Hi, I was wondering if anyone experiencing this symptom. When anxiety kicks in from OCD thoughts and it’s strong, I sometimes feel actual pain in my head and I start to be over sensitive to sounds. At that point any kind of conversation or sound I feel it like a knife through my head, and my thoughts that time is like attacking these sounds or the person that starts the conservation with me. The more my love ones try to relax me the more my head reacts during the episode. At that time I feel like my head is going to explode and sometimes I get very frustrated and angry. The only thing that helps me that time, is time alone, just to breath, relax and try to get away from the thoughts, to put my attention somewhere else, and slowly slowly fades away. The moment I relax little I feel this noise in my ears and the pressure in my head and after a strong headache kicks in. The reason I ask this is because during this time I react toward the people I love and after the episode passes I feel sad and mad at my self for reacting that way. And I am trying to understand why I react this way...

It sounds like at some point you switch from being distressed about the obsession to being distressed about the distress

Thanks @Katie, it makes senses what you say. Sometimes is very difficult to realize what is happening to you especially when you are in that state of elevated anxiety. Recently I have a lot of psychosomatic symptoms that I am struggling to understand, and it seems the more I turn inside and try to label and understand the symptom the more anxiety I have. I try to just see it as a symptom but I always have this urge to try to understand it, to figure it out, to doubt that it is OCD and to start to fear that I have something else and again I start to get more scare.

I am currently on CBT therapy for the first time of my life, and it’s not so easy, sometimes I feel that I am getting worse beacause I try to work on it, and the more I try to work on it the more I feel, I trigger it and I feed it. I have this assignment from my CBT therapist and I really wanted to ask you here, if I am doing something wrong until at least Friday when I have my next session. I need to write down the situation that trigger me, to categorize the thought that scare me, the emotion that I felt and also to try to challenge my thought with a more logical one. The problem is that the moment I turn inside and try to see what is happening to me and challenge my thoughts, the more I think I am scared and the more I feed it. It’s like I am not able to challenge any of thoughts yet, my self esteem and my inner voice is so low that it cannot fight the voice of OCD. I don’t have any believe in myself anymore, I feel like I am only OCD inside, and I cannot find myself inside me. So the moment I turn inside the more hook I am by these train of thoughts and the more anxiety attacks I suffer. What I usually did all the years with my OCD whas to just continue my life normally, focus in the outside world, try to do a a lot of activities and sports that brought it me in the now, and accept my fear and thoughts without giving them attention. This was how I passed my previous OCD themes. I exposed my self to the trigger and stay there, without turning inside and engaging in my thoughts. It wasn’t easy and at the beginning I was able to stay there for 5 minutes or so, but slowly slowly, I was able to stay more and more and without realizing the fear and the thoughts fade away and because I was so bother with what happening in my life outside I didn’t gave so much attention to OCD.

This I how I feel also, because I think this task more that I can handle for now, maybe in a few months I will be more able to do it and to be more effective because now I feel that it’s makes me worse than better. Thanks a lot for all the support.