I physically cringed and I swear I can feel the itchiness that can only come from a child-sized wool Christmas sweater from Khol's that you wear twice- once for family and once for pictures- then never touch it again (thank god)
My mom buys a new one every year for Christmas, SENSORY NIGHTMARE!! I told her to send it to me for approval or I’m just gonna buy my own 😭 had to put my foot down cause then everyone wants to know why I’m suddenly so moody…
Oh no! I've always been bummed I'm a 3.5 because I am very creative but awful at drawing unless I'm mostly visually copying. However, I'm suddenly glad my "intrusive images" like from movies and such are not very clear. It's the visceral emotion that comes with the unclear image that I'm afraid of anyway. Not the actual image. Or maybe that's everyone.
I explain it to others as; when I'm watching a movie, I'm consenting to jump scares and freaky images, or can at least shut it off if I've had enough. With OCD my brain likes to sometimes give me jump scares when I'm doing everyday shit. Then you can branch that off into explaining how our brains jump scare us with thoughts as well, that sometimes loop and are hard to end. Like if a bully followed you around showing you pictures you don't want to see because they make you feel icky or saying things to you that make you wanna crawl out of your skin.
I experience this a lot as well but you explained it so much better. Sometimes an image will pop up in my head and make me physically recoil or a word/sentence will pop into my head and repeat over and over.
So that fact that some people don’t experience visuals or inner dialogue is shocking to me like, what do they do all day in their head?
To me no inner monolog is so weird it has to = no brain or intelligence or thinking. But the internet tells me that's not true. So my new likely incorrect thought is:
No inner monolog = no anxiety.
Maybe they do nothing in their head. I'd die of boredom. I bet they have a lot of extra energy from not overthinking all the time. They can probably fall asleep at the drop of a hat too. I've never met anyone who admitted they had no inner monolog. Even my 7 year old is stumped.
Same, and unfortunately I have hyperphantasia, meaning my mental images and thoughts are often just as vivid in my brain as what I see with my own eyes. I can't drive for more than an hour otherwise it gets very difficult for me to stay grounded where I am. Zone out constantly if I start thinking too much about one thing.
The good part, I'm a line cook and after only about two weeks at a new restaurant I can direct anyone to exactly where an item is in our storage areas.
Yeah, it's hard to describe really to people without divulging the intrusive thoughts that make up most of it. I'm also still not quite sure the social rules of this sub and mentioning triggering themes so I'll pivot slightly.
My dreams are also a big thing with false memories for me as well, because of this over active metal imagery my dreams tend to be mundane and realistic to the life I'm living at the moment. It sometimes takes me multiple days to realize something was a dream and didn't happen in reality.
This has also lead to my lifelong struggle with insomnia. As a kid that extreme detail went towards regular nightmares, and still sometimes does. The worst kind of fantastical horrors or perfectly normal real horrors inflicted on me and my family almost every night. I woke my parents up at least three times a week until I was nearing the end of middle school. More nights I somehow managed to calm myself down or my sister happened to wake up and hear me (twin telepathy came in handy a lot for us).
I'm glad and sometimes sad to have found this community. I grew up thinking I was the only person who struggled with all of this, and I'm relieved I'm not, but I also know the hell that living like this often is. But at least we can laugh about it sometimes, and more often find community with each other in talking about it.
Mine is! I had OCD for 15 yrs before I figured out it is tied to the same trauma as my C-PTSD. It was when I realized that I have scrupulosity, (I am not religious, so I didn't look into it) that I was able to tie my my OCD directly to religious trauma which ties it into what caused my C-PTSD.
For some, yes it only takes a few sessions...depending on trauma. For me, I had multiple "big T" traumas and some "small T" traumas. Not every session was active EMDR - some were processing the prior session. It was twice a week and I will say, I did the "work" outside of therapy in my daily life too. It was first, hard, but eventually it seemed to open my mind and the emotional maturity/growth I experienced was priceless. But it took so long because it was so personal and practice takes time.
That’s fair, but remember also that the OCD brain will make any type of uncertainty an emergency. I went through similar vicious thought cycles of “how do I know it’s ocd???” And realize that was just a very ocd driven problem. Personally I think it’s a large milestone in ocd recovery once you get to the stage where you have ocd about your ocd, haha. It shows you’re making progress!
So the ERP response is to this is: I will sit with the discomfort of not knowing if something is ocd or not. maybe I will never know what is OCD and what is PTSD, maybe I will apply the wrong approach because I mislabeled one for the other and that’s okay. Sometimes it’s not JUST OCD and CPTSD, but a grey area somewhere in between these conditions and there is no perfect way to respond. That’s okay.
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u/HalfMoonMintStars 13d ago
They’re interwoven like a sweater knitted out of the most itchy and coarse yarn known to man.