Reconciling The Past And Present

I’m starting to see a new therapist now. I’m saving a lot of money by not having the car, though that is already made up for by having to deal with energy bills now in the new place. I wasn’t paying any energy bills in the shared hell house, so I’m interested to see where that settles out at. At least I only have electricity to deal with as there is no gas here! I’m a big fan of that. I’ll have to ask parents for a bit more money to pay for the therapy.

The challenge for me is how to reconcile the level of OCD that I’ve subjected myself to for the past 18 months. It was bad at times during childhood, it was bad since five years ago, it was terrible whilst living with my brother and parents, even worse whilst living in the car then with my aunt, but initially when moving into the shared house I was getting it so under control, after everything. I was really consistently improving, even the pandemic helped in that aspect as it greatly reduced what demands I did have.

But since 18 months ago I’ve been struggling with a particular compulsion which really trumped all others. It’s been the most persuasive and time-consuming compulsion/obsession that I’ve ever experienced. It’s also been the most physically-damaging since it aggravated my knees, at times injuring me to the point where it took several days to a week to recover. Only upon reaching that acute level of injury and limitation was I able to override the OCD obsession since the one urge became stronger than the other, and my brain went into a kind of ‘safe’ mode. But inevitably I kept relapsing. This situation was crossing over into self-harm. And it was completely messing up my sleeping patterns since through anxious paralysis I wasn’t using up my energy— my waking days have been a few hours longer than 24 hours. Only sustained physical and mental activity make me sleepy, and I cannot sleep without being sleepy.

And although writing about OCD and such things on my blog used to help me, that resource has long-since lost its impact. There have just been too many accumulated traumas and subsequent efforts to ‘restart’. It has lost its novelty and sense of achievement, there is nothing fun or interesting about this situation anymore.

On top of that, this particular OCD compulsion is the ultimate compulsion in that it’s one that is very sensitive to talk about, thus I cannot shine light on it to help it lose its power. It’s the singularity compulsion. At the same time though, for the reason that it’s so all-consuming I have been able to see some kind of ‘purpose’ and ‘logic’ to it— it drowns out all other OCD ideas and boils everything down to a single focus— either focusing on the obsession or on resisting it. It’s also obvious why it began when it did— 18 months ago was when the major landlord trauma started. Even the causal inevitability and predictivity of that annoy me.

The only reason I’ve kept going through all this was the basic satisfaction in surviving another day, knowing I was in an extremely difficult situation, and using my ingenuity to get through it. But now that I’m not in an immediately-difficult situation with my physical circumstances, the sense of loss through OCD is so much worse. And in fact it is triggered by positive events happening too— what I call ‘Opportunity OCD’— OCD as a self-sabotaging tactic whenever I want and need to allow myself to experience things. Then there are the related challenges of rumination and dissociation.

So anyway the first therapy session is next week and I look forward to getting a sense of reconciliation with everything.

🌪