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.
Two things are happening: I get thoughts that just keep looping. They almost feel like song stuck in my head. Also, I’ll imagine something and I feel my stomach drop. Then as the seconds go by I keep getting fragments of the this thought but with different details. For example, it’s kinda like how a “vision” is portrayed. I’ll get a glimpse of the thought and then it’ll rapidly expand into something worse every few seconds. I don’t know if I’m causing this or if it’s just an automatic thing like any other intrusive thought. It feels unavoidable, idk if this is a compulsion or if it’s just another manifestation of an intrusive thought. Apart from that remembering an intrusive thought triggers the full thought again and then it just keeps looping or expanding. I don’t know how to stop any of this. Help?
I don’t know how to deal with the thoughts that come and barely gone. Usually, the brain often remembers and forgets things. People with OCD however struggle with trying to forget the intrusive thoughts because of the imbalance trying to convey what is real and if the thoughts in your head will come true. Just for the past few days, I was having fun and suddenly hit with a wave of obsessive thoughts and making me stuck with nowhere to go.
i’ve been dealing with this “thing” since i was 15. (i’m 23 now) if i have a bad memory that i have done when i was really young or just an intrusive thought i feel like i need to tell my mom or boyfriend. it’s been on and off ever since but since January hit it’s been an everyday thing about the littlest things. mostly about my relationship. an example is i was talking to someone random at my job and we were talking about taxes and when im in deep thought or just thinking i do a thing where i bite my lip (not in the sexual way) and i had a thought when it happened “was that sexual?” and i felt like i did something wrong and i went for a while thinking that until i told my boyfriend about it. or like my ex’s face has popped up in my head in the most inappropriate times and i feel the need that i have to tell him. (my ex was not a good person) i feel like im a prisoner in my head everyday, trying to justify thoughts or remind myself that its just a thought. i didnt know that this was or could be a form of ocd. it runs in my family but i’ve just never considered it being this. i always called it anxiety or depression but i always felt like it is more than that.
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