In the ongoing quest to suppress ye olde OCD, the whack-a-mole quest, several moles were destroyed viciously and then new moles popped up. Some people have what I had considered a truly weird OCD problem, where they think they have hit or run over someone or something with their vehicle and have to go back and check. I was like, whew, thank God that doesn't happen to me - I can't imagine that ever happening to me. Indeed, one of the public cases where the woman discusses her problem made it clear that she developed this concern after having a traumatic car accident. Sure, I said, makes sense. Not for me! Wrong. Having blasted away most of my big issues, taking one fearless step after another, I found that the brain is a clever trickster and will try to find other outlets for its inherent high anxiety level. The other day it decided to tell me that I had, in fact, run over some pedestrian who clearly was dying in a ditch now, or had been run over in the road, so I should return and investigate just in case.
Obviously this had NOT occurred, and the "me" part (who knows! lol!) started quickly explaining that I would know if I hit someone, DUH, and even running over a squirrel was a big crisis you could feel under the wheels (
), and that even on the one in a million odds I did unknowingly hit someone I would at the very least hear about it later and be able to identify myself as the driver.
This just... cannot happen, must not happen. Yet if you obsess about how this is NOT an acceptable symptom, your trickster brain will try to serve it up to you again when least convenient. So now I have to write myself a note that says, it is not impossible that I may run over some innocent pedestrian, squirrel, or dog with my car and maybe, maybe even not realize it at the time. The odds of this are incredibly unlikely, but it's not impossible, and if it happens, well, we will just deal with it like anyone would, because it could happen to anyone. Usually, you know it.
The brain also tried serving up "bad pajamas", which is one of its old favorites, but I beat that down too. Increasingly as I succeed in shutting off the OCD valves, the pressure releases in other areas that I don't know how to fix so easily, like the cheerful activity called "pathological excoriation". My relatives have had this problem and I was like, NEVER will this happen to me, gross, obviously, never! Yet here we are, having to force-stop the process with great effort. The good thing about OCD, as some of you fellow sufferers here know, is that after the initial delight of soothing your anxiety or making you feel in control and productive, OCD quickly turns sour and you can see how bad the thing you're doing is, and doing it won't give you any pleasure. Some relief, maybe, but no pleasure. Excoriation is, by contrast, more like addictions insofar as a straight shot of dopamine hits you when you do it and it is DE LIGHT FUL. I have always delighted in picking and scratching and plucking abject crusts and accruals off of places where they shouldn't be - it's literally the same pleasure involved in running a Clorox wipe over a smutzy surface or windexing your window, or picking a dried crumb of earwax off your kid's ear, or the pinnacle of all such delights: using your one long fingernail to loosen a horrifying dried-snot-seal plugging the nose of a sleeping small child who needs the help, lest it run around all morning thereafter with slimy half-dried snot balls stuck to its face. You HAVE to do it, you're doing a necessary good deed, almost medical because the poor child has a runny nose, and it's just the most dried out, grotesque thing, like an octopus died on the kid's nostril opening, and ahhhhhhhhhhh you have plucked it away and whisked it into a tissue. JOY. I have no idea how to combat the excoriation issue, though at least I have no toddlers and no one who will let me pick and scratch at their abject crusts. You can wear mittens, of course - I casually mentioned it to the Therapist Guy and laughed, and he became very grave. He knows me. PEOPLE HAVE HURT THEMSELVES THIS WAY, he said. Okay, guy, okay. I'm working on it. I recognize that blood means sepsis potential, and I don't like seeing the blood, as sepsis is my enemy.