Pure O

Hi

I'd like to state upfront before you read this that I do not want to kill myself. I have a lovely life but I struggle daily with anxiety/OCD. I have for 10 years and at times I haven't had any and other times I have.

So this is how my mind works in terms of OCD.

My obsessive/intrusive thought is: What if my anxiety gets so bad and I end up killing myself? or how much longer can I cope with feeling anxious before I kill myself?

My compulsion is to check my body and thoughts for evidence of this. For example am I feeling depressed? Am I feeling anxious? Looking for something such as the anxious feeling in my stomach often creates it.

Sometimes my checking becomes more and more and I am less certain about my response such as maybe I am feeling anxious oh no! These accumulate in anxiety spikes, which I have 2-3 times a year. Usually when this happens I feel I can't be alone as I think I will lose control and I make an emergency appointment with my psychologist.

This as you would image takes the joy out of life some what as I am always on edge checking I am ok, wondering if today is the day it will all become too much or I will lose control. Wondering if I do something like to go the city it will increase the thoughts and my checking which to be fair it often does. But I go anyway usually and enjoy it less than I would without the anxiety.

I've been advised by my psychologist to not give the thoughts and body sensations meaning. To befriend my anxiety. I've read to stop checking (how???) and I've also read to accept that I have these thoughts and body sensations but that is all they are. I've also read it is possible to recover from OCD/Pure O.

I'd love to hear from people with a similar experience or anyone who has had a similar experience and been able to recover from it.

Thanks

Michelle

When I was in college I woke up one morning to go to the bathroom to find my roommate duct taping the kitchen drawers shut. When I asked her what she was doing, she said that she was protecting us. If all the drawers were taped shut, she wouldn't be able to get to the kitchen knives and then wouldn't accidentally kill any of us.

Now I knew my roommate wouldn't have hurt a fly. So why was she worried that she was going to accidentally do something to kill us all (We lived with two other girls) ? This is when I learned about OCD. My roommates and I took her into our university's medical center, and to make a long story short, we all received counseling to learn about OCD (obviously she had individual counseling as well), and she and her family went to counseling together. She started medication and she became a lot better.

At first though, I was surprised. I thought all OCD people were neat freaks who were afraid of getting germs on them and had to clean all the time. Yes, there is that sub group of people with OCD, but they're not all like that.

Obviously the intrusive thoughts were thoughts that she'd accidentally harm her friends and family. And frankly, I didn't really notice my roommate having any compulsions. The things the doc said were compulsions were things I thought were really responsible on her part like making sure the doors were locked at night. She progressed to the point of duct taping drawers shut and hiding sharp objects.

She said that for her the best thing was medication. Eventually she will go back to those spirals that you mentioned without meds, so she's stayed on them permanently. Now she's got a couple degrees, married, and has a kid on the way, so it seems to me that she's got everything under control.