- Date posted
- 1y
Struggling
I'm struggling so badly with not closing my eyes for fear I see someone's privates!
I'm struggling so badly with not closing my eyes for fear I see someone's privates!
Nathan Peterson has a whole online course that I think would help everyone here. Here’s a link, one second
I’ve learned with this type of thing in therapy that you have to accept the thought. The longer you tell yourself stop thinking that or label it weird it’s gonna come up more. Just say that’s an interesting thought. Doesn’t mean anything. Thoughts are thoughts. We have so many a day. We as people with OCD tend to get stuck to certain thoughts. Try leaves on a stream technique it helps me. If it gets in the way of things maybe even exposures with a therapist that can help you envision these thoughts and eventually be able to have them and move on. Because you can’t prevent thinking or seeing something. The way the brain just works you just hear it/see it even more:/ hang in there and don’t be hard on yourself
Don’t close your eyes!!! This is a compulsion. The OCD wants you to close your eyes because it wants us to do socially awkward stuff and make us miserable. OCD is a bully. The only way to defeat it is to IGNORE it. Let OCD throw all the thoughts at you that it wants. Let it say, “Oh, you are a bad person, you saw someone’s privates. You are a monster because you looked!!” Your response should be, “Hmmm, that’s nice. Maybe I am a monster. Maybe I’m not. Oh well. Whatever.” Then you REFUSE to do the compulsion. This means you refuse to shut your eyes. This is what it means to practice exposure therapy: You expose yourself to the trigger (which is a person whose privates your OCD wants to scare you about). And then you refuse to do the compulsion (shut your eyes). You are going to train your brain that it can throw terrible thoughts at you all day, and you just don’t care. (That’s why you can respond with “Maybe I am a bad person, maybe not. I don’t know, whatever.”) Nathan Peterson does an awesome job talking about this. I’ll put a link below.
The more you practice responding to the thoughts with a non-caring response, the more your brain learns that it can’t bother you. Treat the OCD thoughts like a little brother who is pestering you, but will leave you alone if you don’t validate his behavior. Tell the thoughts things like this: “Hmmmm, whatever you say, my thoughts. You are welcome to yell at me all day. Glad you are here today, evil thoughts. Boy, I am glad my OCD showed up today.”
Watch this:):) https://youtu.be/KfN80nk0V6Q?si=7GqmtmUaJXSe9Zux
Thanks so much!! This is a great idea!!
@Crawfish We can take away the power of the bully of OCD when we just don’t care what he is telling us. :):):)
I'm keeping it light hearted but I really desperately need some help. Just to preface this is very tmi. I thought it was just gonna be a quick bathroom stuff. No! That would be silly of course, so number two decided to screw things up ROYALLY. And please bear with me because I am coping with humour 😭😭. So I went, but sometimes, tmi, I struggle to.... Get it all. Out. If you know what I mean. Which is pretty awful to the point I'm like genuinely praying. Because you can't clean up properly if you're not done. So I'm in the bathroom, trying, for over half an hour. And I finally give up pretty much and try and clean up. Oh no, that was a huge mistake. But what else could I do? It was so messy that I wanted to just get in the shower and be done with it. Onto the things I'm worrying about I guess. On the tp (tmi, I'm WARNING 😭😭) it was.... Messy, and there were very loose specks on the tp. Which is an issue, because I used wet wipes which needs to be binned and not flushed, so I have to carry the tp-wipe combo over to the bin, which means carrying it over where my legs are, and thus where my clothes also are. I hate it. I'm now paranoid specks fell into my underwear! Great! Love it. I'm also paranoid specks or just #2 in general went on my hand. And, believe me, with the state of things, it was POSSIBLE. So when I'm finally done and wash my hands, of course that isn't going to feel like enough. I have really short nails, so short they're painful, and I'm always terrified stuff gets under them. So, I use a nail brush while washing my hands. I also filed them down (which HURT) because I'm convinced that could get rid of anything underneath them. But it still doesn't feel enough. Because I have loose skin and hangnails around my nails, and I'm paranoid as well that stuff gets under dry skin. Not to mention my hands are so dry from washing that they're cracked and flaky and they peel, so I am worried that #2 or dirt gets under the flakes of skin. I know it sounds stupid, but I am so scared. Usually it feels irrational but it was such a state that I'm convinced there must be a speck of it on me somewhere. On my hands. And I'm terrified. I know I need to accept uncertainty but I'm struggling right now.
I was trying to sleep in an aunt house and I’m suffering from nightmares or when I take naps or sleep I dream horrible things, and I took a little nap and I was about to start having a nightmare and I woke up. There’s a person that lives here and he’s not even here but I was about to have a dream with him it’s so scary he’s not even my family member or anything. And like it’s a delicate topic. But it’s the feeling that I can’t even sleep sometimes without dreaming this things that are so scary . And the groinal responses are about to kill me ! This is truly destroying my life I don’t know what to do I don’t want to be like this but I’m too tired to stay awake and too tired to sleep
today's exposure exercise. I look at the face of a person I have sexual thoughts about and I feel that as soon as I can connect that face with sex I am attracted to it, and I feel like I can touch my self on sexual way while looking at that face, and I can imagine it and get it as an urge..it seems like I am stopping myself because it is horrible, not that I don't want to... I get stuck a lot with this and I don't know how to get out...I can't...
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