sometimes i ruminate without realizing i'm even ruminating until it's too late and the thoughts have already taken hold of me. how do i fix this? i feel like i have become my disorder. i'm so lost
Rumination is a tricky compulsion! I do it a lot too and it can be hard to catch for sure! I have found kind of a mindfulness approach to be helpful here. Practice noticing it and redirecting, even if you don't notice it right away. You won't be perfect but it's not all-or-nothing. Each time you stop yourself, wherever in the process you are, and redirect to a maybe maybe not type of response, the better you will get at noticing and redirecting. It takes time, but over time it gets better!
I am sorry that you're going through this. Rumination truly is a very difficult thing, the first step is recognizing that your doing it (so excellent work there) and the next is changing your response- think of it like this, the rumination serves a purpose for you, you likely engage in it to reduce your anxiety and distress, but it is just like a physical compulsion, it only serves to strengthen the obsession in OCD.https://www.treatmyocd.com/blog/the-rumination-trap
Hi! I'm new to the community and wondering what rumination looks like in terms of OCD?
I hear you, and I especially resonate with that feeling of the rumination being automatic, like the thoughts take hold and then you’re on a runaway train. Something that has helped me is to remember that the goal is not to make the thoughts/obsessions go away. It’s to respond differently to them. When we ruminate we are responding to the obsessive thoughts with effort. That might look like checking, reviewing, looking for evidence that the thoughts are true or not, trying to “figure out” something with certainty. It sounds simple but the only way out is to choose not to do those things, little by little. Not by pushing the thoughts away, but by accepting that they are there and not giving them more power by engaging with the content of them. Something that has helped me a ton with rumination are Non-Engagement Responses. Here’s an article with some examples of these and how to use them: https://iocdf.org/expert-opinions/how-do-i-stop-thinking-about-this-what-to-do-when-youre-stuck-playing-mental-ping-pong/ Every time you interrupt the rumination cycle with these non-engagement responses, you are responding differently to the thoughts. And in the long term, by practicing accepting uncertainty it should start to feel less automatic.
I cannot for the life of me stop ruminating or checking how I feel about thoughts or focusing on thoughts or creating more thoughts. I feel like I’m losing my mind. I want to scream. I try not to ruminate about the thoughts, but trying not to just makes me think about them more. I try not to check, but somehow, I still check. I want to let a thought sit in the background, but the more I try not to focus on it, the more I end up focusing on it. I don’t want the thought to expand because that feels like engaging with it, but I can’t just stop it from expanding. It feels impossible. People keep saying I’m in control of my compulsions, and maybe that’s true for the physical ones. But when it comes to the mental compulsions, I swear I have no control. It feels like I’m missing something that everyone else seems to have, like there’s some tool they’re using that I don’t have. Controlling mental compulsions has never felt possible for me. I’m starting to fear them. And every time someone says I’m in control and can just choose not to do them, I end up beating myself up even more when they happen. Or when I *choose* I guess. I don’t know anymore. If this is my fault, if I’m responsible for this, then what does that make me? I feel like a monster. I am at my wits’ end. How am I supposed to control mental compulsions when it feels like they control me? I freak out when they happen. They don’t bring me relief, they just make me panic. I want it to stop so bad.
It is not the thoughts or urges that scare me anymore. It is the way I feel like I’ve absorbed the compulsions into my identity :( I am doing them so automatically that it feels like I am choosing them freely and they’re me. and because of that, it feels like I AM the OCD now, not just someone with OCD. I think I’m just deeply trapped in a loop. I was trying to survive unbearable fear so I started scanning. Then I started pre-scanning. Then checking if I pre-scanned. Then I check how I feel during all that. I run to beat my OCD to the “punchline” (intrusive thought, urge, sensation) because I’m so scared all the time. So scared that I don’t even feel it anymore. I feel numb and all that’s left is this jittery residue and numbness. Now it’s all tangled together in a huge knot. I feel so extremely lost. I think this may just be meta OCD, but I’ve never ever felt so gone before :( I’m really scared.
I ruminated too much this morning and got distressing mental images (and confirmation) which sent me spiraling again. How do I stop thinking about this and how do I get back to myself? I feel destroyed.
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