I found the cause why my anxiety or OCD keeps coming back. Took ages to understand it. When I am in recovery, first I usually accept I have the anxiety and these thoughts, images and urges as a whole, and LET them all be, ALLOW them there to be without any judgement (e.g. saying that "okay, anxiety, come to me, be with me and let's do things together). But THEN, when I start thinking about anxiety to be there, an old habitual way of thinking (that I actually do not want anxiety, I hate anxiety) kicks in and that brings it back! I realized, that the most important thing is to really DO things WITH anxiety, and without any suppressing thought or feeling. Just to let them be as they are. In my experience OCD sneaked in because of having so tiny, almost invisible thought of not wanting anxiety... And now what to do - not to become frustrated again because OCD came back :)

Teachercreature

Date posted: 5y

This rings so true for me. Thank you! I think the root of my OCD is that my parents had zero tolerance for anxiety that didn’t have a “good reason.” I was expected to rationalize my way out of everything and keep it together all the time, so I developed all kinds of covert rituals (because I got in trouble for anything that was noticeably weird—hello pure O!). I vowed I would never let my son feel alone with his worries like I did, so when he started showing anxiety symptoms, I taught him breathing and mindfulness, developed a scale to rate his worries, he gave his anxiety a name (Bludger), and we fought it hard together. Guess what? He now has rituals to keep anxiety at bay, because I went too far in teaching him to control it! I sent the message that anxiety is bad and not normal, just like my parents did! Gah! So now we are BOTH working on acceptance.

tttamme

Date posted: 5y

What I have read, is that anxiety is a feeling that derives from a thought or image in one's brain that one has labeled (through a negative experience) dangerous or bad, and as brain gets the impulse that it is dangerous, it sends out a chemical component, called histamine which stops our digestive system (that's why we have this intolerable "butterfly feeling" in stomach) to be in the Fight or Flight Mode against the danger. But we give this anxiety feeling in our body a very negative meaning. E.g. "I shouldn't have this feeling because everything is actually okay", "Why can't I get rid of this feeling?" These meanings we give to the feeling are the same negative, fear-based thoughts that feed the same anxiety cycle. And also this "thinking out of anxiety" is also considered to be fighting against it. Anxiety is just a feeling and when we detach the meaning from it, it goes away on its own. That's what I read from the book "Panic attacks" or something like that from a German author Klaus Bernhardt.

? ilshid

Date posted: 5y

@tttamme That's tremendously helpful, thank you

tttamme

Date posted: 5y

Right! It is interesting to see that people want to get rid of anxiety and the very logical way to vanish it, is to fight against it. We think we can make it disappear by putting so much effort into not being with it. I still feel that my habitual pathways in my brain are so strong to fight against it and sometimes it is still hard not to go down that pathway but the only solution is to deliberately BE in the anxiety and not push it away. It still sounds counterintuitive to me, but I am still grateful for having it. Otherwise I wouldn't have known how the brain works

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