amazingbri17
- Date posted
- 4y
FathomableFathomable
- Date posted
- 4y
That definitely sounds like a form of contamination OCD, and I really suspect a bit of trauma. It reminds me a little bit of one of our members who has been stuck in a loop where she repeatedly makes 'special' pieces of jewelry on a daily basis to represent a fresh start as soon as anything in the day doesn't go perfectly, and has skipped work and walked out on jobs in order to do that compulsion. It seems really stressful. The what if at the beginning of your post sounds like it's the intrusive thought. It tells you that you need to check immediately and repeatedly in case your checking was imperfect or something new in your snaps etc starts to bother you, but once you've finished doing it, it's obvious to you that you don't actually need to get rid of things. It sounds like your brain has learned that doing that makes it feel better. You want to have a safe feeling seperation between yourself and painful or uncomfortable things in your past, as well as reminders of them which are triggering to experience, and a way of giving yourself that safe feeling is to scan your environment and online environment for anything which seems like a symbol or reminder of the past. These things aren't actually dangerous to you, but checking for triggers in order to gain confidence that there aren't any is a habit which has made you feel reassured when your past is bothering you, and I'd guess that you actually find it even MORE satisfying if you do find something you can find an element of emotional threat in, because then when you remove it, the reassuring safe feeling lasts longer, as if you have taken action on something then you feel more in control and you don't quickly start to question your conclusions about there being nothing there. The result being that this loop of intrusive thought-> anxiety -> compulsions usually ends up in finding something to delete or get rid of, and then you feel better for a bit longer than if you didn't find anything? That's just a guess. But yes, this really does seem like OCD. Are you interested in overcoming this habit?
amazingbri17amazingbri17
- Date posted
- 4y
yeah i worry ab it so much bc of someone in my life and i don’t wanna let him down and have something wrong even tho i’m pretty sure everytbing is ok yk? i’m just worried ab that. and i don’t want anything to be wrong n off. n yes i mean it would be great if i could. but sometimes i can brush it off
FathomableFathomable
- Date posted
- 4y
@amazingbri17 Sounds like some "just right" type OCD as well as contamination, with not wanting anything to be off or feel wrong. The fact that sometimes you can brush it off is already fantastic, it shows that you're capable of directing your own attention away from the obsession when you need to, and that you're able to survive some uncomfortable feelings that you get when you do that, and choose to not treat them as an emergency. All you really need to do is more of that :) the more often you can say to yourself "that's unlikely and I'm not going to dive back into it right now- maybe later, ok brain?", the easier it'll get to cope with that feeling of there being a problem you're ignoring, and that feeling 100% will get less and less. I also wonder if you could benefit from doing some active thinking about how you could cope with a situation where your partner saw something in your snaps or discovered one of your possessions which is from the past, maybe your past partner, and they became upset? Like, instead of reacting to your worst case scenario with needing to fix the uncertainty about whether it'll happen, you could build up your confidence that you could handle that outcome- and I'm sure you could! It can help to spend a bit of time thinking it through, but I also don't recommend doing it as a compulsion to relieve anxiety when you want to do checking. I just mean to do a bit of thinking about it in general to see if it makes this fear and the urges feel a bit less urgent and persuasive, which can help you to quit the checking. So what's the worst case scenario, or some of them, and how do you think you could cope with those outcomes? Who would support you about them? What things could you tell your partner? What good things would still be in your life? I think you might find that the thing you're going to some emotionally painful lengths to avoid is simply a situation of slight discomfort and someone else being slightly hurt. But you just *cannot* organise your life around avoiding other people's feelings being hurt, at all costs. People can survive hurt feelings, they wouldn't be your fault for not doing enough to prevent them, and you are suffering much more by doing this OCD loop, than the *maximum possible pain* I could imagine being caused to your partner if they saw a Snapchat of you and your ex or a gift from an ex. You can survive an uncomfortable situation that makes you feel a bit guilty. Those just happen sometimes in life. You would get through it, and so would this person in your life, it may feel like it would be an unrecoverable mistake or imperfection and ruin everything, but relationships are NOT perfect, they will upset you sometimes and you will upset them, the point is to build trust and work at them anyway. It wouldn't be reasonable for someone to expect you to hide or not have a past, or to not have any reminders of it or happy things from it. You wouldn't be letting him down, and those things aren't wrong. It's not your duty to others to control the environment to keep them from feeling any emotional pain at all, it's not feasible.
amazingbri17amazingbri17
- Date posted
- 4y
@Scoggy thank you sm!!
amazingbri17amazingbri17
- Date posted
- 4y
& yes ur guess is correct. but i’m pretty sure everything is ok rn.
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