What do you do when OCD makes you notice certain patterns of cause and effect in your reality that make no rational sense but seem true? I won't share examples because everyone who doesn't have OCD or has had similar experiences always dismisses me as crazy despite it being so precise and on the mark every time. It is like if you went to 5 different gas stations in one day, bought a lottery ticket at each one, and each ticket was a winning ticket. I know what I'm noticing is true and people who aren't cursed with this "mental" illness simply don't notice these kinds of things. It feels like a demon is hacking and altering my reality like how when I was a kid and played ROBLOX online sometimes hackers would join a game and start modifying the code to change what's happening inside the game and add objects and texts into the game that shouldn't be there. The "exposure response prevention" clinical method for dealing with OCD doesn't work because there are certain things that really do seem to happen when I do something specific even though they're not rationally related at all, it happens nearly every single time. It is too specific and repetitive to be a coincidence. It seems like the only way out of this is to give up trying to control anything and accept that your reality or the "rules" of your reality are out of your control, even if it's absurdly cruel rules that make you live an excruciating life where you can't do almost anything in a normal manner like people who don't have OCD.
>>41738186I have OCD too, though based on your post I doubt my particular tendencies and obsessions are the same as yours. Maybe that will help me understand this better.Is there any particular reason you feel the pattern of coincidence and chance occurences is somehow 'menacing' or 'bad' rather than 'interesting' or 'good'? From my point of view, if I happened to get five winning lottery tickets at five separate gas stations, my first thought probably wouldn't be 'these coincidences are evidence of a malicious force,' but 'if there is a force at play and these aren't a coincidence, it probably means that force wants me to succeed.'I suppose the only comparable OCD related issue I've had is seeing the word 'hell' and 'hello' with a high frequency and assuming this meant I was going to be doomed in the afterlife. That was only in early childhood though.
>>41738388>I have OCD too, though based on your post I doubt my particular tendencies and obsessions are the same as yours. My current obsessions/"themes", the worst ones I have ever had in my entire life, are the obsession with good and bad luck and magical thinking. And everything to do with religion & spirituality. It is a living hell. >Is there any particular reason you feel the pattern of coincidence and chance occurences is somehow 'menacing' or 'bad' rather than 'interesting' or 'good'? From my point of view, if I happened to get five winning lottery tickets at five separate gas stations, my first thought probably wouldn't be 'these coincidences are evidence of a malicious force,' but 'if there is a force at play and these aren't a coincidence, it probably means that force wants me to succeed.' I didnt mean that good positive coincidences happen because of it, I meant that the things that happen are so spot on that I dont think it's a coincidence. Fuck it. I'll share one example. Every fucking time I drink organic matcha tea, something atypical and particularly bad, always related to work, happens to me. This happened even the very first time I drank it and I noticed how unusual it was. It even happened when I recently thought I LOST my job and wasn't being responded to by my boss, and then after weeks of not drinking the organic matcha tea (before this situation with my boss ignoring me and other things happened), I drank it again one morning and that very morning, after around 2 weeks of being ignored by my boss, which never happened before, my boss called me and something bad related to work happened that day. And the previous time I drank it another bad thing happened related to my job. Every time I drink it something that causes me a particularly high amount of emotional suffering happens that day, and it's always related to my job. When I drink non-organic matcha tea or other green teas, it doesnt. (1/2)
>>41738388>>41738553(2/2) There are more reasonable examples. I had a friend who every time I told them where I was working (at different jobs), or when I was on the way to work, something particularly bad happened to me afterwards and I also ended up losing both of those jobs afterwards because of changes in external circumstances that didn't happen before I told that friend. There are also songs that I can't listen to anymore because it seems that they give me bad luck when I listen to them. The most devastating example was recently, I tried to "fight back" against my OCD by changing the font on my phone to one that I was scared of using because I was scared it would give me bad luck, and it was also because that friend who really did seem to give me bad luck when I told them where I work used that font on their phone. I decided to challenge the OCD and changed my font to that one before I went to sleep. The next morning my eye felt irritated and looked slightly swollen like it might have been getting infected, which has happened to me before. I was so terrified that I changed the font shortly after. It was also bad enough that I felt like I needed to go to the ER or urgent care to get it looked at, but it was super full so I left and it ended up calming down. I also noticed when I have "green" nature wallpapers on my phone (I change my phone wallpaper a lot), bad shit happens to me. But in the past twice I actually got accepted for 2 different job interviews when I had the old windows vista bamboo wallpaper on my phone. I noticed it the first time, and then tried it again after a different job interview, and ended up getting the job. I think Feng Shui talks about this, geomancy. I can't function in day to day life because of my ocd though. It's hell.
>>41738586I can certainly understand it being rough. There was a time that I would actively leave work on lunch breaks, not to eat, but to go to confessionals because of religious paranoia. I feel you. It's a tough disorder to deal with.I think one thing that's very important to realize is that there's no clear, causation-connection between tea or phone fonts and workplace issues or eye infections. Something bad or good might happen when you drink/change these things. Nothing at all might happen just as easily. What you are finding is the powerful tendency to draw associations where they do not exist, which is so powerful it usually oversteps its bounds.Here's an example from my life. Because I am a religious person, I thought God would punish or chastise me by causing my test scores to fall in university if I masturbated. Since I presume you don't have the same issues and delusions I do, this sounds absurd—and, in truth, it is absurd. If I were ever to go back and look at it objectively, I can tell you exactly what happened:1. I had something very frightening and anxiety-inducing happen to me (a bad test score, in my case).2. My OCD brain worked at the speed of light to try to figure out what I could have done wrong. OCD always assumes that you are responsible for everything that happens to you, so it *must* be some mistake I made. 3. I draw a connection between masturbation and test scores because my brain is desperate to find some way to make me responsible. I studied well, I tried my best. Maybe I was just having a bad day or the professor picked hard questions. That doesn't matter to OCD.4. Whether or not the pattern continues doesn't matter. If I masturbate and get a good test score, I don't pay attention to it as a counterexample. If I don't masturbate and get a bad test score, I think it's just some other failing.Do you see the idea I'm getting at? I'm sure you've interacted with the color green and nothing bad has happened.(1/2)
>>41738830(2/2) But think about it: all those times you've interacted with green and nothing bad has happened, you don't even think about it. When you've drank tea and nothing bad has happened, there's nothing to remember. Your brain doesn't think "Huh. Maybe tea doesn't have any bearing on my job or my luck." What you think is precisely nothing, and you forget that the countercase ever exists, because nothing frightening or unusual happened.This is what is so pernicious about OCD. All it needs is a few cases to start, and then it can keep going forever. OCD doesn't need to be right about luck, or even accurate. All it has to do is be correct once, and you'll fail to notice when nothing bad happens because, well, nothing bad happened.I've only been going to therapy for about a year now, but I think I can give some solid advice. It's good that you're challenging OCD by doing things you're scared to do. The next step is to let every impulsive urge or thought about luck just pass over you like water around a rock. Don't do anything to try to fix the feeling of uncertainty and worry. Say to yourself, "Something good might happen. Something bad might happen. Nothing might happen. I can't know the future or be sure about what fate will bring, but I can know that drinking tea won't have anything to do with it." Sit patiently and observe the feeling of uncertainty the way you'd observe an interesting feeling in your stomach, or a strange dream. It's just a feeling that's there. Just because the frightening emotion exists doesn't mean that you are in any kind of danger or that anything needs to be done.Hope this helps. God bless.
>>41738830>>41738859>The next step is to let every impulsive urge or thought about luck just pass over you like water around a rock. This helped to read Thank you for your advice
