RE: Just had one of the craziest dreams...
Interesting.. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. So I assume you have some form or had some form of OCD as well?
I noticed mine going back to my childhood when I got my first pet ferret and had to make sure the door was either shut so it wouldn't escape or that there was a wall barrier in place and I would go back and check it over and over and over again cause I couldn't remember if I shut it.
I still do this today to an extent when it comes to locking the door to my room when I leave, like I have to check numerous times.. And I have a pretty good memory! It's weird... It's like.. It doesn't lock in and I question if I really did it.. I found many others with OCD have this same issue, however my OCD in regards to washing my hands didn't show up until.. I think around my 20's.. So while I've had signs of OCD since my young teens, it was mild compared to what I deal with now and I wish there was some kind of easy answer that could solve it though I've been thinking about it and watching YouTube videos and studying about it for a while now and haven't been able to solve it.
Some people claim to have cured their OCD and others claim that it is impossible to cure and that you can only sort of improve the condition and make it less worse.
Your idea of counting and examining the thoughts and judgments and conditions sounds interesting and I've heard similar before I think in a YouTube video, however.. I don't know how to convince myself that I don't need to wash my hands, or that I really did lock the door.. It's really a pain and I feel like it ruins my life sometimes, though in other ways I feel like there is a gift on the other side of most struggles, so.. I do feel like it has helped me be smarter and more intelligent in some ways and it's not all bad.. I just wish I could somehow overcome it so it stops preventing me from living how I want to live.
I appreciate you sharing your insight and I haven't forgot about our other conversation on veganism, I'm just extremely busy right now trying to get the IFC contest I run started and haven't had the time to respond to many comments and messages as much as I'd like. I will get back to it at some point just trying to prioritize at the moment and this message of yours was very interesting so I had to make the time to respond. Thanks again for sharing your thoughts and I will have to think more about what you said.
Directly speaking the reason you cannot remember whether or not you locked a door is because your attention has been grabbed by a felt worry, and there is only so much attention available at any given time. That fact is no different than an inability to read a book while driving for instance. Your attention simply isn't on the memory of you leaving a room, it is on the worry briefly, and then it is led along the activities developed to insulate that worry from a child who could not understand it . The worry is informing you about a conditioned sense of inadequacy which gets misattributed, and externalized. That habit begins to break up as soon as you see for yourself and engage with the pang of inadequacy, the felt impulse, as it emerges in real time.
Hmmm.. That makes a decent amount of sense. However I think in order to shift from the focus of worry to the focus I want, I have to figure out a way to want that more than the worry.. And the worry is so strong that it's difficult to logically think of the alternative, I think I'm like.. Having a battle within my mind in regards to what it wants more.. Part of me wants the comfort that comes with double checking or feeling clean and another part wants the freedom and health that comes with not having to do those things.
Last night I was thinking about trying to be more "funny" and less "serious".. Maybe if I could somehow get that positive energy connected with not checking the lock so much or washing the hands that would help.. Or if perhaps I could turn it into a funny joke that what I'm doing is so absurd and doesn't make sense, maybe the positivity from the laughter could help pull me more away from the comfort I get from feeling secure and clean... I dunno.. it's tough.. Thanks for trying to help me through it though I really appreciate it!
"I don't know how to convince myself that I don't need to wash my hands, or that I really did lock the door.."
If you observe the process of becoming convinced that you need to wash your hands, and the process of becoming uncertain whether you locked the door or not - perceive it, sense it, watch it somatically in real time - you unlearn your conviction, certainty, or "nagging doubt". The certainty that you need to wash your hands is the end point of a process happening in psychosomatic space; subjective space. That process takes time; it's not instantaneous even though it might seem to be. Because the process takes time it can be felt/sensed/perceived. That is not really any different than feeling that you are hungry for instance, it just takes more subtle attention because we're not used to observing processes that happen so quickly.
But If you try to convince yourself on the heels of a compulsion, after the fact of it, you will tend to suppress it and its causes, which makes it harder to perceive how it comes about in the first place. Sense the beginning glimmer of compulsion in real time and you unlearn it.