physical tension focussed OCD?

[bawow]

I am increasingly got bothered by more bodily focused symptoms such as sensations of (involuntary) tension in my jaw and neck and tongue (e.g. tongue biting as a result of neck and jaw tension), to the point where this is hampering with my functioning and enjoyment of life. Naturally, attempts to address this through relaxation don’t help.

I cannot find anything like this in descriptions of OCD, but my suspicion is that my OCD is proposing a new body-focussed theme along with some meta-theme “this is not OCD”. Is this possible, have you every encountered this? Somatosensory OCD is more often described wrt blinking, swallowing, etc.

[Eli_E]

Hi! I have definitely experienced this. It is a lot better now, but it does still pop up now and again. For me, when my ocd and anxiety was really bad, I would hold tension in my jaw. Naturally this was uncomfortable, but it was my body just dealing with the large amounts of anxiety through it. Unfortunately, my ocd did latch on to it. Once I started getting better through therapy and whatnot, I stopped having constant tension in my jaw. Of course, this meant when I would experience tension, my ocd would go on high alert and urge me to think about what I must have done "wrong" to be experiencing this tension. So basically I had to treat my jaw as an exposure. Now I know every time my ocd zeros in on my jaw tension I have to just accept it and say yes, maybe this means I'm doing something wrong or I'm getting worse, and then try to continue on with what I'm doing. Its challenging, but it definitely has gotten better.

[bawow in reply to Eli_E]

Thanks for replying it means a lot.