3D Student said:
If anyone has comments or suggestions, they are welcome to share of course. I just felt it was a good idea to share this in case anyone can relate and hasn't figured out that OCD is dangerous, especially in relation to the esoteric sense of becoming an STO candidate. If I got something wrong here, I'm open to discussion, as this is not a rigid conclusion, and is only based on personal experience in relation to the ideas here. I look forward to any replies. Thank you.
I was reminded of a story I read in Reader's Digest (I think it was). A wife came into the living room where she expressed her frustration at obsessing about something that was upsetting her at the moment. The husband was sitting in a chair, reading a newspaper. When she finished talking, the husband said something like: "aww honey, you just care a lot."
Just a simple statement really, but she stopped to think about it and realized it was true in some way. To make a longer story short, she wrote the story to tell the readers how her new perspective of her own reactions helped her learn to cope in some way. In other words, the positive spin changed the way she was looking at the problem.
Then, in another thread, I ran into the idea again:
Laura said:
...
Neuroses are generally related to "caring too much."
...
Then, in this very thread:
Laura said:
It seems to me that OCD is a survival mechanism that "grows" in a chaotic world where the individual doesn't feel that they have any control over the chaos and it frightens them.
Then, I was thinking back to the mid-nineties when I was looking into Dianetics/Scientology. I found a book at the local library called "The Volunteer Ministers Handbook". In it, there was some concept about 'chaos and the stable datum'. It had to do with situations when people get upset and/or sense themselves emotionally out of control for some reason. It was said they had temporarily lost connection with something which served as the data around which everything else (in a given context, or generally) was balanced. At those times, the suggested 'help' was to organize or tidy up something in the person's environment so that they could see that there was, in fact, something in order (organized correctly) during the time when they really needed to see that, especially while you're directing their attention to things around them to help 'exteriorize' their attention.
I kinda introduced this idea about 'caring too much' to my wife less than a month ago. She had some emotionally traumatic experiences growing up and claims to be OCD, but I have seen only a few manifestations of it. So I waited patiently, and the next time she mentioned something about being OCD over an issue, I said something like "Maybe you just care too much about...".
She didn't comment on that, but she became thoughtful, so maybe a useful seed was planted.
On a final note:
I have got a lot of usefulness from Adam Beck's writings concerning his work with people using CBT. For what it's worth, here's what is said about obsessions/compulsions specifically:
[quote author=Beck]
OBSESSIONS AND COMPULSIONS
The content of obsessions is generally concerned with some remote risk or danger expressed in the form of a doubt or warning. The person may continually doubt whether he has performed an act necessary to ensure his safety (for example, turning off a gas oven), or he may doubt whether he will be able to perform adequately. The thoughts differ from those of the anxiety-neurotic in that they are concerned with an action the patient believes he should have taken or an action he should not have taken. As an example of the latter, a patient repeatedly had the thought that he might have contracted leukemia because he touched the garment of a leukemic victim.
Compulsions consist of attempts to allay excessive doubts or obsessions through action. A hand-washing compulsion, for instance, is based on the patient's notion that he has not removed all the dirt or contaminants from parts of his body. He regards the dirt as a source of danger, either as a cause of physical disease or as a source of offensive odors.
We often see the triad of phobia-obsession-compulsion. A patient, for example, was afraid of being harmed by radiation. His phobia was manifested by avoiding contact with objects that might emit radiation (e.g., clocks, because of radioactive dials; or television sets). After an unavoidable contact with such an object, he ruminated about the possibility of contamination (obsession). This led him to taking frequent, prolonged baths to remove the presumed radioactive material (compulsion).
PHOBIA
In phobias, the anticipation of physical or psychological harm is confined to definable situations. If the patient can avoid these situations, then he does not feel threatened and may be tranquil. If he enters into these situations because of necessity or because of his own desire to overcome his problem, he experiences the typical subjective and physiological symptoms of the anxiety-neurotic.
As in the psychiatric disturbances described previously, the patient's cognitive response to the stimulus situation may be expressed in purely verbal form or in the form of imagery. A woman with a fear of heights, who ventured to the twentieth floor of a building, promptly had a visual image of the floor tilting, of sliding toward the window, and of falling out. She experienced intense anxiety, as though the image were an actual external event.
Fears of particular situations are based on the patient's exaggerated conception of specific harmful attributes of these situations. A person with a tunnel phobia will experience fears that the tunnel will collapse on him, that he will suffocate, or that he will have an acute, life-threatening illness and be unable to get help in time to save him. The acrophobic similarly reacts to high places with fears that he might fall off, that the structure might collapse, or that he might jump off impulsively.[/quote]
In addition, most of the patients he has helped with various disorders seem to follow a general formula to get back on track:
[quote author=Beck]
The formulation of the progress of this patient can now be fitted into the therapeutic model: (1) self-observations that led directly to the ideation preceding the anxiety; (2) establishing the relation between the thoughts and anxiety attack; (3) learning to regard thoughts as hypotheses rather than facts; (4) testing the hypotheses; (5) piecing together the assumptions that underlay and generated these hypotheses; (6) demonstrating that these rules composing her belief system were incorrect. Her belief system consisted of equations regarding probable mental and physical illness, loss of control, and involuntarily hurting somebody.[/quote]
Source: Cognitive Therapy and The Emotional Disorders, Aaron T. Beck, Meridian, 1979
I don't know if this formulation would be useful to someone with OCD, but I thought I'd post it just in case.
--Edit: included the phobia element of the O/C triad in the Beck quote
