Hello everybody, wanted to share some of my recent experiences with my OCD. This week I had my first full week of work and studies in a month. It was crazy, I experienced so many things, good and bad ones. With this setting of going to work and studying a lot at the same time requires me to have a ton of exposure to my intrusive thoughts. Sometimes it even feels constant, I mean my spectrum of intrusive thoughts is immense ranging from contamination (+Covid), harm, accidents&catastrophes, counting&repeating, social anxiety, to just name a few. What I noticed then, is that I am positively surprised of how well everything is going at the moment, which is a rare feeling for me. But on the other hand there are the downs and they are terrible. Sometimes coming home from work or even on the way home my anxiety gets so intense I feel like collapsing. It never happens I just get dizzy and my thoughts take over. I then stand somewhere on a sidewalk for 10-15 minutes until I feel okay to continue my way home. This is always related with guilt and self-blame afterwards. Firstly I criticize myself for stopping and giving in to my anxiety but it feels like a wall, I still can’t avoid this currently. Secondly there then always come false memories of me causing accidents in these situations since I am wondering around in dizziness and lost in my intrusive thoughts of something terrible happening. It happened to me a few times this week and this is a bad side effect of me doing so much exposure in my daily life at the moment.
Any thoughts, ideas, experiences would be greatly appreciated!
