Some things I learned from my last spike

I am recovering from a spike that went a few weeks and have learned some things along the way that I wanted to share: 1. How to deal with anger and frustration. I tend to try to avoid being angry. I often see it as an unhelpful and selfish emotion, and what’s more, I have had certain religious beliefs about the nature of anger and its sinfulness. But what is considered sinful anger is that which is oriented towards injury, physical or personal. Often the big “explosion” that my anger feels like it is boiling towards is just… sharing that I hurt. Not insults, not threats, not guilt tactics. So I have been sharing more of my daily frustrations lately, and also just allowing anger to be there, without stoking the fire of course. And I have found some freedom in this. 2. Self-affirmations to help with low self-worth are actually best addressed to self-worth itself and not the apparent cause of the dip in self-worth (such as a mistake or a bodily feature), which sometimes can be an obsession. So, when for instance, I feel bad about a moral mistake I made in the past, I say something like, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made in the image of God and have inestimable worth” with no reference whatsoever to the particular struggle. If I name any particular good qualities of mine, I make sure they are not related to the cause of low self esteem, and I remind myself that they do not earn my worth but merely point to it. The purpose of this approach is threefold: (1) the real struggle for me often really is about self-worth underneath everything and it “attaches” to smaller things, often insignificant, sometimes significant, (2) to avoid reassurance compulsions, (3) because self-worth should be unflappable and not dependent on contingent qualities. I may make serious moral mistakes in the future, or may lose some of the good qualities I have. Life happens. What I need then, is the agency to be better, which requires a sense that the agent (me) is worth redeeming. Christianity offers a very poignant way of explaining that. 3. The sorts of thoughts that have historically been intrusive thoughts for me can also be compulsions, based in obsessions around obsessions. So I may have some intrusive thought or sense that intrusive thoughts are *about* to appear, and the compulsion would be to think those sorts of thoughts on purpose. I combat this by using my ERP messages against the intrusive thought that I may have intrusive thoughts. I say “maybe I will and maybe I won’t.” When I figured this out, a lot of things feel into place— I had been honing these psychological tools in my exposures, but yet hadn’t yet applied them to this situation. Once I identified that “spidey sense” as OCD, those skills began to pay off. 4. The difference between judgement and rejudgement. To judge is to decide one’s valence towards something once and for all. A judge feels no need to walk back into the courtroom every 10 seconds to reannounce the judgement they already made. The judge does not think that anytime they are not in the courtroom doing so, they are announcing a contrary judgement to that which they already declared. Similarly, judgement is something which normal human beings do, but they normally do it once, and then if they are to change or reaffirm their judgement, it is only after a period of rational doubt. But as OCD sufferers, we often feel the need to “re-judge” in real time. We say “murder is wrong” in response to harm obsessions. But didn’t we already know this? What was the purpose of judging murder again? The answer is that it is a compulsion in response to an obsession. The reminder is meant to keep you from murdering or to suppress the thoughts. And this is an important difference between healthy judgements and compulsive rejudgements. When we have intrusive thoughts, likely, we already know what we think and feel about them, in terms of our set positions on things. Hope these help!