Did I leave the lights on? Did I feed the dog? Did I leave the lights on? Did I lock the door? I need to attend a meeting for a class. Did I leave the lights on? Did I forget my keys? I’ll visit a friend later. Did I leave the lights on?
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Quotes tagged ‘ocd’
When you are trying to stay in control of your wandering mind, you seek out work or other activities that take up every ounce of thought you have. You want to be fully immersed in an activity because that ensures that your mind won’t wander and obsess over your most irrational fears.
OCD can make you forgetful because you can’t focus on your jarring obsessions and your real life all at the same time.
You often visualize bad things happening, and then need a visual distraction just to push the mental images out of your head.
Sometimes it’s easy. You’re getting through the day: no ruminating, no rituals, you’re in the moment, no worries or doubts and you are, genuinely, on top of the world. Sometimes it’s not so easy. Sometimes you get sucked in.
I always fucking beat it. I beat it every time I don’t do a ritual. I beat it every time I have a good day. And I beat it every day I don’t take a knife and end myself.
It’s thoughts like that that trigger the need to fix or clean. It is not because something not being the way you prefer it, bugs you. It is because something terrible will happen if you do not fix it, and the thought does not go away until you make sure what ever it is is the way it has to be. Then…
The intrusive thought. The needling lack of logic. The obsession. The anxiety. They do not yield, but you can get better at ignoring it.
When you have OCD, the trigger is not reasonable, it is not something along the lines of ‘they messed it up, I have to fix it or it will annoy me’, it is more a long the lines of ‘if I don’t make sure my collection of vintage potato chips is in chronological order, someone will date-rape my future d…
I know that I’m being unreasonable but there’s a little itch that says, ‘…but what if you didn’t?’
You see, my OCD serves as a weird kind of security blanket. It (very) temporarily calms my anxiety, makes me feel like I have control over the things I clearly cannot control.
The severity of my OCD ebbs and flows depending on the circumstances surrounding me.
If you have a bad feeling about something, and something bad actually ends up happening that day, you’ll chalk it up to a coincidence and move on. Not me. I’ll think that, somehow, I knew it was going to happen. That I was right. It gives my OCD credit that it doesn’t deserve. It makes the disorder…
Sometimes, I’ll even cancel plans, because I feel like something bad is going to happen if I leave the house. The worst case scenario is always the first scenario I think of.
The thing about OCD is that I realize I’m being completely ridiculous. You don’t have to tell me. You don’t have to make me feel even worse about it than I already do, because I know. I’m trying to resist my urges, but it’s hard.
Common obsessional thoughts include: violent thoughts (ex: wanting to kill a loved one), sexual thoughts (ex: sexual thoughts of children and family members) and thoughts of contamination (ex: thoughts that one will be infested with germs).
The difference is those living with OCD are not able to pass off these thoughts quickly as an ‘odd thought’ but often get ‘stuck’ on them even with every attempt to ignore or suppress them.
Obsessive thoughts are often a response to confusing discomfort for danger. This is the premise of all anxiety, but particularly with OCD.
The whole problem is that OCD makes you incapable of controlling your attention. While nobody has power over what thoughts pop up in their heads, they usually do have autonomy over whether or not they focus on them. This is not the case with OCD.
It’s not always about repetitive actions, counting steps, or making sure things are super clean – the classic signs of OCD. It’s more often about not being able to let go of a thought or fear, and then taking extreme measures to resolve the problem.