Day 153- When OCD Prevents Life

This blog is continued from:

 

Day 143- Dermatillomania: Staring the Beast in the Face
Day 144- Dermatillomania: Staring the Beast in the Face (pt 2)
Day 145- Dermatillomania: Staring the Beast in the Face (pt 3)
Day 146- Dermatillomania: Staring the Beast in the Face (pt 4)
Day 147- The Comfort and Security of OCD
Day 149- OCD: It Doesn't Matter, If No One Knows
Day 150- OCD and Distorting Reality

Day 152- TheFear of Not Having OCD

 

     I was going to write about the terrible feeling I get when I do not complete OCD rituals, and how I create this feeling and perpetuate it. But I have to jump back to a couple blogs ago wherein I identified the self-sabotage that creates a world of chaos, disorder and fear which then justifies the OCD. I want to  address this point again because it recently played out in an event in my life.

It’s hard to wrap the mind around self-sabotage, because why would anyone do things that make life harder for themselves? I had long been under the impression that things will just work themselves out, and my ‘natural state of being’ is one that will automatically work towards improvement and doing what’s best for me. But this is not so. And once you start looking at things and events within the understanding that subtle or unconscious self-sabotage is in fact a possibility, you start to see it everywhere. Just a simplified example: if you are cooking or cleaning or something, and you knock something over and make a mess, how mad do you get? If you forget your keys or accidentally lock yourself out or forget to pick something up at the grocery store, don’t you notice yourself saying things like “I can’t believe I did that, I’m so stupid, I ALWAYS do that, when am I going to learn?” This is some nasty stuff to say to oneself over little insignificant things that could instead be dealt with by, for example, taking a breath and just cleaning up the mess, calling your roommate to let you in, using a different ingredient in the recipe, etc… and reminding yourself to cook or clean a little more slowly, to always put your keys in the same spot, or to bring a list when shopping (problem, solution, learning, prevention, benefit). But instead we create this meanness within ourselves. It’s this brutality that most would probably never impose upon another person, so why ourselves? It just makes us feel bad! We’re manipulating our own emotions and creating an internal environment that is not stable and ready to take on the day, and to take on life.

And the question that has to be asked in self-honesty is: do we really even want to take on the day, and take on Life?   Getting angry and mad and resentful towards oneself, for whatever reason, is disempowering. It really does a good job of setting one up to say “fuck it- I can’t do anything about it and I can’t do anything about myself. I am unforgiveable, unchangeable, so I might as well just succumb to it…

And then we succumb; because what is the point or life, really, if we’re just nasty towards ourselves all the time, creating this internal environment of self-hate, disappointment and anger? And then this is where addiction can come in, wherein, I would find myself thinking: “this is the only thing I enjoy and the only thing that gives me pleasure.”

It’s like, in our mind we know what we’re doing, we are not exactly dummies in this respect. We know how we are going to make ourselves feel when we treat ourselves like shit within ourselves. And we know if we start to take responsibility and start to change this, we will lose our excuses, justifications and reasons for our addictions- the one (or more) thing(s) that ‘gives us pleasure’- and I mean all addictions here- addiction to television, drugs, food, OCD, worrying,-   everything that is habitual and comfortable for the mind- activities which are not beneficial for self, yet that are participated in daily. And this is what I have notice within myself: we beat ourselves up and in turn we justify addictions that make us feel better.

So, this is a whole can of worms that I’m not going to go into any further in this blog, but I wanted to clarify my understanding of self-sabotage in simplistic terms, because today I saw very clearly how I sabotage myself in a way that has been causing huge problems for me. I wrote a small series about it in relation to the difficulties I was experiencing while studying and finishing my degree- but I never quite got to the bottom of it (Blog Series- Becoming An Effective Student). It plays out daily in so many ways. Sometimes it is very small, and sometimes it runs my day- but each time it happens, it is an opportunity for me to look into what exactly is going on within myself, and to identify and take apart the pattern that is sabotaging me from really actually living for real.

So, what happens for me is, on my days off for example: I’ll say, I ‘m going to go to yoga today, I ‘m going to get some groceries and cook for the week, and I’m going to do some writing. But then, what will happen is varying degrees of self-sabotage (I can’t go to the grocery store, I look like shit, it will take too long anyways, and I don’t have the money. I’m too tired to go to yoga, I have nothing to wear, all my clothes look bad, I’m just going to stay home, I ‘ll go tomorrow, etc…)

So today, I woke up and there was a note for me that the car needed to be registered, which would involve me taking 2 or 3 very easy steps, and driving but 15 minutes away to the town hall to pay for it and get the stickers. What happened was- I got myself to the point of moving towards starting the task, and I had huge resistances like “I don’t want to do this, I can’t do this, ” etc… The fact that I HAD to do it is kind of like cheating, because I couldn’t get out of it and drive around in an unregistered car…. I did contemplate it- but this is something I HAD to do. When it’s something I don’t absolutely HAVE to do, it’s easier to succumb to the self-sabotage.

So I was standing there thinking to myself  that I was so stressed and anxious, and I just wanted to stay home, I don’t want to go out there and see people, and have people looking at me and seeing me like this, and I felt completely stuck. And then all of a sudden I had this moment, where I just said to myself, “how am I creating this for myself?” And I realized I was in fact creating it for myself, and that I don’t want to be this way. And it is my choice to either be this way or to change.

So I ‘m going to use self-forgiveness to look into how I create this stuck-ness, this inability to move myself to do the things I plan to do- which are all things that are beneficial to me, and that would be taking steps toward expanding my potential. But instead I remain stuck, unable, and the only thing that gives me any satisfaction in those moments is picking my skin.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to turn thoughts of tasks and responsibilities into energetic charges and experiences within me, by constantly and continuously thinking seemingly imperceptible thoughts such as “I can’t do this, I’m not going to be able to do it, something is going to prevent me from doing this, if I start I will never finish, I won’t do it well enough and I will be disappointed, etc..” which are all actually thoughts based on memories of times where the play-out of events didn’t go the way I planned, or I gave up, or accepted and allowed myself to succumb to fear, and instead of learning from those situations, I took them to be ‘just who I am’, I identified with them and perpetuated them until I actually made them into true statements of who I am, and so now I have to deal with them In real time, because the past is always present here with us.

I commit myself to continue learning how to recognize those moments I experience as a complete ‘stuckness’ for what they are, which are moments of resistance because of and due to the fact that I have projected the past into the future and allowed it to freeze me in time because I’m too scared to walk into the disaster I have already created for myself in my mind.

 

I commit myself to, in moments of ‘stuckness’, unstick myself within the realization that I can direct myself through any and every moment as the choice to not continue repeating the past, but to walk myself into and as an unscripted future which I decide.

When and as I feel the ‘stuckness’ wherein I just want to stay home and not see anyone and not move myself, I stop, and I breathe. I bring myself back to self-movement by reminding myself that I am the creator of this experience, and this experience does not determine Who I Am, and I show myself that this in fact a FACT, by walking myself through the situation in awareness, so that my thoughts are not directing me, but I am directing myself, and I show myself that my thoughts are wrong: I Am Not a disaster, a disappointment and a failure, this is NOT who I am, I am rather capable, learning, adaptive and able.

I will continue with self-forgiveness in my next blog…

 

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