- Date posted
- 16w
Meta ocd bait and switch prayers
TW Religious ocd So I just did a bad prayer. Probably should not be posting this, cause I probably didn’t have much of a choice but I’ll explain. Meta ocd has made my obsession much more complicated. Essentially, one feature of it was praying for things I normally wouldn’t but wanted, to prove I could choose my prayers. So I may pray for cake to pop in front of me or something like that that I normally wouldn’t. Or I would be running on the trail, see a fox, and pray for it to attack me. All of these prayers I meant, BUT there was also a stimulus of “prove you can choose what you pray for.” Essentially I did not come up with them on my own. Unfortunately, meta OCD used this against me. The main reason I wanted a fox to attack me was I wanted to die. But if you think about it, a fox attacking me isn’t something that’s really pleasant. In fact, it would be one of the least desirable ways to die and while I wanted to die, I didn’t REALLY want that, even if that was the prayer. So now my mind starts thinking of other creative things that could get me to die that affect other people. Those include World War 3 or anything else that would affect other people. My mind even came up with offensive things that could happen. Like it could say if I were afraid of making an offensive prayer, that a bomb magically takes out both me and a specific group of people. The end result is still the same: I would still die. During this bait and switch prayer, my mind will start off with me thinking “I really want to die” (which is true), so then I’ll think “ok please let x happen to me.” My brain might even choose something I wouldn’t really want (like the example it chose today was to get swarmed by bees) to prep me for something I really wouldn’t want. I’ll mean it, cause I want to die, but then it doesn’t really matter what the next thing is. That is what my mind will go to. I’ll do that, and mean it. And then after that’s all done, I don’t have a desire to do ANY prayers to die, however the desire was strong throughout the whole thing (that was caused ultimately by an ocd prayers obsession but it doesn’t really matter in the moment). At the end, I’ve prayed for something horrible (though my real desire was to die) and meant it, but then the anxiety over it is gone and I’m not thinking about prayers like that again. And it is all based on what my brain decides it is going to pick. If I don’t do the prayer and resist it, the odd does not go away. It will focus on the fact I did prayers like this in the past and I won’t be able to stop thinking about it, which will bombard me with other “escape” prayers my brain has hand picked beforehand. There is no easy way to end the cycle. Something I could do is allow myself to actually pray for every bad thing I want and it’ll eventually go away, however, it’ll mean I prayed for the things. I’ve actually started doing this, which possibly is partly why I did the bad prayers. Doing that completely removes any ambiguity. The issue is, I know I wouldn’t normally do ANY of these prayers without an ocd prompt. Once I know it doesn’t matter and I could still mean them, my brain starts getting extremely creative