OCD is a seductive liar. It tries to find a reason for what you are feeling, when the truth is that what you are feeling is an echo of something much older, activated by the similarity of a present situation to a past one.
Your mind is trying desperately to make sense of what your nervous system is trying to tell you to do to survive (to fight, flee, freeze, fawn, sometimes more than one at the same time).
Thinking your way through the situation, trying to find solutions through cold logic and rationality isn't the way. The trauma is older and wasn't created through a logical problem.
It's unfortunately kind of a scavenger hunt to find actually useful information for this, but some of these might help, if not solve everything, at least give you a better direction of what to look for:
A brief explanation of how the nervous system fucking lies to you, the survival-obsessed bastard:
This book is about ADHD but funnily enough it's what made the most sense of what was going on with me, OCDer extraordinaire (tl;dr: babies absorb everything around them like sponges and their learning coping mechanisms can be disrupted if they are genetically predisposed to it; ADHD and OCD at thier core are last-resort coping mechanisms for an overwhelmed mind):
This might help make a bit more sense of when your mind turns super negative. It's geared towards trauma survivors but the part about the inner critic isn't exclusive to that:
If any of this seems interesting or useful, at all, please let me know, I've been researching all sorts of things trying to also cure and manage my own life-long OCD and I'm happy to try to find something that might help you. You deserve peace, too.
To actually share some vulnerability: I've spent my whole life guessing what to do. Feeling like everyone is onto a joke that no one told me, following a script that everyone has but I didn't get a copy. And then wondering how defective I was that everyone "got it" but me. Like how to behave and talk is super obvious and if only I paid more attention or made more of an effort I would "get it" too.
Try to act kind? People took advantage. Try to sound funny or clever? People laughed at me, not with me. Be honest? People looked at me weird. Lie? People avoided me.
I constantly felt (and still do, but a little less) that I'm messing up, that I'm offending people, that everyone is judging my every move and word and gesture and finding me wanting.
I've been discovering that none of this was the case. I have auditory processing disorder, prosopagnosia and dyspraxia, the combo from hell for socializing. Add in family dysfunction and no healthy examples of how adults are supposed to navigate life, and of course OCD developed from that.
If no one told me what to do, I would trial-and-error my way through finding the Right Perfect Answer to everything or die trying.
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(Anonymous) 2025-04-24 04:27 pm (UTC)(link)Your mind is trying desperately to make sense of what your nervous system is trying to tell you to do to survive (to fight, flee, freeze, fawn, sometimes more than one at the same time).
Thinking your way through the situation, trying to find solutions through cold logic and rationality isn't the way. The trauma is older and wasn't created through a logical problem.
It's unfortunately kind of a scavenger hunt to find actually useful information for this, but some of these might help, if not solve everything, at least give you a better direction of what to look for:
A brief explanation of how the nervous system fucking lies to you, the survival-obsessed bastard:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/5yfl82HVKevqHDydATLRzP
This book is about ADHD but funnily enough it's what made the most sense of what was going on with me, OCDer extraordinaire (tl;dr: babies absorb everything around them like sponges and their learning coping mechanisms can be disrupted if they are genetically predisposed to it; ADHD and OCD at thier core are last-resort coping mechanisms for an overwhelmed mind):
https://www.amazon.com/Scattered-Minds-Origins-Attention-Disorder/dp/0593714377
This might help make a bit more sense of when your mind turns super negative. It's geared towards trauma survivors but the part about the inner critic isn't exclusive to that:
https://www.pete-walker.com/shrinkingInnerCritic.htm
If any of this seems interesting or useful, at all, please let me know, I've been researching all sorts of things trying to also cure and manage my own life-long OCD and I'm happy to try to find something that might help you. You deserve peace, too.
same anon
(Anonymous) 2025-04-24 04:34 pm (UTC)(link)Try to act kind? People took advantage. Try to sound funny or clever? People laughed at me, not with me. Be honest? People looked at me weird. Lie? People avoided me.
I constantly felt (and still do, but a little less) that I'm messing up, that I'm offending people, that everyone is judging my every move and word and gesture and finding me wanting.
I've been discovering that none of this was the case. I have auditory processing disorder, prosopagnosia and dyspraxia, the combo from hell for socializing. Add in family dysfunction and no healthy examples of how adults are supposed to navigate life, and of course OCD developed from that.
If no one told me what to do, I would trial-and-error my way through finding the Right Perfect Answer to everything or die trying.
same anon again
(Anonymous) 2025-04-24 04:38 pm (UTC)(link)Anon, if you want to take this somewhere else, or even just prefer to let this die, let me know.