- Date posted
- 9h
Self Discovery of my personal general OCD
I spent most of my life without knowing I had OCD. It certainly was always there in the background, but it wasn’t potent enough to come into my conscious awareness as something that needed correction. I would say I started experiencing severe rumination at 27, and have been fighting it non stop practically every minute of everyday for 18 months to date. It felt as though my reality was in the background, and my obsessive thoughts were in the foreground. The content matter of the thoughts has to do with how others perceive how I look and my overall worth, and figuring out a way to quantify my worthiness. I believe it stemmed from being insanely burnt out after 5 years of non stop work for my own business (in which I actually channeled the OCD in a useful way), but then feeling like my business and family fell apart as a result of it, and existing in the hyper competitive and vapid world of social media. I noticed that once it felt like I solved any one fixation I had my attention on, that the problem with shift immediately. Relevant topics included body, face, overall appearance, masculinity, ethics, purpose, and many others. Most of the time it triggers when I look at other people and I think I must then scan myself and compare where I exist in the social heir-achy based on the person I am looking at. Sometimes I would even look at other pages followers and get triggered. I have been in therapy for over a year, going twice a week. I have seen a psychiatrist, tried many different medications, eventually settling on fluvoxamine which I think has genuinely helped. I am about to see an ERP and CBT specialist this week for the first time, due to my insurance I couldn’t afford it before now and I finally got off the wait list. Good news is after a year and a half of straight torture I am actually much better than I was, the improvement is night and day. I still deal with it here and there but I can definitively say that I will come out tougher after this experience and that’s with me not even being healed yet. Dealing with this has been a nightmare but I willingly chose to confront the underlying thoughts that were running my day to day life, and in turn opened Pandora’s box. Nonetheless I’m proud of myself for choosing the hard thing because I know I am on the path to liberation. I just want to enjoy life again and do good work and I know I’m close. I am grateful to have found a community like this that makes me know I’m not alone. Has anyone else experienced similar thoughts or rumination like I have?