Rumination on being a bad friend

Hi everyone,

Lately I've found myself ruminating on being a bad friend and that my friends don't like me. I keep apologising to them for being annoying, they tell me I'm not annoying but I don't believe them. One friend came round for dinner and I worried that she didn't really want to come and was only being polite but telling people behind my back that she didn't want to come. After she left I worried she might have been bored. Also yesterday I lay awake worrying that I'm making my friends ill as I started to realise a few of them have had health problems since they met me and I was worrying this was my fault and that I should stop bothering them with my problems and then maybe they'd be ok.

Does this sound like OCD?

Dear kah80:

It sounds like you worry, unnecessarily. Troubled. Uncomfortable. When did it start? what did you worry about before you worried about this? What are the circumstances of your life as is? What hurts and fears are you carrying from childhood? Answers are in insight. Diagnoses are of very limited value.

atina

A diagnosis would be useful for me because maybe it would stop my hours of panic that I don't have OCD and my hours of googling symptoms to reassure myself I have it. Maybe...

But in answer to your questions, I have worried for as long as I can remember. I have many worries. I've listed them in another post here post1800371.html#p1800371

Well, diagnoses are really artificially determined clusters of symptoms. They are not about causes or root problems, only symptoms but artificially determined. They are useful in different contexts and harmful in other contexts. Root cause: fear. Attending good psychotherapy so to gain insight- of intellect and emotion- into the fears and hurts of your childhood, learning skills to manage fear, these are useful.

Fear from childhood, fear split from awareness of the child because it was too intense and child not skilled to handle it, that fear circulates in the brain and attaches itself to THIS worry and THAT worry- any thought will do. The reason that cut off, split fear NEEDS a thought, that is something to worry about, because, your brain figures, if you know WHAT you are afraid of, have a thinking idea of what it is, then you can resolve the danger. Without a thought for the fear to attach itself to, there is no way you can resolve the danger.

The real danger was the danger you encountered in your childhood. Therapy will CONNECT the fear to that danger that really was. Until that happens, the fear roams and roams and looks for a home. No home will be its home for long, except for the real one, where it originated.

atina