First post here, hello all. I have suffered mild to moderate anxiety issues since my teens, but since my daughter was conceived 2 yrs ago everything's got a lot worse and come to a head. I wanted to share my specific experience of OCD as I can't find anything else that quite describes it anywhere and even my therapist is starting to get a little confused!

Basically I have this very fixed personality profile of myself in my head; it encompasses who I am, how I want people to see me, the person I feel I need to be, where I must fit into the world, my characteristics, passions and personality. And it becomes this benchmark that feeds my obsessive ruminations. Basically, I'll have a conversation with someone or perform some every day action that is in reality insignificant but then this burst of extreme anxiety steam rollers my thoughts and I feel very intensely that I was unforgivably "weird". I then have to match my actual behaviour to this profile in my head, often mentally reviewing from several different angles and endlessly ruminating until I feel satisfied that they adequately match up and I get that "OK" feeling. This can take anything from a few seconds to a few hours, but at it's worse it's completely exhausting, maddeningly stressful, just one obsession after another looping round my head. Even though I know it's illogical and just a chemical reaction, the fear is too intense to avoid the mental reenactments. It feels like my confidence is entirely dependant on the temporary assurance the ritual gives me; like if I deny the ritual my confidence will be irreparably damaged and my future ruined, perhaps I'll go mad, perhaps loved ones will abandon me, perhaps my daughter will be affected - all crazy projections of stuff that's never going to happen but the fear just tramples my logic into the ground.

I've now done ten sessions of CBT and at first it seemed to be helping just sharing with someone, but the further we go into it the less helpful it seems as she constantly struggles to understand what I am describing and how her usual methods can help me - she seems more geared towards helping people with outward compulsions via exposure, where as my OCD is 95% abstract, internal obsessions.

Can anyone else relate to this type of intrusive thinking? I can find vaguely similar things online but nothing that quite describes my experience. It seems to be part Pure O, part magical thinking, part perfectionism, part social anxiety, maybe none or all of the above. I'd love to share coping strategies with anyone who suffers similar maddeningly abstract obsessions as it's driving me crazy and making me very unhappy!