what do you know about obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)?

part of the reason why the issue is so taboo, clearly.

i have continued to struggle with it on a self-image level. it has gotten a lot better, but it's frustrating.

it gets better. but it's still fuckin' hard. but i'm still not going on fuckin' zoloft.

Trying to finish a book, trying really hard and it still taken me 5 hours to read 30 pages. Sucks.

I worry about typos occasionally but most of this doesn't apply to me.

http://www.steveseay.com/social-phobia-perfectionism-ocd-treatment/

Odd to think that a lot of people might be intentionally making themselves look bad to get over their fears of looking bad online.

it's an interesting article outside of the social media aspect -- "ERP" or making mistakes on purpose is in fact the only help that i have found for OCD. mine is still fairly extreme, but time and time again, every time i am having a real problem with it, this is the only thing that helps. speaking in incorrect grammar, blundering your words, messing things up a little, getting your hands dirty -- this is the *only* thing that helps when perfectionism transcends and becomes a significant problem.

http://www.worrywisekids.org/node/120

For younger children, the therapist and child can make up silly songs about the feared content (going to jail, poison, etc.) both to expose the child to what they fear but also change the tone from serious to humorous.

yea, i was reading a little about this too. like an inner wonderland kind of thing.

i guess i sound so redundant it's just so baffling to me that i've been dealing with these things for practically half my life

I said above, in May that I didn't have too much trouble with unpleasant thoughts but recently it has become awful. A few weeks ago, I had what feels like one of the worst days of my life.

It never ceases to amaze me how easily OCD spreads. If you start calming down about one fear, it'll invent another two things to be afraid of. If you try to examine the worrying subjects and your situation or even vaguely related subjects, it hijacks these thoughts and builds all these worrying associations. So it feels like you can't even rationally think about anything you're scared of. And avoiding thinking about these subjects makes it seem like you're ignoring something important and not dealing with it.

So I was always unconvinced about anything involving using rational thoughts to fight OCD because it never seemed to work. I had read quite a lot about OCD and using words as therapy always seemed to be a road to more suffocating rituals.

But then I read this article.

http://www.socialworktoday.com/archive/070212p22.shtml

Russ Harris, in The Happiness Trap: How to Stop Struggling and Start Living, discussed a skill called cognitive defusion, which helps an individual create room for intrusive thoughts. A client thinks, “I am a bad person.” To practice defusion, you would restate the thought: “I just had a thought that I am a bad person” or go a step further and say, “I just noticed I had a thought that I am a bad person.” This allows clients to occupy the same space with their thoughts but from a different vantage point. Instead of being crunched in a small closet with their thoughts, they are now in a gymnasium with them.

ACT also stresses showing irreverence to internal private experiences and instead choosing to live life based on one’s values.

It doesn't cure everything, you can't completely rely on this technique but these ideas helped me calm down immensely. Just stating the worrying thoughts and feelings in a very objective, plain and robotic fashion tends to calm me down when it's getting awful.

Although the OCD is obviously real, I often feel I'm subconsciously creating these problems for myself as a way to procrastinate and sabotage my life away. I need to keep reminding myself that I've lost a large part of my 20s to this shit.

i'm with you 100% Robert. You are not inventing problems. I lost so many years in my 20's. i am now 32 and i have thought so much about the sort of techniques you describe. they do help. very much. i know everything you're going through. i can't say that it goes away - but these things do help. what i want to say to you is that you are not creating these problems for yourself as an easy out. i have thought the same thing. the bigger problem is that it is one of the most difficult problems to get help for. hang in there.

Thanks. I'm wondering where all the other OCD members are.

But I've always procrastinated, been a bit lazy, not prioritized enough, maybe a bit of a sabotager too, so I don't feel like that's all totally OCD. I'm not being hard on myself, I think these flaws might have invited OCD into my life.

I'd imagine OCD tends to affect more relatively idle people than it does people who constantly need to be on the move. Surely worriers who are full of doubt must be more prone?

I think it's like OCD and procrastination collaborate. There's so many times I completely chosen to do the rituals in what I knew was a futile attempt to straighten things out, I knew that I risked making myself worse.

Unpleasant thoughts were only a real OCD issue for a relatively short time in my early 20s and for 6 or 7 years it wasn't a problem at all.
There are some obsessions I managed to drop and haven't been an issue in a very long time. So if I could drop the unpleasant thoughts and read properly, I'd be very happy.

i'm over here btw.

Welcome and hope you're coping well.

sometimes? sitting out on ilx for awhile is not hurting too bad.

don't sit out on this thread though. we all need people to talk to. sometimes i feel like i don't have anyone to talk to about this sort of thing.

okay, i guess it just feels weird to discuss? Like the nature of my posting to ILX is often enabling to my OCD which, har har, except when it's not. At the moment, I'm about to go walk a dog at the local animal shelter. I find that the best way to overcome this stuff (and I think i'm a bit older than you guys, so lots of hills and valleys with the process) is to remove myself from wherever I feel too comfortable. That makes me have to shift out of the little OCD box of this then This then THIS THEN THIS THEN THIS THENTHISTHENTHISTHENTHIS that drowns me because I have to honestly think on my feet. Exercise helps too.

good points. i appreciate those. it definitely feels weird to discuss. that's been my biggest thing. i can't even talk to my boyfriend about it anymore. like, lots of ppl just don't get it.

i'm also just presuming as I'm not diagnosed but everything i read and feel points me in that direction. I totally appreciate the anxiety/depression spiral that creeps up as everything gets "out of control" and I'm panicking just typing that tbh. But I'm very high functioning! So the majority of this just reflects on the inside where only I'm aware. When I talk about this with my girl she tells me that I don't seem stressed or anxious at all, so it doesn't come through.

i self diagnosed and then confirmed with an MD. also just because it doesn't come through doesn't mean it's not real. but that's GREAT that you function highly and that your girl is telling you the same. it's not easy to be high functioning.

hope y'all are doing ok today

hahahahaha, i was gonna bump this thread!

:-)

Generally better than last week anyway.

a little worse for me for a lot of reasons but one of the big ones is needing to close this tab.

yo, i just wanna pop in here and say actually paying (even if out of pocket) to see someone who can prescribe drugs for this is one of the smartest and best things you can do with your life

yyyyyyyyeah i hear you but

i dunno maybe it's worth thinking about

i just made an appt with my doctor for tmw

i'm going to keep making more frequent appts with him he keeps up with all the medicine

Been wondering a lot about how many things in my life are OCD and what the first thing was, sometimes it's so subtle you don't notice a disorder. I think it only became a major problem in my 20s but I can see minor phases of it possibly stretching back to early childhood.

i remember exactly the day when mine started. like the moment. the girl, the conversation, the cafeteria.

i just met with my psychiatrist and he said it's not a bad idea for me to try some medication again. it's not specific to OCD but since my "symptoms" are mixed i'm giving it a shot. i tried it before but not under the right circumstances!

mmmmmaybe

it's been years since i've tried something - i get the major hesitation

Doing much much much better than the hole I was in when I last posted here. Still need to fix my reading OCD problem though.

I was talking with a bunch of OCD people recently and they pointed out how the trend of youngsters in fan communities and social media being extremely puritanical often seems a lot to do with OCD. The idea had crossed my mind, but discussing this and thinking about the paranoid dogmatic behavior, it makes a lot of sense. Really scary and sad that they're hanging out together and freaking each other out like this.

https://amp.kentucky.com/opinion/op-ed/article269080207.html

Kentucky mayor opens up about having OCD and urges people to stop making it a punchline.