Reply To: Wannabefree’s Friday night Blog…

[wannabefreeParticipantParticipant]

Hi Friends…

When it comes to seeking constant reassurance…

Well, the first thing that comes to mind is… Who would I ask? I need someone who will be on my side, so to speak. Someone I can trust to reassure me in a good way. I look at the people around me… In so doing, I inadvertently lower my self esteem below where I perceive their self esteem to be strong enough, in order to advise me. That self esteem of mine is then on a spiral down, cos, due to the complexities of OCD, the more I seek reassurance, the more I doubt it, and ask more, until my friends walk away in exasperation. And I then come over as difficult to live/work with. In a staff team, I could be the one they make redundant first.

Just like the weird feeling we get, when, after having checked that the door is locked three times, the stronger the urges are to check it, just once more to make sure.  I even used to phone my daycentre from the bus stop, so they could check that I had signed out of the premises, and yet, I might still hold the pen in my hand… Such is this malady of OCD.

I got away with playing my tambourine last Sunday…  Mind you, it was smuggled in in a canvas carrier bag, so that no one knew it was actually me! As if that should matter! I’m me. I took my music keyboard in last night, and that is now fine. Next week, I’ll play it just a little louder so I can hear over the brass band practice taking place in another room from me.

Back to the OCD and reassurance.  How do we actually believe the person who reassures us? Have I told them everything, exactly as it happened? Maybe they don’t know anyway.

If I asked a food hygienist, they’d probably say that it is safer to just give up eating anyway!

If I make a cheese and ham sandwich… A very popular choice of mine. Two important questions;

1) What do I cut it with, and

2) On what colour chopping board?

I wonder what their answer professionally would be…

My answer is; Wooden or dishwater rinsed white plastic chopping board, and any knife sharp enough to cut it with…

It’s what we do at home anyway. And the sandwich will be fine…

We won’t need any reassurance at all as long as we remember that our bodies have a fantastic immune/defence system, that, just like our muscles, needs to be put through it’s paces every so often, to keep it working at peak efficiency. We actually need the bugs around us, or our natural defences will evolve out of us. We will lose the ability to survive in our own natural environment. So;

Next time you feel the need to ask for reassurance, Just hold back for an hour or two, or even overnight, and see if the need disappears of it’s own accord. If not, Ask, just the once, and leave it at that. Each time we do this we find the urges reducing, to the point where we start to feel free to live as ourselves… Life becomes wonderful again (Well nearly) and we find that we can remember the things we want to remember, and can concentrate much easier on things. Give it a go…

I’ve now got to think about something for next Friday… I don’t think I will have been chucked out of church by then!!!

I had the keyboard all wrapped up in an old (Clean?) blanket and old canvas bag, on a sack barrow last night, because it is so heavy to handle. As I get braver, I’ll turn the sound up so that someone else might actually hear it!

For next week then… Let’s have a look at the tricky subject of ‘Acceptance’.

Chat again next Friday 22nd September, at about 6pm.

Wannabe