to resist compulsions indefinitely, at first that may not be reasonable.  

I find that when I am dealing with a particularly strong relapse, a particularly persistent intrusive thought, that journaling can help.  Sometimes the act of simply writing down my worries and the feelings/thoughts I'm having on paper helps me process things just a little differently can can ease some of the anxiety.  In order to avoid it becoming a compulsion I set aside a set amount of time each day to write, and I try not to rewrite the same worries in depth day after day.  Once I've written it down once, I try to simply refer to it in later entries briefly, or avoid writing about it again for a few days.  There are also exercises you can learn from books or therapists in how to better process these events like checklists or comparisons etc.

Finally, remember, feeling fear doesn't mean something is truly a threat.  You can feel scared and still be safe.  Also, its good to remind yourself that when it comes to this topic you are compromised, therefore your ability to reason about it is limited.  Basically you can't trust yourself.  What seems like logical proof of your fear is probably not when looked at by an outside party.  Remind yourself that you can't take these thoughts at face value because of your OCD.  

As a practical, real world example, consider the following:
For many people in the world cilantro/coriander is a delicious herb that can make food taste great.  However, for a select portion of the population, a genetic anomaly means that coriander tastes like soap to them (its true! you can look it up!).  Now, imagine you are one of those people.  One day you are eating food and it tastes really soapy.  If you didn't know any better you might think "OMG I'm eating soap".  That seems like a logical response.  HOWEVER, if you KNOW you have a coriander reaction, then you KNOW that some things that are NOT soap, will taste like soap to you.  So you have to analyze the situation with this additional knowledge.  You have to assume that "it tastes like soap" is not good proof that you are, in fact, eating soap.  You MIGHT be, but odds are you are probably eating coriander instead.

Likewise with OCD, if you were having these same kinds of thoughts, the conclusions you are drawing MIGHT be logical IF you did NOT have OCD.  But you DO have OCD, therefore you can't use the same logic, you can't play by the same rules.  You have to make different assumptions about your intrusive thoughts because you KNOW OCD is interfering with your handling of this topic.  Try to keep that in mind so you can reframe your thinking and break out of the anxiety spiral.

Thanks Dksea. I honestly feel and I don’t believe this to be a compulsion but well I honestly feel if I could understand the different types of thoughts, the natures of them. How one could seem to be saying this because it is thus way or another is saying this because of this way.. I’m trying to make sense to you here. I guess if I had a fundamental understanding of why some thoughts make me feel so convinced than others and I had an understanding then I feel I would do better. For example the thought that upset me last evening wasn’t something I was able to reproduce after and honestly I didn’t want to go there anyway. However perhaps if I understood it well then it wouldn’t have such an impact on me every time it came in. Is this something we can learn? I hope I make sense lol 

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1 hour ago, Nikki79 said:

However perhaps if I understood it well then it wouldn’t have such an impact on me every time it came in. Is this something we can learn? I hope I make sense lol

Hey Nikki,

Nope you're overcomplicating it again.

You don't need to understand what they mean at all, that's the whole point of it. The reason you get so stressed is because you feel you need to get an exact answer or understanding of why the thoughts are there. This won't help.

As has been said before, it's all about stripping it back and remembering that they are just thoughts and NOT ONE SINGLE THING needs to be done about them :)

B

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6 minutes ago, BM94 said:

Hey Nikki,

Nope you're overcomplicating it again.

You don't need to understand what they mean at all, that's the whole point of it. The reason you get so stressed is because you feel you need to get an exact answer or understanding of why the thoughts are there. This won't help.

As has been said before, it's all about stripping it back and remembering that they are just thoughts and NOT ONE SINGLE THING needs to be done about them :)

B

I really find that hard to get my head around. I don’t understand to be honest. 

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Intrusive thoughts don't mean anything but when you try and understand them it gives them meaning in your mind. The more you try and examine them the worse you will feel.  As soon as one comes in you need to recognise it as an intrusive thought and therefore meaningless and don't engage with it at all. The more you do this the more the thought will fade and the less hold it will have over you until eventually it won't even enter your head. It won't happen overnight and it will be hard at first to ignore the thought when it comes in but if you want to get better you have to at least try. 

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5 hours ago, Nikki79 said:

Oh I do want to get better but it’s just I get stuck on thoughts that find information about whatever my obsession is that make me further believe it might have happened. That’s my dilemma.

Try not to engage with the dilemma. It's OCD generated, worth nothing. 

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