Homework is Stirring Up a Lot Inside of Me

[EveHarrington]

This is OCD therapy homework, but most of my obsessions are trauma related as confirmed by my therapist.

I do like my new therapist as she has really been able to help me so far. She’s not a trauma therapist but she does seem to be trauma informed. We knocked out my worst obsession which I would say was the kingpin obsession and I’m shocked it happened so fast. I’m sure it’s not gone forever, but at least it’s gone for now. This was the “god hates me” obsession. This one was related to the trauma as I believed that god hated me as he allowed me to be molested. Knocking this one out means that I am simply able to work on the rest. Don’t get me wrong, the rest are horrendous and will no doubt take a lot longer to work through as I have lists to support my obsessions and then when I was doing my homework I realized that each line in my list had a list of its own. Damn, getting complicated, right?

So this week we are working on the obsessions dealing with feeling worthless and unlovable and bad. These are all of course trauma related. Having to write out my lists and even more lists has been so hard as I am writing down every obsession about my negative qualities and then the “why”. The last part is countering those thoughts, but really it’s going to be up to me to talk to others to get other ideas why my thoughts are wrong. (It’s the seeing things from another persons point of view that helps me the most.)

Everything is so stirred up inside and I have been crying so much all weekend. I have a few more of my obsessions to work on by Wednesday when I have therapy again. This stuff isn’t easy in the least.

Anyway, please do not reassure me by saying “God loves you” or “God cares about you” or something like that. The crux of OCD treatment relies on not being reassured as reassurance just makes the cycle continue. I need to be ok with uncertainty (about all my obsessions). I only touch on this one obsession as without fail, everyone who believes in God has reassured me that he loves me (save my therapist as it’s her job not to). I think it’s an automatic reaction, lol. I’m not trying to be rude, rather this is all just part of my treatment.

I’m just struggling right now. Thanks for reading.

 

[arfie]

I need to be ok with uncertainty (about all my obsessions).i

that certainly jives with my own ocd. ocd has nothing to do with knowledge or intelligence. i **know** there is no benefit to knowing how many stairs i climb to reach a building i will never visit again, but that won't stop my uneasy feeling if i don't count them accurately. don't bother trying to stop me if i need to turn around and count them again, just to be certain. or? ? ? if i need to stop and ply the therapy tools to help me deal with the uncertainty of not knowing. it be that uncertainty which i am self-soothing with my ocd ticks and its kissing cousin, control freakitis.

in my own case, it doesn't seem to matter whether my ocd ticks are trauma related, or not. being okay with the uncertainty is the ticket for me.

attempted humor alert
god really does love you

 

[Movingforward10]

I don't believe in god, but, out of all the worlds population, why would it be YOU that god hates?

A personality flaw (which every single human has some or many of, no one is without flaw) does mean that god or anyone else would hate you. Or that you deserve abuse.

I don't know if you're asking for counter messages, but those were two I thought of.

Are you asking about the unsettleness? I always think that when I am working through tough things, all this unsettleness is a sign of healing. Perhaps you're realising that you are not worthless and that shifting these cognitive distortions is helping to realise you are and always have been worthy.

 

[EveHarrington]

that certainly jives with my own ocd. ocd has nothing to do with knowledge or intelligence. i **know** there is no benefit to knowing how many stairs i climb to reach a building i will never visit again, but that won't stop my uneasy feeling if i don't count them accurately. don't bother trying to stop me if i need to turn around and count them again, just to be certain. or? ? ? if i need to stop and ply the therapy tools to help me deal with the uncertainty of not knowing. it be that uncertainty which i am self-soothing with my ocd ticks and its kissing cousin, control freakitis.

in my own case, it doesn't seem to matter whether my ocd ticks are trauma related, or not. being okay with the uncertainty is the ticket for me.

attempted humor alert
god really does love you

I’m not sure why it is funny to you to make a joke like that? When I specifically asked people to not say that.

Yes, people here can say whatever they want but at the same time I specifically stated how that was my kingpin obsession. Here’s me being an asshole, seeing as how you drew swords first. You don’t have severe OCD. At worst you have baby “oh, I had an obsession once, maybe” kind of OCD. And even that is a HUGE “maybe”. Anyone with severe OCD wouldn’t be making effin’ asshole jokes like that. NOBODY. I don’t have baby OCD. This shit is serious and my obsessions have lead me to suicidality more than once INCLUDING ATTEMPTS.

You are a sick, sad individual who gains gratification from joking about other people’s mental illness. You are not a good person in the least.

I hope you are happy knowing that your BS “humor” has succeeded in putting me in an even worse place.

You are just like every abusive person out there who finds someone’s vulnerable spot and then uses it against them. Go check yourself. This is 100% abusive behavior, full stop.

I don’t even know why I bothered to post when people here just use shit you say against you.

Plus, counting OCD? Bwahahahahaha that’s baby shit. Oh, no, I am a widdle bit anxious because my count was off! This is pathetic level crap compared to “f*ck, game over GOD HATES YOU”. My shit means there is no path forward in living, your shit is just counting stuff that makes you a little anxious. DO YOU UNDERSTAND NOW? Of course not. Why would you???? My obsessions are a effin joke to you, so yours are to me.

 

[EveHarrington]

don't believe in god, but, out of all the worlds population, why would it be YOU that god hates?

I never said I was the only one he hated. Don’t put words in my mouth. Try again.

A personality flaw (which every single human has some or many of, no one is without flaw) does mean that god or anyone else would hate you. Or that you deserve abuse.

Yes, we agree. A personality flaw means that God can hate you and other people can hate you, too.

Perhaps you're realising that you are not worthless and that shifting these cognitive distortions is helping to realise you are and always have been worthy.

Nope, not there yet, don’t know if I’ll ever be there. The agitation is from
Having everything thrown in my face at once.

 

[Movingforward10]

I never said I was the only one he hated. Don’t put words in my mouth. Try again.

Don't think I will with your response. I was trying to help. If it doesn't resonate, it doesn't resonate. No need to be rude to me about it.

 

[Sideways]

Mod Note:
Dysregulation. Thread being locked temporarily.

@arfie - threadbanned.

The OP has explicitly stated:

do not reassure me by saying “God loves you” or “God cares about you” or something like that.

Even in humour, please respect this request. We’ll thread-ban members that ignore OPs reasonable explicit requests about replies.

 

[Weemie]

I need to be ok with uncertainty (about all my obsessions).

This was the crux of my OCD treatment as well. I have REOCD so the big issue for me is obsessing about shit that I've done (which makes me bad, even though I am not all bad, is the good enough to cancel out the bad??? blah blah Blah. How do I exist having done bad shit??? am I obligated to tell aka confess lol, to every person I see???) Part of my therapy has been learning to simply sit with the fact that people are good and bad.

And I'll never know what that actually means, existentially, because human beings have no ability to know that information. There are some religious overtones to mine as well - Judaism has this precept called kareth which is where you do something so egregious that G-d cuts you off spiritually, and I genuinely believed for a long time that this was true because I did a number of the things that you're supposed to die instead of do (though the threat wasn't to my life, but to others).

The only way forward through this has been a similar level of "OK with uncertainty." If there is a G-d, and he does hate me, I guess I'll just have to make my case and hope that he has a reasonable understanding of causality. If not, then I guess I'll just have to take my namesake (Isra'el) literally and fight him.

out of all the worlds population, why would it be YOU that god hates?

Sadly, OCD doesn't really work that way. It's not really something you can "logic" yourself out of, because that's the mental illness itself. Anytime you try to think your way out of that box, OCD will worm its way back in and say "well but XYZ!" ("I'm a monster because I hurt other people, OK I was forced to hurt other people, well I'm a monster because I could physically do it and a good person would have just died...")

OCD can get so bad that you're almost straight up delusional, not that EveHarrington is at that point (it sounds like she's saying she's recovered a bit from this one) but the way severe OCD works can get pretty delusional, as in genuine false beliefs that you believe are 100% real. I am convinced every time my mom goes out for a bike ride she will die horribly. Is there a point to worrying about this? Nope. Will it help her to not-die? Nope!

If I prevent my mom from going outside, will that stop her from dying? Nope! But my brain says if she's in the house, then she's Safe. But she isn't, no one is. She could die of an aneurysm tomorrow. OCD just be like that. That's why the best treatments for it are actually anti-cognitive, like ERP. You're trained to just let the thoughts go, to not entertain them, to not seek reassurance.

(As Eve mentioned - this is part of my compulsion as well, the cycle of confession/reassurance that I've engaged in a number of times here before I understood what it was, and now that behavior is much lessened in me as I go thru ERP.) Rather than to try and be like "oh well if G-d has all these other people why would he focus on you? G-d loves everyone, blah blah."

OCD will be like "well G-d didn't make everyone get molested, maybe he just hates the people he lets get molested. We already know G-d has severe punishments for things that aren't that bad, that he's engaged in omnicide before, etc. So there's no reason to presume he's omnibenevolent..." and on and on. It's OCD. By trying to engage with it logically like this, you just open up more room for the OCD delusions to latch onto and wiggle around.

It doesn't matter how logical the argument is, OCD will find a way to counter it. That's why ERP focuses on forcing you to just stop engaging completely. "OK, maybe there is a G-d and maybe or maybe-not he hates me. I have to still live my life, so I'm going to set this aside."

 

[Movingforward10]

Thanks @Weemie. The OP has been banned now so , if that is a permanent ban, won't see any of this.

I don't know much about OCD but what you're saying is similar to what I'm saying. You're still finding logic, rational thoughts, to counter message the OCD thoughts. It's finding the logic that works for any particular person.

 

[Sideways]

Mod Note:

The OP has been banned now so , if that is a permanent ban, won't see any of this.

Temp banned, they’re welcome back.

This thread is visible to anyone, member or otherwise - only (Member) and (Private) threads have any kind of restriction on visibility or interaction.

If there are any other questions about this, please direct them to Contact Us.

 

[Weemie]

You're still finding logic, rational thoughts, to counter message the OCD thoughts.

The big difference though is that despite the fact that ERP grounds you in reality in a way that is ultimately reasonable, it's not the same thing as using logic and arguments to reason yourself out of OCD thoughts. It is deliberately choosing to acknowledge that you will never know the answer. Which is why there is a difference between what I said and what you said.

"Why would G-d choose to hate you, personally?" is different than "maybe or maybe not, but obsessing about it isn't helpful." One is feeding into an argument, and that is not something that is successful with OCD. The other is essentially setting it aside, choosing to be comfortable with uncertainty (which is ultimately where OCD prevails, it is an attempt to gain control over things that cannot be known).

Receiving counter-messages like that one (what the OP actually asked people not to do - which is what reassurance is) isn't helpful in OCD, because it isn't neutral. And, unfortunately, just causes repetitive conversations that are circular, go nowhere, and constantly rehashing the same stuff over and over again. I used to get into conversations like this over and over and over again - I'd be like I'm a monster, blah blah.

Then I'd circle around it for a while and I might feel better in the moment being able to usurp the rumination with someone else's outside logic. In the moment I might go "hm, I guess." But it was always temporary, it only took an hour or so at most before I'd start having the same conversations all over again, OCD would find a way to invalidate it. It really is not about finding logic that works for you - as that gives the impression that OCD can be reasoned out of. It can't.

The only effective treatment is choosing to stop, and this is extremely difficult for people with OCD to do, because part of the rumination cycle is the insistence that rumination is actually helpful in some way. Edited to add: Because this might sound somewhat confusing - with ERP, countering the thoughts isn't an attempt to reason yourself out of your obsessions - it is basically a way for you to find a thought that is neutral, and forcibly pasting it over the ruminations.

This is variable to the person, so you're not wrong with that point. Whenever I start getting into the whole, I'm a monster thing, I forcibly say "I am grieving" instead. If I said "well I was just a child" - that invites discussion. I am 11 standard deviations above my peers, so maybe that means I wasn't a child. I was older than the children, maybe that counts for something. Children do bad and horrific things all the time, maybe it doesn't matter. Etc, etc, etc.

It does not change the fact that I have OCD or that I still think about these things very frequently, but it does offer me a tool to refuse to engage with it. In order to be effective, a countering thought has to be neutral. It can't be something like "why would G-d hate me?" because that is not neutral and invites discussion. And that is where OCD will just start the spiral all over again.

The reason why I mention all of this stuff is because I think Eve was trying to engage on a subject that she anticipated people on this forum would understand more about than they do, and getting a reaction that most people with OCD get from people who don't know about OCD. I'm definitely not trying to shame you personally or make anyone feel bad, just explaining more of the actual process of how this stuff works and why it may have resulted in a blow-up.

Which isn't anyone else's responsibility, but I'm sure we have all been in a place where someone has said something about PTSD that you've heard 100x before while you're triggered, for example. I definitely agree that the response was disproportionate, though. The expectation was unreasonable, since this isn't a forum for OCD, most people aren't going to have this level of in-depth knowledge and this is generally the most common response given when mentioning OCD obsessions.

Same way that the people who mean well in your life don't always know everything about PTSD.

 

[Movingforward10]

I'm definitely not trying to shame you personally

I didn't take it that way at all.

why it may have resulted in a blow-up.

This is where we are all responsible for how we respond to people.

Thanks for the explanation.