- Date posted
- 1y ago
accept uncertainty
how do you accept uncertainty I find it impossible and so distressing? It’s ruining my life😔
how do you accept uncertainty I find it impossible and so distressing? It’s ruining my life😔
I have found it tremendously helpful to actively try to challenge some of my black-and-white thinking on my themes. I have found that I can’t really “live with the uncertainty” if that means trying to straddle an extremely sharp good-vs-evil or hell-vs-heaven line. That simply doesn’t work. You must try to soften that line, learn and think more deeply about your fears, and try to identify grey areas where you can perhaps find some peace when required. Check out OCD Recovery videos on youtube for helpful advice on this. By the way this is not at all an exercise in abandoning your values or moral judgement, it’s more about trying to see things more clearly, calmly, compassionately.
If it helps, as a starting point, here are some irrational beliefs you might find helpful to try to challenge: - I am my thoughts - This thought/ urge/ bodily reaction means I want this - OCD is not the reason I am obsessing about this - If people knew, they would totally reject me - If people rejected me, my life would be over - Etc. Etc. Etc. If you’re anything like me, you probably have a whole range of these waiting for you back there! I hope this helps!!
I’m really struggling with this too. Something that has been helping me is Matthew Marshal on YouTube. He has some shorts about his ocd that relate to accepting uncertainty. I’ve yet to achieve acceptance for the uncertainty but really striving to hopefully one day be there
I struggle with false memory ocd and accepting uncertainty makes me feel sick
My last and almost life long theme/sub-theme largely subsided recently and my ocd felt like it wasn’t even an issue. Then I went on winter break from uni and being alone made my mind come up with a whole new topic to obsess over. TLDR on my fears, my advisor wouldn’t email me back for a while about signing up for classes so my mind started to worry “what if he doesn’t in time and you can’t enroll this semester and you lose this whole life you just built and all these new friends” So when that issue was resolved my mind found other scarier ways I could be uprooted from my current life and friends that I’ve grown so attached to. Then my mind remembered back when I was struggling with false memories and scrupulosity and I essentially made a post on a forum 2 and a half years ago saying I did something or was convinced I did something that I never actually did. Now I’ve been spiraling about someone finding it reporting me and I either get seen as a horrible person or arrested or something over something I never actually did but “admitted” to out of fear of going to hell. My mind won’t let it go and keeps finding new reasons for it to be “valid” “logical” or even inevitable. I feel like it’s just hanging over my head and I can never rest easy. Especially when I try to focus on my daily tasks or plan for the future I get this horrible flair up of “why plan for the future when this could come back in that future and you get uprooted from all of it” my mind won’t rest without certainty being uprooted won’t happen but certainty doesn’t exist, at least not with ocd. This sucks and I miss being care free.
Here is what I say to people: I wish I could make it stop. I really do. I also wish I could stop tinnitus. What is tinnitus, you may ask? Well, have you ever gone to a loud concert and after it had a ringing in your ears. Or, in movies when a loud explosion hears, first it is often muffled, and then there is a very loud ringing sound. Well, I have hear that sound for over 30 years. Turns out the medications I took as a kid for allergies and all the antibiotics I was on for Strep had a side effect for some people - tinnitus - that sound that I have heard every decade, year, month, day, hour, and second, for the past 30 years. I have learned to live with it. As I type this, it is REALLY loud, because I am paying attention to it. But, in a few minutes it will fade into the background, and, while I will hear it, I will not pay much attention to it, and therefore I will go on with my night. I will listen to music, practice my story for the MOTH radio hour, and work out. I will clean up the kitchen and load the dishwasher, and I will eventually get ready for bed. I will go to bed hearing that sound, and fall asleep for a few hours until tomorrow morning when I start the day all over again. I cannot make the sound stop. There is nothing to do for it - no surgery or medication. Just learning to live with it, and that is what I have done. It is the thing that I hate the most in my life, and, if granted three wishes, it would be the first thing to change. For now, as I have for 30 years, I will live with it, and I will ask you to live with your noises in your head - the thoughts, the images, and the urges, and we will practice together accepting that things are not always as we want them, but we can handle that. We got this.
I need tips on how to really accept the uncertainty the ocd causes, even if it feels so bad like I might get in trouble for something , do I wanna be okay with that?
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