Does anyone else ever feel like you have to have a mindset for everything? You could label it as a controlling behavior. If I’m in conversation the whole time I’ll have to have one thing that my mind is focused on weather it’s (the image of Jesus) (listening to the other person) (connection with the other person) (God loves me- Saying this constantly in my head) (Being fun) (Giving) Also while I’m by myself it’s like I have to have a goal that I’m heading towards or else more intrusive thoughts are going to come in. It’s like my mind does not want to improvise/ go with the flow of life but to have a sincere direction that I’m going to all of the time.

I’ll be praying for you Katrina. Let’s try to come up with solutions. What’s the most predominant thought?

I think about what Jesus looked like and what the resurrection looked like

I was just talking about something similar. I feel like my brain is never quiet and its never just casually thinking about this or that. I feel like I'm always repeating something in my head, or reassuring myself, or doing compulsions over and over all day. So I feel you.

If you’re comfortable with saying. Yeah

Hmmmm. I tell myself Everything’s ok too and just try to think of the image of Jesus I’m even doing it right now and am trying to stop.

Well, I get why you see it as controlling because you're aware that it's pretty rigid, and is an attempt to feel in control. It's normal to want to feel in control, we just have to focus that onto the things we *can* control, like our behaviour and choices and how we treat others. Keeping an image or phrase repeating in your head certainly sounds like OCD. I wonder what happens when you try to not do this and just go along with the conversation? Often OCD tells us "something bad is going to happen"- we get hung up on trying to work out what that is, or trying to prevent things we fear, a lot of the time it's just uncertainty in general that we are trying to avoid having to feel. Your type of magical thinking/just-right OCD is really similar to touching or counting things the 'right' way, symmetry OCD, etc. The thing of staying focused on what your goals are for the day/what you're doing/planning on doing sounds like a compulsion you're using to deal with the uncertainty of the fact that life is full of surprises (good and bad), changes of plan, hitches, unforseen circumstances in general. The absolute best way I've been able to get on top of all the uncertainty at the bottom of my OCD has been changing my focus away from avoiding feeling uncertain, to facing it without my compulsive safety blankets via building up my own confidence in my ability to deal with unknowns in life. I "go there" thinking about my worst case scenarios and instead of thinking "how can I avoid/prevent/feel less insecure about that?", I go "okay, what would I do then?". How would I adapt? How can I be resilient and flexible so that I don't snap? If a conversation (where you were focused on the conversation instead of an image or phrase) sparked an intrusive thought for you, how would you cope? Flexibility is being able to say to yourself "I'll deal with that later" and come back to the conversation. Even the worst case scenario of you becoming more anxious and the conversation not going well, wouldn't be the end of the world. You could adapt. You could say the same thing to yourself if you had intrusive thoughts while going about your day- you could acknowledge they started, and commit to put them aside for now and continue what you were doing. OCD is literally a feedback looped caused by trying to avoid intrusive thoughts and the feelings which go with them, instead of letting them happen and letting them go away again- so your hypervigilance is actually making things worse rather than helping. The more you try to prevent getting intrusive thoughts, the more they happen. If you let them happen but refuse to get sucked into overthinking about/analysing them/memory checking/self reassurance, your brain absolutely will learn that they're not important and stop sending you the thoughts in the first place.

All the time

Damn. Same here. I know that’s good for me to have faith and rely on Jesus but at some points it feels like I’m doing it out of an unhealthy way