- Date posted
- 3y ago
- Date posted
- 3y ago
Are you asking here for discussion of difference between confidence and certainty? Confidence is like "it's probably this, I don't need to spend more time thinking about it". Certainty would be "I 100% know this, there is no doubt". Confidence it's possible to get to, certainty is impossible to get. There's always a "but what if?" Or "how do I know for sure?". With ocd you *want* certainty on some things, particularly if they're important to you. But like you say, it's never satisfying enough for ocd to be pretty confident, it wants to *know for sure*, so it gets you to go back over everything, check again, etc. The thing about moving forward with uncertainty is recognising that you want certainty on something, but you're never gonna know for sure, so it's practicing telling yourself "yep, maybe, maybe not, I'll probably never know for sure", sitting with the uncomfortableness of that and then hopefully over time being able to let the anxiety come down by itself. Takes practice tho!
- Date posted
- 3y ago
Means every person has these types of thought ,but they are comfortable with uncertainty they didnt 100% sureness. While person with ocd needs certainty,after knowing this it is not possible , means digging that hole where you never get water... Accepting uncertainty =Freness from ocd
- Date posted
- 3y ago
@Jassraj singh Hey, yeah 100% what you said. Everyone has loads of random, weird, tricky, difficulty thoughts all the time. Even people with ocd will have lots that they just, let go. But with ocd some of those thoughts you latch on to. I think cos you're *really* scared they're true, so you try and find ways to be sure they're not true. Digging that hole when there's no water is really good way of putting it. One way of thinking about ocd is trying to find sureness for things it's not actually possible to be sure about. So you keep trying harder and harder but it doesn't work, so you try harder. So key to treatment is practicing being ok with not knowing. Taking a different approach even though you really want to keep trying your normal approach. Think that's why ERP works, and why it takes a while
- Date posted
- 3y ago
I do the same thing.
- Date posted
- 3y ago
This is me, sometimes it could’ve literally happened 10 seconds ago
- Date posted
- 3y ago
I think in some context confidence and certainty are different and in some places they’re similar. If you aren’t certain something didn’t happen, you may still feel confident it didn’t happen, or you may not feel confident at all it didn’t happen. I’m not quite sure what they mean by “move forward with confidence.” I’ve never heard that phrase in relation to ocd, actually. I guess I’d just say don’t focus on it. Toss it out. You can move forward without feeling confident. Maybe they just mean you’ll feel more confident in your recovery eventually?
Related posts
- Date posted
- 17w ago
When an intrusive thought comes I can’t just say “that’s not true” and just move on. I always feel like I have to disprove the thought and be able to say it with confidence but the problem is that the ocd doesn’t allow me to feel and say it with confidence so I get stuck for hours or even days. How can I stop feeling like I need to do this?
- Date posted
- 17w ago
This might contain triggering content, but I'm also wondering if others have dealt with this similar thought, and if so, how to deal with it? Overall, I've been doing so well these past few days. I'm able to eat again, which I hadn't been able to do because of how much anxiety I'd been experiencing. I'm spending time around loved ones and not just rotting in my room, and I've been able to wake up without immediately being bombarded by intrusive thoughts. When things first got really bad, I'd wake my mom up every night for reassurance, but I haven't done that in a while either. I'm really proud of myself, but there's still this nagging thought in my mind... While looking through others posts on here, hoping to find advice that'd fit my situation, I ended up making things worse. Someone mentioned how they had a fear that they'd purposely search for illegal content (related to POCD). I panicked, and "what ifs" flooded my thoughts. "What if the intrusive thoughts affect who I am as a person, and I do that?" I'm terrified that I'll search for those things, which I know means I wouldn't do it. But then, another person on here said they'd actually looked for those things, and that freaked me out even more. Does that mean it's possible for that to happen to me? I don't want to do that, but I keep having intrusive thoughts surrounding it. I've been doing so well these past few days. I'm just... stuck. I don't know what to do. I've spoken with other people who have the same fears, but how do I manage this? It's not something I've even thought about before seeing those posts. I've been practicing accepting the uncertainty, but I'm really struggling with this one. I hate this. This morning, I woke up, and the intrusive thoughts were back. It's just disheartening.
- Date posted
- 10w ago
So, I know my capacity to get fixated on things. And it's normally something that's relatively remote but, my latest issue is really getting to me and I was wondering if people have any advice. I'm avoiding getting too into specifics, as I don't want this to get reassurance-y but, in essence.. I came to the realisation recently that people who I'd been "friends" (feels like the wrong term now) when I was younger were not very nice people, and normalized a lot of very unpleasant behaviour towards other members of the group. They really normalized it, sold themselves as figures of authority, as older and more responsible and grown-up than others, and looking back, they acted horribly. And coming to this realisation, that I'd been manipulated into just accepting their behaviour has just... broken me. My OCD has latched onto it and I can't stop feeling irreversibly tainted by it. I've talked to others about it, and they've reassured me, told me it's not a big deal and that I hold myself to too high a standard, but none of that sticks. I feel better for a bit, then think 'Maybe when you told them you were skewing it to make yourself look better' or 'Did you leave out a crucial detail'. I keep ruminating over and over, trying to remember exactly how everything played out, trying to figure out if I fed into the behaviour, if I did something bad myself (because y'know, I feel like I was accepting of it at the time, so what does it say about my own values?). I know I need to stop doing all this if I want to improve, but then some part of me keeps saying 'So, you're just going to let yourself off the hook then?' Normally, I can rationalize my own fears to some degree, assure myself something won't happen, but the realness of the situation, and the fact I only came to understand the reality of it because the thought had been bothering me means it feels so much more all-encompassing. I know confessing in itself is a compulsion, but I keep feeling that if I'm not I'm somehow concealing what I 'really am' from others around me, and any positive interactions are me deceiving them in some way. I feel like I can't enjoy anything in life right now, and a good part of me feels I should not enjoy it ever again. If anybody has any advice on it, I'm all ears. Or even hearing if you relate to these feelings, I might appreciate the solidarity at least.
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