Reply To: The last ten years of contamination and checking ocd. And where I seem to be now
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Hi everyone… I’ve started a study course with the Open University… Sort of trying to go from patient to professional… I am still a patient, and take daily medicines to help me, along with reading books by great writers to inspire my own writing, but also to encourage me to keep pushing on. Studying is really difficult for me, as I’m getting on in years, and having to work with modern technology that I sometimes find quite baffling. Watching a three year old scrolling through pictures on a smart phone and suchlike, they’ve been born into it, there weren’t even pocket calculators until after I’d left school… I just cannot get my head around how the ‘cloud’ works… I’m still remembering how revolutionary, floppy discs were, and how a full length novel would go onto a 1.45 megabyte disc! Now it’s terrabytes! Fine for lots of videos and suchlike… Okay… My OCD isn’t just about contamination issues, it is also about checking… I get to the car, Have I locked the house front door? Mmmm… Isn’t it weird how, the more we check something, the stronger the urge to ‘just check it again to just make sure…’ In past times I would go out in the car, and actually drive back home, just to see if I had actually locked the door. Thinking back, it always was… I had locked the door, and I had checked… Several times, before I finally reached my destination… It feels like I’m being negligent by not going back to check… If, God forbid, we were to have a burglary, the insurance people would ask if the the door had been locked all the time, How could I truthfully and confidently say ‘Yes’ ,when my OCD was shouting in my ears words to the contrary..? It took a giant leap of ‘Faith’. To begin with, I would have someone with me… A witness… I would then just lock the door and leave it, hoping that, if I had left the door unlocked, they would know, and prompt me to lock the door… It never happened… Over time, I got to just walking away from the door after locking it, Knowing, that, whatever my OCD said, I would have locked the door because I always do. The proof is that I always, always have to unlock the door to get back in… And the keys are always in the last pocket, especially when it is pouring with rain!!! More later,
God bless you for reading.
Wannabe