Little update on my mental illness recovery. For some reason, my false attractions are more weaker than they were before. I just try my best not to give those intrusive thoughts and feelings an attention because OCD is like a little spoiled kid who wants a toy and will annoy their parents and make them to buy one. The thing is, I don't feel like myself. I feel like this is a different reality. I'm not exactly sure if it's normal for a person with OCD to feel this way, even when they're getting better. If I had OCD with only intrusive thoughts, I would easily dismiss them. But since I also have intrusive feelings, it just made things more confusing. I know I keep complaining, but this post is for venting.
What you're experiencing is entirely normal for someone recovering from OCD. When those start to subside (whether from medication or from another resolution), you really do feel like a different person because your brain is no longer hijacked. If it's been hijacked a long time, then "normal" doesn't feel normal, because you aren't used to it. Nothing wrong with talking about this, and nothing wrong with venting. It's important to express your feelings to help get past what's been going on for you. It does sound like you're headed on a very positive track!
I am lucky enough to have not had to deal with OCD personally. But I have worked with quite a few people with OCD and I'm fairly familiar with how psychotropic medications work. Since OCD is in part driven by an overabundance of dopamine and epinephrine, the medications that reduce symptoms work in part by reducing the availability of those neurotransmitters. The problem is, dopamine is basically what makes life interesting for us, and without it, we'd be zombies. So if you are used to living life with excess amounts of dopamine, then normalizing the amount of it is, in the short term, going to make life seem very different. But in this case, different isn't bad... it's just something you aren't used to, because these levels have always been too high and now you have to cognitively adjust to this "normal" state.
But I wonder why did I deserve this. I have so many things to experience, but I'm just distracted by those disturbing thoughts, which I can't distinguish between reality and imagination.
You didn't do anything to deserve this. OCD is a byproduct of trauma that impact brain development. Nothing you did caused or influenced its development.
I don't know how did I get it. Maybe I just have a very low self-esteem because I was bullied at a young age when I was 11 to 14. Before having OCD, I'd had many intrusive thoughts, but they never affected me severly. At the age of 15, I became increasingly worried that I was gay. I felt like my reality started changing. I had no idea why it was happening. My anxiety was uncontrollable. I started doing research about my intrusive thoughts. First, I searched about fear of being bisexual, and as I was scrolling through articles, I found HOCD. I related to its symptoms. The next day I remember was I had those intrusive urges to kiss the same sex. Those urges weren't natural. I did not desire. Those urges were forced, not desires. If they were natural, I would desire to act on them, but yet, I couldn't tell whether they're intrusive or not. I was constantly questioning my sexuality non-stop. I couldn't figure it out. I lost my full attraction to the opposite sex. I started questioning whether my attractions to men were fake or real and I was manipulated by heteronormative society. But if they were fake, I would know they were fake. This is what my HOCD would tell me.
Well, it feels to me like you were (luckily past tense) in a very stressed out state. Stress does such things to people, it can make you feel agitated and jump to conclusions, act recklessly, be all like... "I really need to do this right now". It's stress response in my perception, just a very prolonged one, because your stressors were prolonged and they became a part of you. It happens to many people, happened to many people I know, me included, not to everyone in the form of OCD, me also, but I had periods when I was very stressed out that I just felt strong urges to "do something" or would circle in gaming on my phone before I could think what I'm doing, I rushed around in all kinds of nonsensical circles both with my actions and thinking... No need to blame yourself, unless you didn't stop yourself from something extremely stupid to the point of being dangerous, because it's just how humans work. It's okay to feel stressed out, even extremely so, the stress response is a natural element of the human body and it's supposed to be helpful in times of crisis. Just like all feelings, they are there for a reason. And it's okay to need help fixing your emotions and for them to not always work in a way that serves you best. Lots of people have trouble with their emotions, I'm not sure about the statistics, but a quite large percentage, I reamember reading about it one day, it was as high 30% people having been treated with antidepressants at some point, but don't quote me on that. I just googled that depression alone affected 7% of Americans in a given year (not in their lifetime). Just few people talk about it, because of the mental health stigma in the society.
What I mean by stress is... all negative emotional experiences like bullying - are stressors. Too much of exposure to them can trigger things like depression, OCD, anxiety... they're all negative emotions in excess and that impair functioning.
IT's not the bullying. It's sort of complicated and nuanced to explain in short, but basically, the bullying is a symptom of a problem with either your caregiving parent(s) or your relationship with them. c A child who has a healthy parental relationship, and gets bullied or harmed in any way, should immediately go home and tell their caregiving parent, who should take action to resolve it. My guess is you either didn't tell them, or they didn't do anything. Either sends the message that your needs don't matter, and won't be addressed. And that message is communicated very early in life, before age 3, and your infant brain adapts to that behavior/message from your parents. That adaptation, in turn, influences how your brain develops. And that's what gives rise to the neurochemical deficiencies that later in life manifest as OCD. This is also not your parents fault; they behave based on what wounds and experiences they carry, which come from their parents (and their parents wounds come from *their* parents, which is what the study of intergenerational trauma is about.) The good news is, this is fixable. But the first step is understanding the brain adaptations, getting help (starting with medication and therapy) and the working on repatterning your brain.
I would usually not tell my parents about my experiences with bullying in school. They don't have psychological issues or anything like that, but I do. I have OCD.
I hate to tell you this but... your issues come from your upbringing. So yes, your parents do have issues. They may not be obvious to you, but I absolutely guarantee you they are there, and that's the origin of the OCD. That's based on an enormous number of studies looking at what are called Adverse Childhood Experiences and how they impact brain development.
Well there's one time that I got slapped on my face by my mother when I was a kid and as years went by, she doesn't do that anymore. She's not abusive, but what she did was wrong.
I think you're missing the point. It's not a single issue. These things come up from *years* of events that can be overt or subtle; as Gabor Maté says, "Trauma is not just something bad that happens; it can also be something good that didn't happen." And it normally manifests as some way in which our parents were not able to be there for us. I'm not in your head or at your house so I can't pinpoint exactly what it is. What I can tell you, pretty much without question, is that your OCD is, in some way, a byproduct of the environment you grew up in. That's pretty widely accepted knowledge in the emerging field of trauma psychology. Working with a therapist to understand how your home experience influenced you will be crucial in getting the OCD managed and resolved in the long term.
