ImSoOCD [they/them]
“Chairman Costanza, do you have any recommendations for the President’s birthday celebrations?”
“I thought we could give everyone a card which told them we had donated to a charity in their name.”
“That seems like it would be expensive”
“No, that’s the brilliant part. We don’t have to donate anything. We just need to print the cards.”
These are mostly things I’ve learned from therapy. I’d rather not talk meds because, as I understand it, I was prescribed it due to other issues I have being comorbid with OCD. I’ve gotten mixed reactions from various mental health professionals when I tell them what I’m on and why. So I don’t think it’s something I want to implicitly recommend, but I’m also not gonna chance it because it works and you don’t fuck with functional meds
Remember how Peter sets some boundaries to make time for himself and then stands up for himself to his landlord, but can only do so by wearing the metaphor for addiction and in the end rather than resolve his tendency to self sacrifice and suppress his own emotions, he goes back to the way he was before he put on the suit?
I know this is a famously bad movie, but fuck what was the point of the symbiote if ridding himself of the need for it didn’t teach him anything? We could have had a Sandman film. His origin story scene is by far the best scene in the movie. But they had to stuff Venom and the New Goblin in there. It could have been such a good movie.
The larger project for me at the moment is to learn to process my emotions with a wider range of coping strategies than avoidance and overintellectualization. Right now I’m mostly numbing them and talking myself out of them, including ones that are valid and necessary to work through.
Medication and thought replacement helped the racing thoughts for me. A lot of recurring negative self talk can be rephrased in a way that short circuits the tendency to start spinning. Once you’ve identified your triggers for those thought spirals, playing around with different framings of a thought helps. A mild example for me is that “This person who I’m close to is mad at me” can become “I feel insecure that this person would not tell me if they were upset with me”. It’s not a reassurance, which would reinforce the obsessive tendency of the thought, and it’s not focusing on an unknowable fact (someone’s immediate feelings). And also sometimes, it’s just trial and error to see which thoughts do and don’t make you spin.
I’d done deep breathing before as well as the 5 4 3 2 1 sensory thing for anxiety. But it somehow never occurred to me that this could involve paying attention to more ambient bodily sensations or my emotional state. In other words, paying attention to my environment and paying attention to myself were separate activities, which is the opposite of grounding.
So right now I’m just making a habit out of noticing when I’m stuck in my head and paying attention to my surroundings as well as how I’m existing in those surroundings. This was something I did as a kid but willed myself to stop doing because “if I’m not paying attention, the solution isn’t to look around the room at stuff. It’s to concentrate harder.” Turns out looking around the room was a grounding technique I’d picked up on my own and was shamed out of because you could see my eyes wandering and people thought I wasn’t listening.
And the results so far are that even mild clutter makes me feel out of control and dirty and that I spend most of my time in a slightly heightened state of anxiety, which I’ve trained myself to ignore and numb, mostly through media consumption. In other words…. my contamination OCD made my environment unmanageable so now I’m addicted to social media as an avoidance tactic. I have some other rituals related to this as well, mostly about keeping very small areas where I’m required to regularly peel myself away from my phone excessively tidy.
