- Date posted
- 1y
Moral scrupulosity
I don’t understand the concept of using Maybe or maybe not. When having very taboo thoughts. Like I feel it makes my ocd worse. Can someone explain?
I don’t understand the concept of using Maybe or maybe not. When having very taboo thoughts. Like I feel it makes my ocd worse. Can someone explain?
You live “maybe, maybe not” and not necessarily say it because that can become a compulsion. The more you interact and react to your OCD, the more it acts up because you are signaling to the brain that what it is showing you is in fact, dangerous, and will continually show more of it as a dangerous response. The same goes for avoidance: the more you avoid something the more you are reinforcing the brain to fear that thing, place, or person. That is why you need to face your fears and your OCD to overcome them.
@Nica Hi Nica - I’m your experience, how would you apply this theory to SOOCD. So if the thought is “I feel like I’m gay” and that’s the obsession. How does this work when it comes to the brain protecting me? Or how does it work to show me it’s dangerous? I’m very stuck.
@gp OCD latches on things you care about or that go against your morals so you have to take that into consideration. I suggest working with a specialist because OCD is complex alongside your background and personality and life experiences, but they’ll get to know you and then help you way more with specifics. But you’re just letting the thoughts and feelings be present without fighting or judging them and that’s how you lessen OCD symptoms.
@Nica Thanks Nica, makes sense. I have a therapy session on Monday. My question to her will be how do I accept the thoughts and feelings as intrusive when they feel real/true? It seems as though once I can acknowledge them as intrusions rather than fact/truth, then I will be able to create that space and get on with my day. I seem to get sucked into believing they are true, and then find it too hard to carry on with my day allowing them to be there. Does that make sense?
@gp That will be discussed in therapy but definitely something to bring up and be honest with. I had to do this with POCD and it wasn’t accepting I was a monster, it was just letting the intrusive thoughts be there without fighting them.
@Nica How on earth did you go about accepting the thoughts despite how real and true they felt to you? Like I get people say “deep down you know” but I find I can’t lean on that. I’m so confused and get smashed by how true the feelings are? How did you overcome that?
@gp Because I know it’s OCD and I was suicidal and hit rock bottom after many miserable years of my life. I was angry at everyone and at myself. I hated life. I hated everything in existence. So, do I keep doing what I was doing—which sucked and did nothing for me—or trust my therapist and the process? I trusted my therapist and the various therapies I went through and still do 100% trust my therapist. I’ve now been recovered from all my mental illnesses or 4 years now.
@Nica Makes sense to me. Congrats. I know you have responded to me many times and others. I want and need to just trust my therapist who tells me this is ocd. And tells me I have to accept the thoughts and do ERP. I get these periods of feeling like I can do it, then it comes crashing down when it feels so real and true. Almost like I feel as if I know the thoughts are true but don’t want them.
@gp The moment you let go of the need to control your thoughts, then it will all be easier.
You dont need to accept the thought or agree with it, you just need to accept that your brain had an intrusive thought
Like I saw a therapist online saying to use that and I he said that starves the ocd because it hates uncertainty. But I get taboos thoughts about racism and sometimes I get the thought “I’m a racist” and I was thinking how can incorporate the maybe and maybe not if we know that intrusive thoughts go against our values it’s like by using that I’m agreeing to the thought and that makes my ocd worse.
@Melody 25 You realize that it’s an intrusive thought and you don’t interact with it. Go about your day.
This is really complicated but it isn’t just intrusive thoughts, however I didn’t directly do the prayer. I’ll do my best to explain. I’ve been having an obsession over prayers. There have been a few bad prayers I’ve almost done and meant that are not good. A week and a half ago, I was feeling desperate and I had the genuine urge to pray for my parents to die in a way which somehow wasn’t my fault (I couldn’t be morally responsible for the prayer was another condition too), because if I attempted suicide, it would devastate them. Thankfully, I stopped myself, but that mindset stuck. If I was worried about it, it could actually put me back in that mindset where I wanted to pray for it. I know this sounds crazy. So it followed me around sometimes. OCD has found loopholes to actually doing the prayer. I have prayed to pray for certain things, meaning I am indirectly praying for it. This was sort of like that, except my mind designated that blinking while thinking of it a certain way would be a prayer. To me, this actually meant it was a prayer because of magical thinking. I ended up blinking while thinking of this, and I did regret it right after, but in that moment, I meant it. I essentially blinked during that moment to magically agree with and do the prayer. And to me, it was doing the prayer. I meant it while doing this too, but didn’t care afterwards. To me, stepping back, it does feel different than directly doing the prayer. This probably doesn’t make much sense
I can be way too hard on myself and beat myself up over the smallest slip up in regards to OCD. Sometimes it can feel like I'm gaslighting myself on what was "so blatantly and obviously a moral atrocity in thought and intent", when 95% of the time I'm not even sure what my own intent with dealing with these thoughts is or why I do what I do. It makes me feel like some shameless beast for "daring to even entertain the thought of something so VILE!!!" When I just get so confused and scared on moral issues, like my mind is pulled down a rabbit hole I can't escape until the tricks are done on me and it's too late, i've accepted such ideas I hate until that hate and trying to not give in convince me "it might not be that bad". It feels like anything, even the most mundane things can trigger this. This cycle happens mainly because I feel like there's "no way to escape committing more 'attrocities' in thought or compulsion anyway"...and these cycles become the basis for more of these incidents. there a way to stop this? There have been multiple times where I called myself the R word, and even knowing it's a slur I still called myself that because "I'm nothing if not deserving of such scorn". Any attempt to stop the madness makes it worse and it's like all this I talked about is so convincing I dare not question it until after the fact. Please help.
Been having blasphemous intrusive thoughts about God. Then sometimes I’m really struggling and I feel resentful, sometimes even towards God, which I know is not right, I want to have reverence. But it feels like sometimes I think the blasphemous thoughts on purpose because of my anger. I don’t know if this is an OCD issue or an issue of my heart or both. But yeah I don’t know what to do.
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