Last night, I went on to an OCD chat room.
My intentions were to talk to people suffering with OCD. I don't know anyone in real life with OCD, and i'm don't have any "online friends" who I can talk to either.
My OCD has been quite bad for the past week and was hoping to just vent with people who are sick of their OCD too.
I spoke to a guy called Kriss. I added him on MSN as the chat room was lagging a lot. We spoke for about half an hour.
After talking to him, and finding out he was in the same situation as me, (not knowing anyone who suffers and not having anyone to talk to) we agreed to talk again some time. It felt good at the time to have a rant about it and actually talk to another person with some of the same OCD's as me.
However, this morning I woke up feeling sadder than usual and I think it's because I finally got to talk about it.
It made me more aware of what I was doing and made me feel guilty that I was doing it too.
Mostly though, it made me feel guilty that I had to go out of my way to find a stranger to talk to rather than a close friend, my boyfriend or my family. But I suppose I don't talk to them because I know as much as they try to understand, they just can't.
I'm scared that they will see me as a bit mental, or act as if it's not a big deal when it actually affects quite a lot of my life, or generally ask me to stop moaning.
Anyway, I realised that I can deal with this problem a lot more if I don't talk about it. I'm not sure if that's a good thing, because really i'm just supressing it.
Talking about it for me, made me a whole lot more aware of what I was doing and made me worry more about it, which in turn made my OCD's worse.
You are not alone. People without OCD don't get it –how could they? It's completely beyond them. My husband doesn't understand what I go through (Pure O) even though he's very caring and we love each other very much. I think it's great that you found Kriss on MSN and were able to talk with him. He gets it. Our family, signif. others and friends still care about us, it's just that OCD is so far removed from the scope of their experience. And this isn't easy for me to say, because I share your apprehension! I don't want to be considered a mental case and feel alone with all my fears. I'm sick of OCD. I hate it. I've resigned myself to the fact that it'll always be there, either in the background or front and center, and I will have to live with it. Meds help, a lot. And talking about it helps. Thanks for posting.
I saw a psychotherapist for about 4 years for my OCD's and got CBT too, and to be honest, it never worked for me. I found myself leaving the psychotherapists room and feeling even lower, more miserable and more ashamed than I did in the first place.
Having to talk about it made everything feel worse. Like the realisation that everything in my life just sucked soooo badly haha.
I was never offered any kind of medication. But i'm not sure if I would have taken it anyway, because i wouldn't want to be dependant on something to make me happy or "normal" when most of the time, when i'm not talking about it or having to think about, I get on with my life just fine. Granted, it's a burden on my life, but I still manage my daily life most of the time just fine.
I wish I would just wake up some day and be fine because I think my main problem comes from being very sceptical after spending so many hours of my life talking just to end up feeling miserable and my refusal to accept any medication.
If there was something I could do that'd help, and I wouldn't have to depend it on every day, it was just a one off sort of thing, I'd go for it in a heartbeat.