A little OCD poke…

…and no, that doesn’t mean some sex action whilst cleaning my hands for 2 hours.

Not been a bad week until this afternoon. Last week’s spell appeared to hit the ‘reset’ switch finally and, combined with some much needed good sleep, have felt ok and quite active.

Thing is, I don’t realise how much my mental state affects the little things until I’m not in a spell. You become inordinately proud of small things like having a wash, cleaning teeth, going for a walk and other stuff that is meant to be a basic. It’s just that, when I’m IN a spell, all such things seem just way too much mental effort, even oddly daunting. That’s a characteistic shared with depression I know, but funnily depression is not something I tend to suffer from too much. Am pissed off because of my disorder but not depressed as a seperate issue from it.

Anyway, today’s mini-attack was out of the blue. Just led on the sofa listening to a podcast and some idle line just set me off into remembering something from around 8 years ago when I was at my lowest and in the midst of my pornography addiction (itself an obsessive thing borne of testing re: my homosexual ocd and of the ridiculous amount of stress I was suffering – that became the outlet and ultimately not a healthy one in such amounts). Remembered something dodgy I’d seen, how I near blanked it out at the time and ignored it and how much just the concept of even seeing it now is upsetting and alien to me.

Wasn’t fun. My technique of trying to defuse that is probably contrary to what you’re meant to do but the more I’ve lived with pure-o the more I realise you flex them to keep yourself sane. For me, I had to lie down quietly and mentally search for a ‘rope’. Can cope with no other input at that point. Much as you know it’s just an ocd attack and when it wears off you’ll think normally again, for me I have to compromise. I have to find something I can grip onto to guide me back, concentrate enough to find the thread of sane explanation for such upsetting shit that’s there when I’m thinking and remembering clearly. Once I can find that, I can pull back from the place I am at that second, not engage and let it burn itself out.

Is that how you SHOULD do it? No, at least not how some psychs tell you to. My reply? Try suffering from it because, when you do have a spell, you’re right back there mentally. You feel every emotion, every bit of mental distress, panic and confusion as the person you are normally (and now) suddenly conflicts with the place you were then. Basically you have to indulge the compulsive thinking element of it and desperately try and concentrate/focus enough to drown out the shit and remember the truth and hope you haven’t stretched yourself too far mentally while doing so. If you do, a spell is liable to fully trigger immediately. Mind you, if I don’t do that at all then that’s gonna happen regardless.

Thankfully I found the truth – I really was so damn desensitized at the time that I was barely paying attention to what i was downloading/glimpsing for a second or two before moving to the next thing and the upsetting stuff just got numbed out in my search for ok stuff to help relieve my tension (ironically it was just making things worse). Once I started to become aware of what was happening it scared the hell out of me – made me suddenly take notice of things and go way too far the other way in being hugely oversensitive and ultra-edgy about anything that even vaguely reminded me of anything even 1% dubious, which itself then just fed my ocd in a different way.

Took me the best part of an hour + to remember that though.

*sighs* Not gonna lie, even recounting it now disgusts and upsets me. Ok, I understand how the behaviour happened as a facet of my disorder, I understand the fact that even a hint of anything vaguely dubious now is kinda proof that it isn’t anything for/in me (tbh more of a problem that I over-react now) and understand that, at the time, I was so desensitized that I was just seeing (to be crude) t*ts & b*sh and nothing else for a second before moving onto the next image – and that the moment I realised that and stepped back to look for more than a second, I was appalled.

Feel I better clarify this (have discussed this on here in the past but worth doing so again). We’re not talking kids/PTs. The fact that what i saw HAD t & b will hopefully calm any fears that i was seeing anything REALLY dubious like that – such things have always disturbed/disgusted me and always will and I wasn’t desensitized THAT much. Purely the ‘night be/might not be, not sure’ grey area, the one where men (and women I’m sure) see someone and notice ‘cute but not sure, steer clear’ as a mental/moral decision.

Beforehand it was something I treated like every other person, is just something you automatically avoid but wouldn’t beat yourself up for thinking ‘they’re attractive’ as you know you’d never go near it with a barge pole and that’s the equivalent of a massive cold shower. Since? When OCD is bad, you constantly question any reaction of the tiniest nature to anything like that, inspect yourself mentally to make sure you meant nothing else by it and go hyper alert physically. Is it as bad now? No – but when your ocd wants to trigger, it’s another weapon it can pull.

Understanding doesn’t change the memories hurting and triggering when your ocd locks on though…just gives you a rope to cling onto. Even though I’m past such behaviour now, you don’t forget it – and the problem is, because it’s not somewhere you’d go when in your right mind, it’s hard to accept it and forgive it as a sufferer now because it’s so alien to how you behave now. Plus noticing an attractive, physically developed person in their mid-teens is probably an absolutely normal reaction but that gets mixed up with the ocd turning it into a bad one. Tough.

Hope that makes sense in some way. Am hoping a good nights sleep will help the ocd relax itself.