Quote Originally Posted by Panicandpeace View Post
NervUs, thanks for your supportive words. At least you had a true reason to be so fearful of bats. Did you get PEP after finding the dead bat? How did you get over "seeing bats everywhere"? I'm constantly looking around. When I see birds fly, I say to myself, okay those are birds... so many birds in my neighborhood... you'd think that would be reassuring, like, look at all these birds. You've never seen bats, but you see birds all the time. I've been doing better the past couple of days. I bought a couple of workbooks, and as somebody on here suggested: You Are Not a Rock and The Man Who Couldn't Stop. I've also tried to accept the answers the doctor and my therapist gave me... of course, with OCD being the doubting disease, I still have the occasional inner monologue, "Geez that doctor seemed overly confident in his assurance that that mark was not a bat bite... He did seem to know a lot about bat bites, but there doesn't seem to be a consensus on what a bat bite looks like. He said the marks looked too close together and that it seemed to look like more of a pinch to the skin than anything else... but should I have gone to another doctor, just to have a second opinion? It was a teledoc appointment, so he didn't see the mark in person. Was the photo you sent good enough for him to judge?... Okay. Stop. You did what the doctor at the health department told you to do. You had a doctor look at the mark. You told him what you were worried about. He assured you, you're fine." BUT I am trying to just let those thoughts pass. I keep reminding myself that I would have to be the unluckiest person in the world for a bat to somehow fly down, bite me through my shirt, and fly away again without me noticing at all. I'm sure they can be stealthy, but that stealthy? My therapist said, "It's hard to unlearn something. So even when you've stopped the Googling, you've still got a lot in your brain from previous Googling." Which is so true. Wouldn't it be so easy to trust that doctor, if I hadn't already read several accounts of people barely getting brushed by a bat and seeing pinprick marks that prompted them to get the vaccine?

I also just registered for some online school classes. I was worried to do it for a long time because, I was worried I wouldn't be able to focus my energy properly because my mind was so absorbed in this fear. My therapist thought it would be a great idea to shift my focus. I think the psychiatrist I saw put it really well when he explained that often times ADD and OCD go hand in hand, and while it may not be that a person with OCD can't pay attention, like what you classically think of with ADD, it's that they can't shift their attention. That was a big lightbulb moment. When I get absorbed in something it can be very hard for me to shift my attention. Obviously haha. I'm trying. I'm going to keep trying, trying, trying. I've had a stiff neck the past few days, which really never happens to me, but I just keep telling myself, "You're hyperaware of your body right now. Thinking about the stiff neck is just making your neck more stiff. This is anxiety."

I also have surgery soon. I know that this fear is probably a way to distract me from that in a way. Now I've been thinking about that a lot... Anybody else with intrusive thoughts terrified to go under anesthesia because of what they might say?! That's my latest worry.
It's obviously good to challenge the thoughts but don't get too far down the rabbit hole of rumination - the mental gymnastics can be a form of ritual as well that only strengthens those connections in your brain!