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May. 30th, 2021 09:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brideoffrankensteinSo, this is gonna be a bit of a heavy post. Talk about mental illness under the cut.
I was reading a post on buzzfeed a few minutes ago, one of their "stolen from reddit' ones, that asked therapists what their patients are always scared about telling them but that the therapists hear all the time. One of these was violent intrusive thoughts. I won't explain what kind of thought, online, as the fact that I have/have had them is part of the point of this post. The therapist in question said that this was a very common symptom of OCD.
Now, I've thought of myself as having "OCD-like thought patterns" for a long while, but hearing that those intrusive thoughts were a symptom made a lot of sense and woke up all my "I'll deal with having OCD later" feelings. I have a lot of compulsions. There're about things like - if I do something x number of times, that's bad, so if I come close to doing it that many times, I have to do it more times til I'm sure I didn't stop on that number. Checking messages the day the notification came through. Making sure my hair parting is straight. Making sure all my stuff is tidied away and exactly the same as the day before. It manifests of searching for a lost thing for half an hour even though I'm exhausted and need to sleep. Moving a pill bottle an inch to the left. Digging through the rubbish for something that I ought have put in the recycling.
I won't really talk about what I perceive the consequences to be because it's pretty classic OCD.
And I'm making this post because I was thinking more about it and the thing that makes me really upset and cross is that I think this comes out of my mum's way of parenting. Classic, recent example: If you don't make sure the pans are bone dry before they go in the cupboard, we'll all get legionnaires disease. Yelling at me to make sure my parting was always always straight. Getting at me if my stuff was somewhere it shouldn't be. Making it my fault for having a messy room if I lost something.
Everything always had big consequences. Either because I would get raked over the coals or because mum would give some dramatic reason why we needed to do something. And I was just thinking. If this is OCD, then I honestly have every reason to have developed it, because everything had huge consequences always and I had to behave very carefully to avoid them. Add undiagnosed ADHD - where I'd fuck up things for no reason I could understand, leading to my mum trying to give me bigger and bigger consequences - and I think I was rather a perfect storm for it.
But I can't seem to talk to anyone about these feelings or have them help me. When I first told my mother years ago she said I was scaring her. In the sense of "That's serious, scary, frightening mental illness, you'd better not develop that". I can imagine my parents saying "don't be silly" and then leaving it at that. Or "Well, yes, you should always try to tidy up" which misses the point.
I don't know where I'm going with this. It's just hard.
I was reading a post on buzzfeed a few minutes ago, one of their "stolen from reddit' ones, that asked therapists what their patients are always scared about telling them but that the therapists hear all the time. One of these was violent intrusive thoughts. I won't explain what kind of thought, online, as the fact that I have/have had them is part of the point of this post. The therapist in question said that this was a very common symptom of OCD.
Now, I've thought of myself as having "OCD-like thought patterns" for a long while, but hearing that those intrusive thoughts were a symptom made a lot of sense and woke up all my "I'll deal with having OCD later" feelings. I have a lot of compulsions. There're about things like - if I do something x number of times, that's bad, so if I come close to doing it that many times, I have to do it more times til I'm sure I didn't stop on that number. Checking messages the day the notification came through. Making sure my hair parting is straight. Making sure all my stuff is tidied away and exactly the same as the day before. It manifests of searching for a lost thing for half an hour even though I'm exhausted and need to sleep. Moving a pill bottle an inch to the left. Digging through the rubbish for something that I ought have put in the recycling.
I won't really talk about what I perceive the consequences to be because it's pretty classic OCD.
And I'm making this post because I was thinking more about it and the thing that makes me really upset and cross is that I think this comes out of my mum's way of parenting. Classic, recent example: If you don't make sure the pans are bone dry before they go in the cupboard, we'll all get legionnaires disease. Yelling at me to make sure my parting was always always straight. Getting at me if my stuff was somewhere it shouldn't be. Making it my fault for having a messy room if I lost something.
Everything always had big consequences. Either because I would get raked over the coals or because mum would give some dramatic reason why we needed to do something. And I was just thinking. If this is OCD, then I honestly have every reason to have developed it, because everything had huge consequences always and I had to behave very carefully to avoid them. Add undiagnosed ADHD - where I'd fuck up things for no reason I could understand, leading to my mum trying to give me bigger and bigger consequences - and I think I was rather a perfect storm for it.
But I can't seem to talk to anyone about these feelings or have them help me. When I first told my mother years ago she said I was scaring her. In the sense of "That's serious, scary, frightening mental illness, you'd better not develop that". I can imagine my parents saying "don't be silly" and then leaving it at that. Or "Well, yes, you should always try to tidy up" which misses the point.
I don't know where I'm going with this. It's just hard.
