I've been in a really relaxed contemplative mood today. I'm learning a lot from the people on this website. Here's my three big observations…

1. The blogging tool REALLY needs a spellchecker.

2. We as OCDers, as a whole have a problem with not blowing things out of proportion in our heads. That may be a duh thing to say, but I always thought it was just me!

3. We also have an issue with trusting ourselves. Whether its not trusting your eyes to see that the door is really locked, or not trusting your immune system to protect you from getting sick, or not trusting your self control to keep you from hurting someone or yourself, or not trusting your emotional capacity to deal with a (seemingly) disasterous event. We have the opposite of paranoia. Typical paranoia is when everyone is out to get you, this kind of paranoia is when you are out to get you. It makes me wonder if there is an contributing element in our pasts that caused us not to trust. Maybe it even started with losing trust in others then turned inward.

One tale from my life that serves as an illustration of the above two observations. When I was about 8 or 9 through 12, my mother was fighting and eventually died of cancer. It started as breast cancer, she had a mastectomy, then came back a few months later in her arm bone, then leg bone, then liver/brain/etc.

At that age, I trusted that my Mom would be there to take care of me, but she couldn't. So there's an outward trust issue.

Also, my Dad was hypervigilant of her at this time. I distinctly remember one time when there was a Kraft singles cheese wrapper, you know the cellophane, laying on the kitchen floor by the garbage can. I was in the kitchen and as he was throwing it away he casually said, "You kids have to be careful about things like this. Mom could slip on this and break her leg, then the cancer cells would travel to other parts of her body and it would be all over." It put me in such weird headspace. Yeah, we shouldn't leave cheese wrappers on the floor, but if we did we could kill our Mom. I have no idea if that is indeed, a medical fact about breaking bones and spreading cancer, but I accepted it as a truth. By being careless, I could kill my Mother! Another time he was mad at us for bickering with each other and he blurted out, "You kids cause stress and stress causes cancer!" Jesus Christ, just by being upset I can cause cancer?! (God, I'm getting sick to my stomach just remembering this.) There's the blowing things out of proportion part. My thoughts and actions, my insides and outsides, are capable of great harm to others. And there's the self trust issue: I cannot for one second be inattentive, impulsive, or heedless of my thoughts and actions or something terrible could happen.

(It's not like I blame my Dad for anything. I cannot even begin to empathize with losing the love of my life, the mother of my children, my soulmate. When I brought it up to him sometimes in my 20's he didn't even remember saying it.)

Anyway, it makes me wonder if the neural pathways that were created during these experiences and others like it somehow alter our cognitive processing, making us OCD. Are we wired to operate on a negative truth fallacy and an appeal to probability fallacy? Check those terms on wikipedia for a refresher in formal logic.

I'm sure that this is nothing new, really. I guess many OCDers eventually wonder about this, but I am just getting there on my "Journal to the Center of McGuirk." (10 bonus points for whoever gets that reference!)