OCD Ocd responses while dissociating

[Powder]

Recently, my husband has been gone working more, and I feel more stressed in having to take care of our more difficult child. She is the age I was during abuse, and I love her so much. This is causing real stress for me.

I've noticed that during the day with all that I do, I start dissociating and suddenly feel like my hands are dirty. I just feel "dirty." And I can't recall washing up. I just cant' focus and remember if I washed them just now or not. Even from walking out of the restroom.

I told my husband and he thinks it's no big deal. But I haven't had this symptom in a long time (since my teens when I also had eating disorders.)

Meantime, I started eating disordering again. Starving sometimes, and binging others. I seem to be losing touch.

I don't know what I can do to regulate.

My sleep is fitfull. I don't know if it's winter getting to me, too. If this doesn't clear up soon, should I go ask to change/tweek my meds? I'm scared to mess with them, as I just go them to feel right. Now, I don't know if it's life or what.

 

[Friday]

My knee-jerk is to run with symptoms... Until I'm okay with them... And then work on kicking them to the curb. So I'm not fighting 2 battles: symptom + guilt/shame of the symptom.

For hand washing, this would mean buying a bunch of sanitizers. Hand lotion. Hand soap that smells good. Working in hospitals and restaurants, I would get used to washing constantly.. And so gel in & out of every room (or touching 2 kinds of food). Get okay with constantly washing up & gelling. Then slowly start peeling them off. So I'm only washing up like a normal person, and not like I'm touching other people or their food.

Some symptoms I do end up "keeping" this way. I never kicked scanning to the curb as an example; I just hid it in a smiley, bubbly kind of way. Scanning didn't negatively impact my life once I wasn't setting other people on edge by doing it like a dog about to bite. So that is a warning with becoming okay with symptoms. Once the guilt/shame is gone? Sometimes there's no reason to work on getti rid of them, as they do no damage.

 

[garden]

I'm sorry that you are feeling this way. I understand. I try to find the source of my unraveling too, because I think that if I can find the source I can find a way to address it and it won't happen again, but this is more complex than that. I'm having a hard time being functional right now after a period of high functioning and it's painful to find myself here again. It is scary when old symptoms that have not been around for years resurface. Definitely talk to your therapist/doctor about it.

 

[Chava]

I had more OCD behaviors as a kid, not so much now (I don't know if I was dissociative but I do remember that I didn't trust my perceptions of reality), but relate and also have been through years with eating disorders. I do know that upset in the eating makes me tweak out even more, so not sure if that's something you can work to balance out a bit and not worry about the other stuff? Like make sure you're eating every few hours, getting some protein, etc, if you can. And if you need to wash your hands extra, is that okay for now? Sometimes I have to accept certain symptoms for a while, with awareness, especially if I know I'm struggling and trying to not get thrown out of balance in every area.

Lately I'm more depressed but relate to anxiety symptoms, which is what your stuff sounds like. So anything that helps with that, talk with therapist about new ideas that could help you, maybe meds included...talk to your doctor if you don't think what you are on is helping. It sounds like you have good awareness, so that should be really helpful even if it's hard right now.

 

[Powder]

Yes, it seems to be anxiety related. All fall, I had a hard time every morning, as I got a stress induced asthma feeling. It usually passed by midday, but was bad every morning. Totally new symptom.

Ongoing, but as said above, went away and comes back: Looking for something more than 20 seconds has been a trigger my whole life. I think it is because of my mother shouting at me and expecting me to find things instantly. I must have internalized that criticism because I now expect the same of myself. I don't give myself time to find things.

All of this is linked to most recent flashback in which I couldn't breath in but I could breath out. Felt like I was under water and abandoned; after a while, I went tonic immobile, and felt I would stop breathing and my heart was pounding so loud. I thought the flashback itself was going to kill me. I felt that I was dying, then and during the flashback. Because it was somatic, I had no context for it.

Then I had a dream about a week later that my mom neglected me when I was an infant by holding my hand but letting my head go under water for a long time at a lake camping spot. Then, she noticed I was drowning, so she picked me out of the water and then laid me on a blow up, yellow inflatable raft to see if I would be okay where I struggled to breath in the most pitiful, painful way. I felt total rage at her.

I don't know if that happened, but it seemed real.

All I was told was that since I was born in late May, they took me camping at only a couple months old. (My whole life I have water phobia, can't get my face wet without panicking, was the only kid to fail swimming because I couldn't put my face in the water, and have a terror of yellow, inflatable rafts.)

They did tell me that I had pneumonia as a baby and they didn't take me to the hospital. So I guess there was some kind of drowning trauma perhaps linked to a "secondary drowning" pneumonia at early preverbal times. I only relive these flashbacks as somatic feelings of drowning, but I feel intense abandonment at the same time as I think I'm dying.

Up until now, all flashbacks were of my father's abuse and my mother's not helping me, but this is new stuff that my mother's neglect caused that also felt very dangerous. Both of them were hazardous to my health. These ones seem to come from a younger, more vulnerable time period. It brings up more anger than previous flashbacks.