Anyone who is undertaking a recovery programme will, inevitably, encounter the fears more often, which will involve more occasions on which anxiety blasts. This is an absolute requirement of the self-treatment. Anyone who judges relief by the amount of avoidance that he or she is able to undertake and the number of thoughts avoided is not recovering at all. Such a person is ensuring that the OCD owns them. This can be very difficult to accept when these thoughts are hurtling around in one’s mind for many hours each day, or are hovering, apparently ready to ‘strike’, at the slightest jolt or reference to the feared situation. When this occurs, it is tempting to try to ‘think the problem through’. That is, on the basic assumption that there just has to be a reason to be thinking like this, the person starts to work on detecting this reason. This is invariably disastrous because these thoughts don’t have a rational basis – they are obsessive and that is all they are. Once a person starts to look inside themselves for the ‘badness at the root of it all’ they will inevitably find something, because we all have areas within us that do not stand up well to close scrutiny. We are all the product of everything we have ever thought and done and a solid proportion of this will be uncomfortable. Just looking back at ourselves as infants, children and adolescents, using young people of these ages that we know now, shows how self-involved, unkind and downright cruel we must have been at times.
Very educational, this will help those suffering with this & I really like the laughter portion on your post excellant. Keep it up.
April
:)
Back at ya =D
So true! Thank you yet again for making so much sense of the nonsense!