New to ocd

[Avasmummy_x]

Hi there I am new to ocd. I was diagnosed just two days ago after suffering with gad since I was 13 I am now 21.

It's all started for the past week I am getting uncontrollable racing thoughts and intrusive thoughts of harm. Mainly to myself.

When I'm in the car I get a scary thought of just suddenly jumping out which frightens me. And when Im high up. Say top of the stairs or second tier in a shopping centre. I have the thought and urge to jump. Absolutely frightening mainly because my anxiety has always been based on worrying over my health scared of dying and scared of going crazy. So racing thoughts and thinking disturbing thoughts is making me feel I am crazy and thoughts of harm just frighten me!

My other fear is what if I do actually do something? What if my mind just takes over and I can't stop myself? My doctor says it won't though.

I've been reffered to cbt but an intense one with a physciatrist as I've done cbt before so she says I need something a bit stronger. She also prescribed me fluoxtine 20mg which I'm picking up today which I'm also scared of as I'm very anti meds as all I've tried have either made me sick or my anxiety shockingly worse.

Would like a bit of advice on how to cope and maybe even a success story so I know it will get better. Also if anyone is on fluoxtine please please tell me it helps I'm so scared to take it x

[MyNameIsTerry]

I was the same. I had urges to jump off bridges even though they weren't very high, run in front of traffic when walking up a busy A road, etc. Its not a conscious thought because it feels like its in the background, thats how you can recognise these are intrusive.

You won't do anything Ava, the mind doesn't work like that. These thoughts all come from your subconscious but they have to then go to your conscious mind and they are evaluated by something called the prefrontal cortex which is often called the executive because it decides what to do. This is your logical rational side. Now, if you could act out your thoughts, you would not react so emotionally too them, you would consider them normal, as an option or enjoyable. You wouldn't be questioning them.

This is a really really common thing that people new to OCD think. You won't think like this the more you learn about it and talk to people on here because we all started like that too. I often post sections from OCD UK's website and they state this too when discussing harm & sexual forms, the last people who would act on them are people having these intrusive thoughts because they are abhorrent to them and cause distress.

Think of your typical thug or psycho. He gets these thoughts and acts them out. Do you think he feels back about it? No. You do. There is the difference. He embraces it. You don't.

It would be worth having a read of some of the threads on here and the ones about sexual/child abuse thoughts because those are extremely distressing to the sufferer and you will see people explaining how it all works and how its not something they would ever do.

Your anxiety about death won't matter to your OCD, thats the way it can be. So, you now have 2 forms of anxiety eating into each other by being a trigger. Having such as HA & OCD is a tricky combination because the OCD won't care about the HA and it can make rituals that infringe on the HA making the anxiety worse.

The key is not reacting. The more you react, the more the subconscious associates neurons in the brain with each other. This just means they become even more learnt behaviour and get sent to your conscious mind to worry about them. The stronger the emotional reaction, the more it makes the association. This is proven neuroscience and its how anxiety disorders come along. Its called neuroplasticity. The way out is the same as the way in really, you have to retrain your brain to a) not care and b) stop sending these things to your conscious mind. It takes time but by doing enough of a), the b) just comes along on its own.

Something to remember is that intrusive thoughts are experienced by anybody, anxiety disorder or not. There are studies of this and the people in them didn't realise they even experienced them until the researchers prompted them on how to notice & record them. Thats what we have all been doing until our anxiety decided to latch on to them by choosing a subject that tends to bother us. This means that you can experience after you recover but the difference will be that they won't cause the reaction you are having currently. I expect you will notice them more, as I still do, maybe once we've been there we are tuned into spotting them because of our experiences with anxiety in the past. More learned behaviour. However, they will come to you less frequently as you recover and in the intensity will drop.

This is what happened to me. I had thoughts of harming strangers, the self harm stuff as mentioned above, thoughts of harming myself in general, thoughts of my family being harmed (mostly death) if I didn't perform rituals to 'cancel' something out (Magical Thinking OCD and I had it combined with touching rituals & imagery which can be separate forms, so OCD can interlink with its other forms!), etc.

I still get some of the MT ones but it is substantially reduced. It doesn't cause me much anxiety unless my GAD has spiked.

The harm stuff has gone really. I get the thoughts from time to time but I don't react to them. Actually, I find myself thinking how daft they are or smile or even laugh. Remember the one on my PM? There is the difference. Its no issue when they don't bother you.

OCD is a funny one as well. I have found that you can't always tackle it head on. If you have a strong or stronger anxiety disorder, in my case GAD, it will just keep it going and CBT may not be able to unpick the OCD. Its different for us all. I found that in reducing my GAD instead, the worst forms of my OCD started to reduce or disappear.

For me, CBT was beneficial but it didn't do a lot. What did help me was Mindfulness. Its ideal for this because the way it tackles thoughts & sensations is far more powerful than CBT in my opinion. It teaches you to enter a state of non judgemental compassionate thinking in meditation and when these thoughts & feelings pop along, you don't react to them. This retrains your mind to do this everytime...but it can take time. It took time to get in your head, it will take time to come back out! I think its very good for Pure O.

I was put onto this by my therapist. NICE recommend a blended version of CBT & Mindfulness in Professor Mark Williams MBCT 8 week programmes for recurrent depression so its getting backing. I expect it will for anxiety when they do another review (I think they have only had 2 so far???). He has books out and free guided meditations on his Frantic World website if you want to try it.

You could also try the CBT route and use things like Thought Records and Cognitive Restructuring. See here:

http://psychology.tools/download-therapy-worksheets.html

Its a way to counteract thoughts on paper. Some people like to write things down as it helps with rumination. From a CBT point of view, it means you have affirmations to use.