Sensorimotor ocd

[Houdini1965]

Hi does anyone have the ocd that makes you analyze your swallowing and how you do it and thinking about swallowing makes me do it alot. I hate it more than I can explain.

[deValentin]

Here is my response to raspberrycream who posted a message about her sensorimotor OCD 7 days ago:

Sensorimotor OCD can be very distressing indeed. Let me share how I got rid of mine. The episode happened in my twenties. For weeks on end, I couldn't stop focusing on salivating and swallowing my saliva. It drove me "mad". As we all know, the more I tried not to think about it, the more I thought about it. I thought for a while it was caused by hyperactive saliva glands, but, at the time, I had no access to a doctor. Gradually, I started to focus on other things, and it went away on its own. I understood then it's something you can't control directly, like falling asleep. Years later, I read White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts from Daniel Wegner and I understood my predicament.

Now I cultivate some passions in life like gardening, reading, and traveling, and as long as emotionally I feel reasonably well, sensorimotor OCD doesn't bother me anymore. I learnt that certain physical processes have to be left alone if we want them to function well.

[FatherOfC in reply to deValentin]

This technique appears to look a lot like ACT, where you learn to give up control and adopt an acceptance. This requires trust, trust in those things that we can't control, and wouldn't want to if we could. Breathing can be like this. Our breathing goes on without our thinking about it. Nonetheless, we can control our breathing. If we attend too much to our breathing and become fixated on the idea or the possibility that unless we attend to our breathing all the time, we will stop breathing, it will drive us crazy. We can let go. We can trust that our bodies are trustworthy, and that we don't have to be in control.

[deValentin in reply to FatherOfC]

Well said!