Life with OCD

OCD is like a hunting game.

It hunts looking for things to obsess about constantly.

OCD takes me by surprise.

I never know what next topic will it choose for obsessing.

Sometimes middle of the night, OCD starts giving me doubts about a topic, and I cannot sleep for some time.

Other times, OCD reminds me of past obsessions with doubts, and it goes on for few days.

OCD makes my life miserable.

I just end up blaming myself that why I had taken out a certain topic, and thats why OCD latched onto it.

Even though I know that I am not in control of OCD.

It is like having a side of the brain which is filled with doubts, checking, repeating rituals.

I wish that I could function normally.

Everyday I go through so many obsessions which is endless.

I feel exhausted by the end of the day.

Since OCD has been written in my destiny, I need to accept it, and try my best in not giving into it.

Each resistance is an accomplishment in my journey with OCD.

I hope we as sufferers have the inner strength to deal with OCD.

[sligoguy]

Yeah that sounds like my ocd ,all the same feeling s ,guilt ,and pain ,instant ruminating,,,,so you are brave to tell how it is for you ,but believe it or not you are brave and strong you are here telling your story,and you are helping fellow suffers ,so thanks for that stay strong and we can all make a life inspite of the sneaky ocd ,,,,

[OCDneedshelp]

Hey Desi yes I get your feelings. I was at my counselors yesterday and was talking about how my oCD has just left me so tired and emotionally drained lately. I have dealt with it for most of my life but lately it just seems to be eating more and more of my time and mentality. I don’t really have much to add except that you are not alone and I wish you all the best on your road to recovery and management of this beast.

[Hidden]

Over the years I've noticed that it seems that there is a "need" to feel guilty, sad, humiliated, fearful, etc. It's as if something in the mind defaults to that as "normal" and seeks out events that brings them out. That's why (to me) there are so many different types of OCD; it's what ever causes us to satisfy that internal "need" to feel bad. When you boil it down it's not so much what we feel, but that "need" to feel that way.

[OCDneedshelp]

That is incredibly true Fishman. I was trying to describe that feeling to my counselor yesterday and was failing to do so in such a way. I know that it is probably depress doing that but still I have been feeling lately more calm about my ocd obsessions but still have this nagging feeling of doom or that I have to feel trrrible about my ocd. My fears revolve around hurting my family and it’s like while I have described my fears to people and I know that my actions weren’t hurtful I expect or almost to want someone to tell me I’m a terrible person and deserve to lose everything.

[MothFir]

These comments are all spot-on. I've been told that I "look for things to worry about," and I know how true that is. "Normal" people seem to live as if everything is okay unless there is real evidence of a problem; people with OCD assume there is a problem until they can prove that everything is okay. We spend so much time distressed because it is very difficult (actually impossible) to prove that something is absolutely not contaminated, or that something definitely won't start a fire, or that we won't somehow, someday lose control and do something horrible. Our brains can always come up with a convoluted scenario where those things happen.

Ongoing, everyday stress might make a person's OCD worse, but I find that highly stressful, urgent emergencies make my OCD almost go away. Whether the issue is a flat tire on the highway or a loved one dying, my OCD shuts up and I am able to deal with the immediate situation. This makes sense to me -- my brain has a real problem to deal with and it doesn't have to make something up. When the real problem has passed, it goes back to finding remote and unlikely "what-if" scenarios to chew on.

When I joined this forum about a year ago, I posted that I was suffering from an OCD relapse. Now I instead think my OCD had just morphed from topics that were harder to recognize as OCD into more recognizable contamination themes.* The intense obsessing had been there the whole time. What so many therapists say is true: the themes aren't the issue, the uncertainty itself is the issue. We need to learn to be comfortable with generic doubt and uncertainty, because that can help us no matter what our current theme is.

Desipurple, I know you've had ongoing struggles with your OCD and I think you've said you've been treatment-resistant. I'm glad to see your posts where you've found some techniques that work a little bit for you. Keep working at those techniques and building on little successes. I hope we can all use our insights into how OCD works to help us overcome its tricks as much as we can.

(*If anybody is interested in the details: I'm not a professional photographer, but I've been pretty serious about photography since I was a teenager. Until a couple years ago I still used film, and between the time I took pictures and had them developed I spent a lot of mental energy worrying about how I might have screwed up the photographs. If I photographed a great sunset while visiting some remote locale, I'd spend days or weeks worried about how I might have gotten the exposure wrong, or forgotten to focus, or had debris on the lens. I'd replay the situation to reassure myself that I'd done everything right. If those things didn't bother me, I'd worry that my film would get lost in transit to the lab. Finally I'd get the film back and of course everything was usually fine -- if there was a problem it was almost always something I had never even considered...

Then I finally switched to digital photography, and all those worries vanished. I knew instantly that I'd gotten the picture, and I could back it up in multiple locations. About a year later I started having contamination obsessions that I hadn't had since I was a kid. They took me by surprise and disrupted my life to the point that I finally got serious about combating OCD. Now it's easy to see that all my worries about photography (which I'd always thought were me just "being careful about my craft") were just irrational and unproductive obsessions. When those disappeared it's not too surprising that my brain found something new to focus on.)