it’s really become some nastybones business in the last couple few years. Like a totalizing thing that affects most of the things I do. In the course of writing this post I’m doing repetitions and that’s just normal at this point. I frequently curate upvotes on my posts so they’re not bad numbers. It’s to the point where I have to go back and forth between tabs or closing and opening them to make sure it’s not a bad number. It’s even such that I am policing my motions with my hands so they’re not bad. Even in the body of this post, I’m counting as much as I can in service of avoiding certain numbers of sentences or repetitions of words.
Anyway, how do you all experience this disease and how do you cope with it?
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I’m on prozac for my OCD. It’s helped quite a bit but I still have some obsessions and compulsions, pesky and hard to get rid of them all completely.
Same. Prozac at least helped with my biggest obsession and I can finally sleep. But I still have some obsessions and compulsions.
Just to like, put it out there I guess. It seems super fucking obvious but I know firsthand how hard it is. You do need to not engage your triggers. There will be a lot of discomfort. It is going to suck. But I don’t think there’s any other way to deal with compulsive behaviors. They seem important because repetition makes your brain treat them as important.
What is to be done then? Well, we gotta just sit with that discomfort that happens when we deny a trigger. You don’t actually need to do the behavior. I’ll go first by making this paragraph an uncomfortable number of sentences for me.
Eventually, it won’t be so bad.
I have a lot of nasty intrusive thoughts, struggle with rumination, and have a lot of worries about my memory malfunctioning or being messed with. For some reason getting medicated for ADHD massively improved my symptoms and I was able to mostly deal with the rest of the symptoms through CBT techniques. Stuff’s still there, just not as distressing anymore.
POCD
I had bad POCD for years and that shit was hell. I was considering DIY chemical castration until I got diagnosed and got some help.
I have untreated ADHD and OCD and it’s going alright. My ADHD presents me with a shit load of executive dysfunction when trying to begin tasks and find myself relying on my wife to body double. This isn’t always great tho because we are both ND and it definitely adds stress to us both. So, I tend to cope by remembering the bigger picture and acknowledging how I may be inadvertently affecting people around me by letting my ND run rampant. It helps a lot knowing that she understands, and it also pushes me to be better about it.
My OCD is a lot harder for me to deal with. There are times a can’t leave the house until I’ve done 3 laps around the first floor to check each door, or checked that the stove I didn’t use this week is off. This behavior makes me late for things constantly and eventually also affects the people around me. So again I try to keep that perspective in mind because I don’t want to fall into bad habits where people need to adjust their expectations to cow-tow to my disorder.
It may not be the healthiest way to cope, but after being on Ritalin for most of my childhood I have an aversion to using those medication personally. I totally support people taking them and see their benefits, I just haven’t come around to giving them another shot myself. Instead I seek therapy and practice mindfulness.
