COMPUTER HELL FOR 72 YEAR OLD GUY WITH OCD

It's computer dummy heaven today. I just figured out how to fix my laptop all by myself. It only required batteries but normally I would not have been able to even find where the batteries go. My new OCD mindfulness gave me a bonus. I am a 72 year old geezer but giddy as if I had just stolen my first high school kiss.

A fortunate life has been my blessing. But, as my mother used to say, "your worst enemy cannot do to you what you can do to yourself."

What a merciless self-assaulter I have been. We are talking mentally, The pain from a broken brain is ferocious.

I remember trying to lay my dead tired eight-year-old body in bed and go to sleep. But I couldn't. The pillow would not line up to my satisfaction with a thin line on the headboard. So, I would keep popping up out of bed like a jumping jack for hours on end trying to set the pillow exactly the way I wanted it. I would finally just flop into the bed, drenched in sweat, and then pass out because my little body was so exhausted.

The obsessions became worse as I got older. Physical confrontation became the centerpiece of my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. The word FEAR is central to my defective brain. I believe it is to everyone with OCD.

Facing danger, real or imagined, made physical confrontation my curse. I would be mentally obsessed to go back after someone who I decided had bullied me with words or deeds. It could have been a schoolmate from high school who I remember slapped me around thirty years before, or a person who insulted a lady at the golf course this morning who I thought and felt I should have confronted.

I could mentally grab onto any event and conclude that I had to be an avenging angel. All that had to happen was a thought, a mere thought, popping into my head. Bingo. The thought would not go away. Then off I would go to OCD hell.

My stomach would start rolling constantly. Only finding the misguided courage to act by confronting the bully would abate the fear. My delusional missions lasted from days to decades and sometimes in multiple forms. Than the fear would come back about the same thing or something else and often with even more inappropriate acts. I do not know how I led a somewhat normal life.

Symbolically, my efforts at trying to line up that pillow defined my life. Endlessly confronting and chasing people who I felt had picked on or bullied me. I could be tormented for any reason such as someone playing their music too loudly, or to allowing their dogs to bark, or feel that someone insulted me, or made fun of me, or criticizing me, or making what I thought to be an inappropriate remark to my girlfriends, or thoughlessly slammed doors, and countless other events that would provoke the same insanity in me that trying to adjust that pillow triggered.

All it took was for me to think that I was the victim. Then came the conclusion I had to even the score, to take vengeance.

Then the fear took hold. The fear of living for a confrontation I did not want but thought I had to have. Being consumed. Like a soldier anticipating battle. But an irrational battle for all the wrong reasons.

I fearfully and insanely provoked countless confrontations because of the misguided belief that I would get permanent relief after I resolved some issue. I would eventually end up worse off then I was before I started trying to solve the thing that triggered me.

I ended up in court, in front of judges, in jail, and in a mental hospital because of the degrees to which I would go to seek relief.

I went to so many shrinks, took so many pills, read so many books, and even today, I still can suffer as I write about these episodes of OCD sixty-five years later. It has no end. It continues to plague me.

I blessedly and gratefully have found pathways to relief through exercising, writing and journaling, meditating, deep breathing exercises, and just knowing that the OCD urge is just a thinking disorder and can and must be accepted and coped with. That sounds easy but it's not. It takes constant and consistent mind-bending work to come to terms with it. There is hope.

I am not violent or psychotic. I am a lifelong scared little boy who was told to go outside to face the bullies in the old neighborhood. I cried instead. My family's definition of courage was about fists and not words. It took a lifetime for me to recognize my family was fucked up, but with good intentions. They did not know macho was not a one size fits all hat.

After many years of good fortune, except for the few times getting punched and hurt by a neighbor who was slapping around his girlfriend and beat me up for interfering, I never paid a big physical price.

Mentally, it is another story.

I have been arrested several times for minor non-violent crimes. I have been in the mental ward. Everything was connected to OCD.

Endless hours, days, months, years of OCD torture have left me damaged mentally but okay enough to say I am much better after a lot of hard work.

I am now spending time learning how to let stuff go and accept my condition. I never really cared about standing up for myself except for a few times in my life where it was legitimate. It's selfishly only been about relieving the fear that I felt with no alternatives. That is erroneous and wrong.

Writing is an alternative for me. Playing ball, reading, volunteering, running, and almost any mental and physical activity are tools that work well in battling OCD.

Going to OCD group meetings and becoming friendly with and supportive of others who are afflicted, is terrifically helpful and a big step in recovering.

The irrational but overwhelming fear of the "what ifs" of not doing what you falsely believe you must do literally eats you up. However, once you are able to realize that the anxiety of OCD urges can be endured with training, life gets immeasurably better.

Saying no to debilitating OCD urges is the only way to get healthier. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is permanent, but can be effectively dealt with as with addictions like gambling or drinking and many others. It takes time and treatment.

12 step programs are effective.

You can do it.

Why becomes an obvious question to anyone reading this who does not have OCD.

Answer....

Normal brains do not involuntarily attach to abnormal thinking. OCD brains do. They are different chemically and they do not process thoughts correctly.

OCD is always about fear, fear, fear, whether you are compulsively checking and rechecking the stove, door, the dogs water, washing your hands, obsessing about harming a child, facing a bully or some other thought.

But, there are ways to safely treat OCD.

My hope is that this helps some fellow sufferers get some value from my self-knowledge, or even better, some relief.

I have just started to write again about OCD.

My Purpose is to help others with what this is about for me. There has to be more to life than my girlfriend, my dog, pickle ball, golf, eating and tormenting myself with new and age old major OCD issues.

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is all about fear no matter where you start.

Fear can be conquered properly.

Go online and look at resources and blogs on OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder.) There is so much there for every sufferer.

Read about it. Find relief. It is there.

Here are some resources to use. I just want to help. I do not get paid in any way by anyone I mention. I Do not know them. I want to help.

I just Google, do my research, just as you should do.

Here are a few resources around the country that came up:

FHEHealth Restore 888-986-1382

Park Avenue Psychotherapy Associates 973-815-0777

Go To YouTube and punch up OCD

Call 720-605-1316

Call 305-856-9442

Call 754-227-6634

Online Therapy-312-955-1212

Good Luck

David S.

I am an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder sufferer associated with no one.

OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE DISORDER (OCD): IT IS JUST AN URGE

Obsessive, compulsive disorder is a brutal mental illness which affects a very small part of the population. In the US, about 1.1% of the people have it and it is evenly split between males and females. Over 2.2 million individuals are afflicted. It is so simple to understand but brutally hard to deal with.

The entire condition is based on thoughts. Just thoughts. So think different thoughts you say and you are cured.? 

Ha-ha !!

No. No. No.

Don't forget, just because you resolve one OCD symptom you do not get rid of the entire disorder. So, the trick is to learn how to deal with your OCD by not acting out in all the goofy ways you do now. Acting out does not work.

I am now having an urge to call someone on the phone which would likely create a problem. At minimum, it would start an OCD cycle where I would have to start calling and calling trying to get my problem with this person resolved.

The problem is I have no real problem with him. The problem is with my thoughts. 

That is reassuring and gives me relief.

I also know I am not going to create a problem with the crazy thought that I can end this perceived problem with a phone call. Maybe I could and maybe I couldn't. It doesn't matter. 

Another OCD problem would soon follow. There is relief in that knowledge. I am sick

So, I chose to write about this. Maybe it will help someone else. It is certainly helping me. My desire to call this guy has diminished.

Working out, talking, meditation, reading are all answers to coping with OCD.

Acting out does not work. I have the scars to prove it.

The stove might still be turned on or the lady did not respond right to your apology or or or. 

An external fix does not last.

In people with OCD thoughts get stuck in their head and most sufferers do not know how to deal with the torment. 

Ironically, the answer to how to deal with OCD is to not deal with it!! 

It is just an urge. It will decrease and go away if it is not fed, When you do not act on it than it starves.

But, and it is a big but, OCD urges are so overwhelming and intense that it is almost impossible to deal with them without knowledge of how to. 

Just to clarify, it is obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) whether it is to wash your hands again and again, check the lights. check that pimple again, touch your nose, count to ten, arrange your desk. check your toes. take a shower, ad to your hoarding collection, or perform any compulsion you feel an urgency to perform over and over. Again and again is the key word.

We are talking about checking for hours on end. We are talking about being soaked in sweat from anxiety when an OCD episode occurs. It can last for hours, days, weeks, months, or years.

Fear of harming yourself or another, fear of saying or doing something embarrassing or dangerous, or fear of anything or anybody in an abnormal way, needing constant reassurance that something was done right, and on and on are common obsessions.

When any thought consumes ones mind in a perpetual, non stop, disabling way it is usually from (OCD) obsessive compulsive disorder.

That means being so focused or consumed by a thought or urge that it owns you.

It can be about what you are going to eat three days from now or being afraid you will throw the dog down the steps.

I had an obsession about tin foil for years. I was afraid to bite down on the foil because I remembered it once hurt my teeth. Tin foil kept me in bed for days being depressed and not wanting to see any tin foil. Even after I had bit down on the foil and felt no pain I still, to this day, avoid chewing anything with tin foil on it.

I had another obsession when I was 25 years old. I thought I had prostate cancer. No matter how many times the Dr. checked me and told me nothing was wrong with my prostate I still demanded to be put in the hospital for a torturous test. The Dr, came in my room afterward and said

“You are fine. See a psychiatrist."

I am 72 now and I am not fine. 

But, I am much better.