OCD what helped you?

[Ocdhell]

I have OCD and it’s starting to really piss me off. Does anyone have any advice or tips.

Some more info:

• It started mildly years ago although I didn’t know it was called OCD back then (probably in my teens with checking etc)

-it got terrible after the birth of my first baby. I suffer from intrusive thoughts. Mainly surrounding harm. I was absolutely horrified about the thoughts! I have a classic case: having the thought, obsessing over it, checking behaviours/avoiding

-driving is one issue I’ve had for years. I think I could hit people in my car, the thought disturbs me, I then did behaviours like circling back to check. Now I just don’t drive.

-I avoid cooking (in case I make people sick), driving, being alone. I’m slow at work due to checking stuff. I check doors and switches. It’s bloody exhausting.

-I have had CBT which I know does help. I will try to dig out my notes from my previous sessions.

-I have several self help books

-it came back after birth of subsequent kids... but I kept it fairly under control.

-I have just had a terrible episode of it last week, I had a brief thought of “this could happen” completely out of the blue, in terms of harming strangers. Then that was it, I’m on day 6 of believing I’m a terrible person, trying to remember exactly what happened when I had the thought, I can’t remember so I maybe think I’ve done the terrible thing and blocked it out, vivid thoughts of me going to prison, a sense of doom, like it’s the last few days I have at home with my kids, wishing I could just die so the feeling could go, I want to badly go back and check etc etc.

What is next? Has anyone successfully gotten rid of OCD forever?

Has anyone had success with medication? I’m also scared of medicine and rarely take it as I always think of worst case scenario... what if I drop it and kids eat it etc etc. How ironic!

My family don’t get it. They think ocd is cleaning

My husband is great and he’s been wonderful at supporting me.

My plan is:
-self help and looking after myself more
-go to gp
-get booked on for refresher course for CBT

I know I need help! I’m just after any positive stories or advice to help me before I get the help I need.

It’s absolutely fascinating to hear that there are so many people like me! Exactly like me!

I 100% think my bad thoughts are linked to the following:

1. high stress (exams, work stress, relationship bad batches, new babies, miscarriages)
2. hormones (Being a new mum and I also get horrendous pmt which can make me feel completely out of it the day before I get my period)

I think you have found your root too
It often is in childhood somewhere in my experience

Not saying your worrying will affect your DC, because it’s how you communicate it to them. Also if you are making the effort to try to acknowledge it and tackle it, they will see that too

So don’t worry that you are also being like your mum because you are different

Having children is a huge trigger as it’s such a life change for you and very overwhelming

You need to break it down with therapy.
How you feel about yourself, what happened as a child with an anxious mum and how this affected you as an adult
Now you maybe are always going round in a cycle with your mums words echoing in your ears, feeling like you never get anything right when in fact you have got a lot right - but you don’t believe in yourself at all

Hi there, I also think mine is linked to stress , babies, contraception and hormones, I did time to talk during my pregnancy which really helped, also exercise and balanced out my diet and tried to keep busy, so far in not on need, mine revolves around speeding, double checking straighteners and doors a billion time and intrusive thoughts, during my pregnancy I convinced myself 6 months in that somehow I had an affair and forgot and that the baby wasn't my husbands, it was hell on earth, even with reassurance it's like my brain wouldn't switch off ....

Also another thing that doesn’t help. For the last 15 years I’ve worked in an industry that is highly analytical. My job involves essentially checking things and if you make a mistake it could have disastrous consequences financially. Actually people at work all joke that they all have a degree of ocd (I’m not laughing and wish I could tell them what ocd really feels like). People are rewarded for catching mistakes through checking. Documents are checked by various people at various stages to catch errors. Everything is logged in a certain way. There are 100s of processes and it’s very repetitive. So we do the same process each year for every document we process. 100s of times.

I don’t enjoy it. People sit in silence in their cubes and barely speak as you need to concentrate.

I mean, it’s very clear to me I need to get out...

... sometimes I’d just like a nice simple job to keep my mind active but with Way less stress. But the one thing that stops me... my mum would be disappointed! I would bring shame on my family as my siblings all earn tonnes and have great jobs. Working on a till or admin in office would probably be “disappointing” to my family.

Well you can’t carry that burden around for the rest of your life can you?

You need to learn how to value your own happiness all you are doing is valuing your mothers

@PookieDo I actually had this conversation with my Mum the other day. I was a really sensitive child and even the news would upset me sometimes - even at a really young age, but sometimes she couldn't shield me from village talk and radio etc. It seems I massively internalised some of it whereas other children wouldn't have remotely cared.

I always remember when I was 5/6 we watched a video about how important smoke alarms were. It was in an era where really poor materials were being used for furnishing. It terrified me - I made my dad check the smoke alarm daily (I was around 6, and probably my first real taste of OCD) because I'd seen in the video how quickly a sofa would catch on fire. Most kids wouldn't have cared a jot but it stayed with me so badly that even to this day I check and double check when I've turned ovens, gas, and hairdryers off.

I think with OCD and pure intrusive thoughts, it's a case of your mind knowing the alternative (and negative) connotations to things. Most people accept they may be robbed, but most don't really give it that much thought. Same with car accidents, health concerns etc (latterly be my personal nemesis). But with OCD you just focus intently on the fact it could happen, at any point. Certainly that's my perspective. Even though at 5 years old in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, it was unlikely we would be robbed, or that a fire would break out (we didn't have gas, and neither parents smoked) I just couldn't reconcile that there was a small possibility it could happen.

You poor thing. You're so brave to talk about it. I suffer from exactly the same thing and can really empathise. What is helping me at the moment is seeing a therapist and trying to get to the root of where these thoughts and worries come from.

I have the whole "have I harmed someone" worry and it's all tied in to abuse I went through as a very small child.

Thanks so much for posting. Hope you are feeling ok today. I have also gone on Fluoxetine for the anxiety associated with it.

My daughter (age 15) is under CAMHS for quite Severe OCD. You are right that it is very misunderstood. She has found CBT really really helpful and has made great progress. She also takes a low dose of Sertraline daily (not for depression but it is said to help the OCD and to support the CBT). She has had very focussed help weekly for nearly a year and is masses better and likely to be discharged soon. So for her professional help via CBT was really essential. I wish you well.

@NigesFakeWalkingStick

Do you remember the shoes on the railway line video from school? You might as well have shown me an 18 rated horror film, I was traumatised and terrified of trains and electrocution for years!

I probably think about my house being on fire about 10 times a day. I can’t seem to stop thinking about it but I don’t react to the thoughts like I used to. I reassure myself that it will be ok because it’s usually ok. I don’t know how else to explain it. I think the more you try to make the thoughts go away, the harder it is. It’s about making the thoughts less threatening and terrifying

@PookieDo yes! That and the book illustrated by the same person that did Ronald Dahls book (quentin?) about not putting your head outside of train carriages with a little decapitated head stopped me even as a teenager from train journeys! Even though I knew I'd never do it

Also @Ocdhell I found my OCD has massively intensified since having a child. My son is now 3 but I suffer from intrusive thoughts on an hourly basis, I'd estimate. If I'm super tired/ill/hormonal I find it so difficult to reconcile them, but they have gotten a bit easier with a dose of paroxetine and some fairly intensive EMDR and CBT therapy.

After mild symptoms for years which worsened with a baby and then again when under stress at work or at home, a few years ago my symptons got a lot lot worse and stopped me in my tracks.
I was referred and had the standard NHS CBT for my OCD but it just made me a lot worse as the CBT and exercises etc made no attempt to discover what might be causing the intrusive thoughts and compulsive behaviours but just seemed to be about trying to reduce the behaviours. I also felt a lot of guilt about the help I was getting when other people could not access it or had to wait for so long on waiting lists – I was being seen but was failing to get better.

Long story, but recognising that I was getting much worse whilst trying to do the CBT my NHS therapist got permission (and funding) to take a different approach and identified the traumas in my past that had led to worst of the obsessive and compulsive behaviours.  
CBT trying to teach the patient that if they do not give into their compulsions for reassurance nothing bad would happen will not work when bad things may have already happened to them! 
Traumas (which can take many different forms) often make the patient hypervigilant - checking threats to make sure another trauma cannot happen to you or your family and that hypervigilant checking obviously plays into and increases the checking compulsions.
I am not suggesting that everyone with OCD has PTSD (or vice versa) but that they can be closely related and feed on each other.
NHS treatment for PTSD really helped (along with low-dose fluoxetine). 

I tried to engage with the OCD support forums but sometimes they just gave me new things to worry about and some posters can be a bit dogmatic that only CBT has been proven to work which can be a bit isolating for those of us for whom it didn’t work.

After the trauma treatment I was ok for a couple of years but the compulsions are creeping in again now. I know all the theory about how giving into an intrusive thought to get the instant relief from the compulsive check is setting up bad pathways in the brain. But that is the main problem  - giving into the thought and carrying out the checking compulsion, does give you instant relief at the time, but the next time you need to do more checking to get the same relief and very quickly no amount of checking provides any relief as  your mind spins on coming up with other ‘possible’ things that you might have missed.
Knowing the theory is one thing but being able to put it into practice is another. I have not however had any recent traumas so have had to think about how this recent downturn has been triggered and think that it may be workplace stress, tiredness and hormones– particularly situations that I can’t control or resolve so the bit of my brain that short circuits into trying to use checking compulsions to gain reassurance seems to have kicked in again, but I am trying to resist, as I know that giving in to the bliss of the instant relief of the check will not last for  long and I will soon plummet back into the very dark place where you are constantly fighting your brain, your thoughts and even simple tasks become impossible.

In short, there are obviously problems in that CBT is the NICE protocol for OCD as it has been proven to work and is relatively cheap in comparison with long-term therapy looking at how someone got into this situation but there is also a lot of evidence that CBT is often only a short-term fix and patients have to return for additional sets of therapy.  There seems to be a mismatch between the current rhetoric about supporting mental health and the difficulties people have actually accessing the help they need.
It is also possible to have OCD without the ‘magical thinking’ element that patients are performing the rituals to prevent harm to a 3rd-party or themselves and CAHMS suggesting the child must have ‘magical thinking’ to be diagnosed is nearly as misinformed as thinking OCD is all about cleanliness.

Please forgive this lengthy post but it has been rather ‘therapeutic’ actually putting it into words. Thank you all for your honest accounts. Hearing how other people feel/think has been really ‘reassuring’ (and not in an OCD way!).

I think it’s nice to actually have someone you can tell about all of the things that worry you that to others sound quite bonkers, or silly

So aside from being scared of trains, planes, fires and hypnotism I was also scared of robots, war of the worlds (still can’t listen now) everyone dying, me dying

I had an abusive neglectful childhood and I struggled to make anything of my life until I had children as they kind of gave me something to fight for, and really made me take stock of my life and the causes of my fears

Oh and touching wood every time I had a bad thought was a really bad ritual I ended up with

My DH had OCD as a child and I have had some issues myself with eating disorders, mild self harm and so on (him diagnosed, me not as I didn't tell anyone) and I was filled with guilt when DD started showing signs of anxiety. As if it was our fault, genetically speaking.
Despite the above, I'd describe us as a pretty happy, relaxed unit these days. Big trigger for DD I think was the decline and death of my Mum who she was very close to and the recent relapse was also around the death of another GP and decline of another with dementia which has been very stressful for us all.
After a very unhappy summer (lots of hand washing and checking for intruders) she seems a lot less anxious now back at school and in a busy routine. Routine really seems to help, but I do worry if it's avoiding the issue rather than dealing with it. And, even if it was, is that ok?

I do think it helps overall to deal with underlying feelings such as bereavement. It is not unusual to develop intense anxiety and then OCD after something like that, it is needing to control your environment to feel better. Has she had any counselling or talked about how she feels?
What you can find is that you manage for a while but then have set backs and are not very resilient when stress comes into your life

She's had a course of CBT just before my Mum died which was really helpful at the time then 4 years of pretty good self management. But the last year has been super stressful, bereavement, stressed parents, starting high school, etc. Which I think has been more than she could cope with.
Curiously despite the intrusive thoughts etc, she is genuinely a pretty happy and confident kid. We're talking a lot at the moment and working through a book together. Although I think she's finding the stage we've got to with the book quite challenging. It's deciding whether you want to change or not.

Sorry you're going through this op. I have ocd, started when I was a child but not diagnosed until I was in my 20s (I thought ocd was just cleaning etc and, as my ocd wasn't like that, i just thought I was a monster and never told anyone what was going on) I had cbt which was definitely helpful but what I found really helped was to write an essay about it. I researched it a lot and included quotes from credible sources (bmj, mind etc), just like a university essay. It gave me a much better understanding of ocd and what was going on with me and then when the intrusive thoughts came up, I remember some research from my essay that explained what was going on and it made me feel much better.
I know it won't work for everyone, but it really did help me so it could be worth a try.

This thread has been a real eye opener. I am also a child of the 80s and my husband jokes that I've been ruined by public information films I watched as a child! I was convinced I was HIV positive too! Also had recurrent thoughts about accidentally drinking bleach (or a child doing it - so won't have it in the house), getting run over by a train and burning the house down in a chip fire....

Yeah it certainly is eye opening! I had literally no idea I had ocd until I googled my seemingly odd behaviour and found there were others like me, actually quite a lot of people like me! Of course there are are differing degrees of ocd but I feel like mine is negatively impacting my life now. It’s got to be sorted.

I honestly cannot thank you all for your support today. It’s the first day in ages that I’ve done where I have resisted the urge for all checking! I feel quite free but I do know my treatment has only just begun...

@smemorata

There is something about that generation of the 80’s which seemed to have a very memorable tone of Scaring People with information. I think we have moved on from that now, and the news is so diluted and from a million perspectives. It felt to me like it was a generation of disaffected adults terrifying children into being afraid of everything (STRANGER DANGER... AIDS)
My kids have never come home from primary school traumatised by a railway line video