Thesuper
Member
Hello, you guys are probably fond of long threads, sorry mine is so long it has just been bottled up for so long. I think my problem started about 3 or 4 years ago.
It started out very mild, washing clean Cutlery, excessive hand washing... that sort of thing, no obsessions.
It seemed like it wasn't a bad thing, it didn't cause stress, not at the time.
Sometime later I got these feelings of anxiety, I think these were among my first intrusive thoughts, I sometimes had thoughts about going back in time and feared losing things, thoughts like losing things i had done, losing the people I knew like I knew them at the time, so on, I couldn't understand why I was scared of thinking it, I was trying to think they were just normal thoughts that made me feel bad.
Back at those times I don't remember what I did for compulsions, I'm kinda certain they were mental things I said to myself like repeating a phrase or something.
Soon after I got scrupulous intrusive thoughts, I remember that gave me pretty bad stress back then, however they were a lot less frequent.
Around that point I knew there was something wrong, the stress it was causing me was not normal, I didn't want to tell anyone at all, I thought it was just to insane, I didn't think of it to be to serious. even though the great stress, it didn't seem to impair my life that much.
I suffered from the anxiety for some months or maybe a year, but now I can't remember what happened afterwards for a few years, its like it went dormant for a while, it was strange.
Less than a year ago, I remember it coming back, I remember being confident about it all, thinking I was gonna keep it under control, little did I know the way I was keeping it under control was just making it stronger.
My life was normal for a little while longer but eventually, over time, it got to me and I hit that rock bottom anxiety feeling, Taking so many hours to get over one intrusive though, as soon as I felt ready to resume my day another would just take me back to square one, on this one day I felt like I couldn't handle it anymore, (remember, I had no clue what this was at that point) I desperately searched up anything that could be causing this, I think it was when I was searching up superstition then I thought what I ws doing was more like a mental ritual, so I searched something like Psychology and rituals, then a search result for obsessive compulsive disorder.
The only thing I knew about obsessive compulsive disorder at the time was its some disorder which people worry about everything being clean and such, excessive organization of stuff.
While reading an obsessive compulsive disorder page I felt good that I could know what it was I could possibly be suffering from.
after reading tons of articles I come across this forum, I read a lot of peoples stories of their experiences with obsessive compulsive disorder.
I got the feeling I could overcome it by doing exposure and response prevention by myself but at the started my methods were extremely flawed, I was not making very much progress at all and I soon got that feeling again of that extremely bad feeling again, it seemed like it would take a whole day for everything to feel normal, my mother started asking me to tell her about what was making me depressed, I kept it from her for about a month but then after another one of those days I couldn't hide it any longer, I told my mother I thought that I might have obsessive compulsive disorder, it is really good I opened up, I felt confident again but it wasn't really that much to make it go away.
since then I have had some weeks where I feel like I live to fight an endless fight with obsessive compulsive disorder where I always seem bound to lose, I will do nothing at all, it just feels like my life is on hold.
It seems to be because I have these intrusive thoughts that if I do things while trying to deal with an obsession it will contaminate the thing I am doing, its like I always have to be free of obsessions to be able to do any activities.
I avoid so many things now, like going to a friends house, sometimes in other places my anxiety is greater because I fear starting an obsession involving whatever I am doing, another very often one is I will stop speaking in the middle of a sentence because I have intrusive thoughts all the time, it makes it a pain to socialize with people or do anything, I have to avoid all the things I like doing because fear of an obsession.
Nowadays my intrusive thoughts are almost always scrupulous, I have to have words ready to negate intrusive thoughts, I have a fear in the back of my mind of damnation and harm to soul it makes it so hard to do anything about it in exposure and response prevention, so far I have not really done anything about the scrupulous intrusive thoughts yet, except of course, for compulsions.
If you have some of your own advice I would be more than pleased to hear and thank you for reading this.
It started out very mild, washing clean Cutlery, excessive hand washing... that sort of thing, no obsessions.
It seemed like it wasn't a bad thing, it didn't cause stress, not at the time.
Sometime later I got these feelings of anxiety, I think these were among my first intrusive thoughts, I sometimes had thoughts about going back in time and feared losing things, thoughts like losing things i had done, losing the people I knew like I knew them at the time, so on, I couldn't understand why I was scared of thinking it, I was trying to think they were just normal thoughts that made me feel bad.
Back at those times I don't remember what I did for compulsions, I'm kinda certain they were mental things I said to myself like repeating a phrase or something.
Soon after I got scrupulous intrusive thoughts, I remember that gave me pretty bad stress back then, however they were a lot less frequent.
Around that point I knew there was something wrong, the stress it was causing me was not normal, I didn't want to tell anyone at all, I thought it was just to insane, I didn't think of it to be to serious. even though the great stress, it didn't seem to impair my life that much.
I suffered from the anxiety for some months or maybe a year, but now I can't remember what happened afterwards for a few years, its like it went dormant for a while, it was strange.
Less than a year ago, I remember it coming back, I remember being confident about it all, thinking I was gonna keep it under control, little did I know the way I was keeping it under control was just making it stronger.
My life was normal for a little while longer but eventually, over time, it got to me and I hit that rock bottom anxiety feeling, Taking so many hours to get over one intrusive though, as soon as I felt ready to resume my day another would just take me back to square one, on this one day I felt like I couldn't handle it anymore, (remember, I had no clue what this was at that point) I desperately searched up anything that could be causing this, I think it was when I was searching up superstition then I thought what I ws doing was more like a mental ritual, so I searched something like Psychology and rituals, then a search result for obsessive compulsive disorder.
The only thing I knew about obsessive compulsive disorder at the time was its some disorder which people worry about everything being clean and such, excessive organization of stuff.
While reading an obsessive compulsive disorder page I felt good that I could know what it was I could possibly be suffering from.
after reading tons of articles I come across this forum, I read a lot of peoples stories of their experiences with obsessive compulsive disorder.
I got the feeling I could overcome it by doing exposure and response prevention by myself but at the started my methods were extremely flawed, I was not making very much progress at all and I soon got that feeling again of that extremely bad feeling again, it seemed like it would take a whole day for everything to feel normal, my mother started asking me to tell her about what was making me depressed, I kept it from her for about a month but then after another one of those days I couldn't hide it any longer, I told my mother I thought that I might have obsessive compulsive disorder, it is really good I opened up, I felt confident again but it wasn't really that much to make it go away.
since then I have had some weeks where I feel like I live to fight an endless fight with obsessive compulsive disorder where I always seem bound to lose, I will do nothing at all, it just feels like my life is on hold.
It seems to be because I have these intrusive thoughts that if I do things while trying to deal with an obsession it will contaminate the thing I am doing, its like I always have to be free of obsessions to be able to do any activities.
I avoid so many things now, like going to a friends house, sometimes in other places my anxiety is greater because I fear starting an obsession involving whatever I am doing, another very often one is I will stop speaking in the middle of a sentence because I have intrusive thoughts all the time, it makes it a pain to socialize with people or do anything, I have to avoid all the things I like doing because fear of an obsession.
Nowadays my intrusive thoughts are almost always scrupulous, I have to have words ready to negate intrusive thoughts, I have a fear in the back of my mind of damnation and harm to soul it makes it so hard to do anything about it in exposure and response prevention, so far I have not really done anything about the scrupulous intrusive thoughts yet, except of course, for compulsions.
If you have some of your own advice I would be more than pleased to hear and thank you for reading this.
