Feel lost

[Mountaintop7]

hi I am 51 and have had high anxiety al my life. I also have generalized anxiety and my OCD is now thru the roof and I can’t sleep and it’s affecting my life. I also go back and forth with depression. I feel like I am a mess, ugh. I want to get help but in the past when I have taken medication I felt so flat I hated it and felt more normal with my heart racing since that is what I’ve always felt. I feel lost and want to live this next half of my life happy and full of adventure .

[deValentin]

I understand your desire to live the next half of your life happy and full of adventure. OCD can make us feel pretty miserable at times. We sometimes become so wrapped up in the process of eliminating all doubts, imperfections, or discomfort that we lose sight of our end-goal, which is to live a reasonably happy life.

I also understand your desire to get help without medication. IMHO, medication is a crutch that some may need at the beginning of their recovery until they can walk on both legs, so to speak. The aim should be to function normally with therapy alone, if possible, because of the side-effects of medication, as you mentioned. Have you tried exposure and response prevention, or ERP?

[80_Zil_ian]

Sometimes I feel like you. I’ve never had depression, but OCD sometimes makes me feel miserable… To be honest, I’ve tried several approaches in life, and with many of them, I really did feel better for a while. But everything started with medication. Did you take it for a considerable amount of time to see if there was any improvement? Because sometimes it can take months, or even a year, and the side effects can be tough—especially in the first 3 weeks.

Beyond the symptoms, one of the biggest problems with OCD is that it drains all our self-confidence, because we start to feel like we’re only living small parts of our lives—never fully.

Beyond therapy and medication, here are some things that have helped me (at least for a while—I’ve never found anything that fixes the problem permanently):

• When I was younger, exercise. After some years, I started to build a strong body, and that boosted my confidence. Even living with OCD, I had some good years, partially because of that. Nowadays, since I’m almost 50 like you, this doesn’t work for me anymore… but I miss those days.

• Religion. At one point, I was feeling so low that I said to myself, “I’m so tired of feeling less than other people,” and that’s when I searched for Jesus Christ. I thought: If I have to feel humiliated, then let it be before Our Lord and not other people”

This helped me because it gave me guidance… (and living with OCD within the Catholic faith is really hard) but at least at the end of the day, I can ask for mercy, even if I’m not sure I deserve it. And beyond faith, it also helps me to see others more equally—not putting myself below everyone else.

[Mom2DnJ]

are you doing erp with an ocd specialist? There are so many new medication being developed all the time. Try a different one.