Accidental triggering?

So I have OCD. I know this because a doctor has told me this. My family members and people on this board have told me this. But as you all know, doubt will still creep in.

I also had a pretty lonely childhood. This is a separate issue. I felt like I didn't measure up to others. I was very shy and insecure.

So the other day my wife and I were talking and I was going around in circles. She knows I have OCD but I don't think fully understands it. I was thinking back to my childhood and kind of mashing those problems and an OCD issue where I have an image of my dad in his underwear or just the underwear itself, into one giant mess. I did suffer from OCD back then as well.

So I asked my wife "what if this has something to do with my childhood and I need to go to years of therapy to figure out what went wrong in my past?" I of course was just thinking about that image. Just that one OCD thought. But she said "I don't know. Maybe. I can't know that, only you can."

This FREAKED me out. I know she was probably mostly referring to my issues of loniliness as a child, but I interpreted it as there might be something in my childhood that made it so this image of my dad and his underwear stick and in order to get it out I would need to dig deep into my childhood to figure it out. This scared me because I had received some solace when my therapist initially told me: "this has nothing to do with your dad or underwear. We don't need to go searching through your childhood. You have OCD." I started to fear I hadn't told the whole story to my therapist and that there was something I needed to explore. I started to feel like my world was crumbling and that these images DO have some meaning.

Anyway, I'm sure some of you have family members who try and help but don't 100% know the disease. I think my wife was trying to help. I pray that this is still 100% OCD. I understand I have issues to reconcile from my childhood, but I just so desperately want to know that these images are COMPLETELY meaningless. Sorry for my rambling. Thoughts? Similar experiences?

Dear brad2534:

I am 55 and had OCD since I was 5 or so. I went to my first serious psychotherapy five years ago when my healing journey started. This is my input about your post:

My childhood was very, very relevant to my OCD. And from what I read of others' OCDs, others' childhood is also relevant. As a matter of fact, childhood is always relevant: this is when a person is formed (called "formative years" for a reason). Excess, ongoing fear started then and that fear is what fuels OCD.

The good news for you (expressing the fear in your post) is that if you attend psychotherapy and explore your past for 20 years, or longer, it will not take the OCD away, so no need to fear having to attend years of psychotherapy, or psychoanalysis.

Once the excess, ongoing fear took hold in your brain, creating the OCD symptoms, you can't undo it because you understand the past and the images that trouble you. Understand as much as you will, the OCD symptoms already took hold.

Insight into the past does help in combination with learning skills such as relaxation, meditation, mindfulness. It helps to understand the nature of the fear, but it is not required, even if it was possible, to feel that fear of long ago, again. There is no feeling it and releasing it. Doesn't work that way. There is no secret in those images and if you find out the secret, the OCD will go away.

Please let me know if you want any more of my input with any more of your sharing.

atina

Yeah, that makes sense. I totally understand that OCD starts during childhood and mine absolutely started during my formative years, so it was rough. My fear was that maybe it wasn't even necessarily OCD, and somehow something I did involving this image is what is haunting me and I would have to completely rearrange my view of this issue and dig for why this particular image bothers me.

But it sounds like that's not the case and I do in fact have OCD and this particular image is meaningless and can't rule my life. Correct?

Dear brad2534:

If you want to share with me, maybe I can help you with a bit of insight. Not as a psychotherapist which I am not, but as one who attended such. Tell me about the image/ memory and your relationship with your father, if you want... as well as anything from your childhood that connects with that image...?

atina

My dad is the best man I know. I love him to death. He used to walk around in his underwear in the house. So around that time I had this thing where I was worried that certain images would be associated with fun things (already was developing OCD). So that happened with the underwear image as I didn't want it sharing space with things I found nice or fun. Eventually I just tried to force it out of my head and it became a thing where I just had a fuzzy image and then I started obsessing about details in the underwear itself. That's what really persists now. Just details about underwear. Color, fabric, etc. And I just get a sinking feeling when I think about those images along with things I enjoy. So sometimes I just avoid fun things.

Dear brad2534:

I am relieved in a sense because I thought there was more to the underwear image. I think I understand it: it is a .. grouping (in groups) OCD, like if I saw a black shirt in a group of shirts, it didn't belong because it was black. And black was bad luck. So it had to be in a separate group or location. That kind of thing? Placing either things or images ... anything in groups, safe groups, dangerous groups... these are rituals, symbolic acts to create a safe space for ourselves, either in the dresser drawer (my example) or in your images mental drawer (yours)- did I get it?

atina

Yeah, pretty much. I just feel like seeing in my mind the image of underwear and also something I enjoy, ruins what I enjoy. Like its contaminating the good and fun thoughts. So I tend to just not do fun things because I believe I'll just not be able to handle the image along with it. Even though I know it would go away shortly after I started doing the fun activity.

Dear brad2534:

You got stuck on the underwear image, or the underwear image got stuck to any image in the Fun Category of images. The stickiness of the underwear image, the power by which it sticks to a fun image, is fear. It scares you that this image is sticking to the other fun images and contaminating them. This fear is the glue. Fine logic says then: remove the fear and the underwear image becomes unglued.

So, what if every time the underwear image gets glued to a fun image, relax and imagine, have the visual image of the underwear becoming unglued from the fun image, as in the fabric of it falling apart, disintegrating. Every time: relax and imagine the disintegration of the underwear.

Until it becomes boring...

Will you try it?

atina