- Date posted
- 6w
How to avoid mental compulsions
My biggest is ruminating, i talk and talk and over share with myself and others Like what are some exposures?
My biggest is ruminating, i talk and talk and over share with myself and others Like what are some exposures?
Hi! Ive been where both of you were at. My therapist taught me to observe the thought like its a leaf on a stream then let it ride down the river bend. It also helps to respond with: "I have OCD, of COURSE id think something like that" to acknowledge the thought but not actually give it any real power. If the rumination is too strong, id suggest looking into psychiatry for medication for help. Mine were strong too and that was the route I took, but regardless of being on medication or not, those responses are the key to not letting ocd run your life. I wish you the best of luck! Youve got this i know you do!
@Carcharhinus_longimanus Oh my goodness that sounds like an amazing response to thoughts. I’m bookmarking this. I second the medication if it feels too heavy! It took some meds for me to calm my thoughts down (including compulsive ones)
Mine Is texting chat gpt for reassurance😭
@Chronicoverthinker I’ve recently fallen into doing this way too much. Even if it’s just simply wanting to know the answer to something. I need to learn I don’t need to know it all to be okay
Rumination is often out of our control. We can respond to it appropriately, and sometimes we do choose to, but often it just happens and goes away as we deal with the fears.
@HopeForToday I really like your reply. Accepting that it’s out of our control a lot of the time helps with the guilt of not “trying hard enough” to get better because you seem to escape rumination. I needed to see this, thank you for replying to this post.
Rumination is a compulsion. Maybe the initial seconds of refocusing on the problem and trying to figure it out is out of your control (because your mind is going to drift to so many things on its own)…. BUT allowing the rumination to continue and engaging with the problem/fear again is 100% in your control. You can stop your train of thought- acknowledge “I’m ruminating on this. This is OCD trying to get me to pay attention again” and then you actively focus on something else. You’re not trying to avoid the obsession- you’re avoiding “dwelling” on it which is what rumination is. Identifying that I was actually ruminating (a compulsion) instead of just “allowing my thoughts to be there” was the reason my intrusive thoughts kept growing stronger. When thoughts FIRST pop in your mind- they are intrusive…. Anything after that you may entertain or engage with is rumination. If you can identify when you’re ruminating and stop it, your anxiety will be so much less over time
Most of the time you can't even "choose" to not ruminate because that "choosing" is just further ruminating. Of course you can "choose" to not ruminating, it just looks different than what you might think. "Choosing" not to ruminate is actually choosing to do MORE and get involved with life, because the only way "not to ruminate" is to just keep on living and making choices based upon your chosen values.
So, I know my capacity to get fixated on things. And it's normally something that's relatively remote but, my latest issue is really getting to me and I was wondering if people have any advice. I'm avoiding getting too into specifics, as I don't want this to get reassurance-y but, in essence.. I came to the realisation recently that people who I'd been "friends" (feels like the wrong term now) when I was younger were not very nice people, and normalized a lot of very unpleasant behaviour towards other members of the group. They really normalized it, sold themselves as figures of authority, as older and more responsible and grown-up than others, and looking back, they acted horribly. And coming to this realisation, that I'd been manipulated into just accepting their behaviour has just... broken me. My OCD has latched onto it and I can't stop feeling irreversibly tainted by it. I've talked to others about it, and they've reassured me, told me it's not a big deal and that I hold myself to too high a standard, but none of that sticks. I feel better for a bit, then think 'Maybe when you told them you were skewing it to make yourself look better' or 'Did you leave out a crucial detail'. I keep ruminating over and over, trying to remember exactly how everything played out, trying to figure out if I fed into the behaviour, if I did something bad myself (because y'know, I feel like I was accepting of it at the time, so what does it say about my own values?). I know I need to stop doing all this if I want to improve, but then some part of me keeps saying 'So, you're just going to let yourself off the hook then?' Normally, I can rationalize my own fears to some degree, assure myself something won't happen, but the realness of the situation, and the fact I only came to understand the reality of it because the thought had been bothering me means it feels so much more all-encompassing. I know confessing in itself is a compulsion, but I keep feeling that if I'm not I'm somehow concealing what I 'really am' from others around me, and any positive interactions are me deceiving them in some way. I feel like I can't enjoy anything in life right now, and a good part of me feels I should not enjoy it ever again. If anybody has any advice on it, I'm all ears. Or even hearing if you relate to these feelings, I might appreciate the solidarity at least.
I have pure ocd i think , i always gotta make sure i do certain things like tap things , light switches on n off , shut things few times and re open them till it feels right . Walk in a room go back out and back in out in in till my mind is right Its exhausting
So hard to not engage the thoughts because even though it's from the "past" (i don't even know if im remembering things correctly and it kills me) and i can't change it, I just NEED to prove it to myself that it didn't happen this way. If you'd asked me questions maybe a few months ago, I would have been able to lucidly explain things. Now I just feel like I'm in a constant swarm of thoughts, not knowing if anything is real. If my brain is to be trusted. Wish I could just get hypnosis to forget
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