Can anyone tell me difference about certainty and confidence.. Eveyone says that everyone get doubting intrusive thought about past and future but they are able to live with uncertainty and move forward with confidence .. I also get thought about past or things just happened a hour ago , my mind tells things that something bad happened or someone hurt you and i know thats my imagination and i am also confident , but i didnt get satisfaction.. but i know if i ruminate it will get worse and i well get nothing from it .. So living with uncertainty is the only solution and does really every person leave with this... This thing always confuses me please help me this...

tomtom45

Date posted: 3y

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!

Jassraj singh

Date posted: 3y

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

tomtom45

Date posted: 3y

@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

airbear

Date posted: 3y

I do the same thing.

OcdDude1

Date posted: 3y

This is me, sometimes it could’ve literally happened 10 seconds ago

allieandscrup

Date posted: 3y

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?

moon0270

Date posted: 18w

Mental compulsions/ rumination

So hard to not engage the thoughts because even though it's from the "past" (i don't even know if im remembering things correctly and it kills me) and i can't change it, I just NEED to prove it to myself that it didn't happen this way. If you'd asked me questions maybe a few months ago, I would have been able to lucidly explain things. Now I just feel like I'm in a constant swarm of thoughts, not knowing if anything is real. If my brain is to be trusted. Wish I could just get hypnosis to forget

eb123456789

Date posted: 15w

Relief followed by questioning that relief

Does anyone else experience a moment of clarity where you feel strong relief that the intrusive thought isn’t true, only to then immediately start questioning if you’ve only convinced yourself that because you don’t want the thought to be true? I’m pretty confident it would take some crazy mental gymnastics to actually successfully convince myself I didn’t do something that I deep down knew I did, but every time I resist the compulsions and try to sit with the uncertainty or tell myself to think about what is logical, I usually briefly know that this probably didn’t happen but am unable to move on out of fear I’m just in denial and have convinced myself of that.

Anonymous

Date posted: 13w

I can’t tell anything real anymore

This situation just happened and I can definitely remember how it went but my brain is telling me otherwise and I know you guys said to sit with the uncertainty but what if the intrusive thought is so bad like disgusting, I can’t sit with that. Maybe it’s false memory but this just happened. I don’t even know how to live with this

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