OCD Youth

mymindbothersme said 9 months ago:

My therapist told me that I have POCD. I am pretty sure because I've waited so long to talk to a professional that it's worsened because somethings are just hard to determine if it's me or my ocd. It's gotten to a point where everything just feels so real. It's horrible..

abocd said 7 months, 2 weeks ago:

A way to get under this obsession can be through unconditional self acceptance. This is taught by Albert Ellis, one of the world leaders in CBT. Unconditional self acceptance is where you believe 'okay, even if I were X I could still accept myself and live my life'. Adopting this belief system takes the fear out of your thoughts because underlying ocd like pocd is often a deep fear of societal rejection, either familial rejection of wider outcasting from society. Unconditional self acceptance does not mean liking your thoughts, it just means accepting them, which means nothing more than letting them exist. Where we get ourselves in difficulty is where we start wrestling with thoughts, trying to prove their not true etc. What this does is actually make them a bigger problem because they take up more of your attention and elicit bigger emotional responses as you get more and more upset that you can't make thoughts stop. After a long time in this struggle it  can lead to you think maybe the thoughts you are having are true because they seem so powerful, but they are just thoughts that have built up like a snowball in to a snowman.

And you might say you experiencing bodily sensations or whatever but if you focus on any part of your body you will experience sensations, that is what meditation shows us. And the distress you feel will be setting off a physiological response of arousal because when in fight or flight we experience everything in a very heightened way. But your fight or flight is being set off in a false alarm. 

so my advice, having gone through the exact same horrible experience, is to stop trying to ' determine if it's me or ocd' like you said, this is impossible to know for 100%, and given ocd needs 100% certainty, you will stay trapped if you don't embrace uncertainty. Nobody knows anything with 100% certainty, we are all just taking educated guesses. The thing is for the general public if they are for example 70% confident about something then this is enough for them, but for those of us with ocd we set the ridiculously high bar of needing 100% certainty, holding ourselves to a higher standard than anyone else, which is actually not fair on ourselves.

There is nothing weird about you, you are just struggling with some meaningless thoughts.

btw any thought that begins 'what if…' discard it immediately, it is almost certainly (but not 100% certain as nothing is!)  ocd.

my wish for all of us with ocd is that we start embracing uncertainty, and give ourselves a break, because we deserve it! 

in my experience people with ocd are some of the loveliest people in the world who are being taunted by their thoughts precisely because they are ego-dystonic, meaning they are thoughts that you morally disagree with. 

So I hope you, and anyone else reading this, gives themselves a break. Life's good