Ocd Person Quotes

Oh, I'm crazy all right. I do have plenty of psychoses. Multiple personality, delusional dementia, OCD. I've got them all, but most of all, I'm crazy about you.

Because now people use the phrase OCD to describe minor personality quirks. "Oooh, I like my pens in a line, I'm so OCD." NO YOU'RE FUCKING NOT. "Oh my God, I was so nervous about that presentation, I literally had a panic attack." NO YOU FUCKING DIDN'T. "I'm so hormonal today. I just feel totally bipolar." SHUT UP, YOU IGNORANT BUMFACE.

Sometimes your belief system is really your fears attached to rules.

Some people think mental illness is a matter of mood, a matter of personality. They think depression is simply a form of being sad, that OCD is a form of being uptight. They think the soul is sick, not the body. It is, they believe, something that you have some choice over. I know how wrong this is. When I was a child, I didn't understand. I would wake up in a new body and wouldn't comprehend why things felt muted, dimmer. Or the opposite--I'd be supercharged, unfocused, like a radio at top volume flipping quickly from station to station. Since I didn't have access to the body's emotions, I assumed the ones I was feeling were my own. Eventually, though, I realized these inclinations, these compulsions, were as much a part of the body as its eye color or its voice. Yes, the feelings themselves were intangible, amorphous, but the cause of the feelings was a matter of chemistry, biology. It is a hard cycle to conquer. The body is working against you. And because of this, you feel even more despair. Which only amplifies the imbalance. It takes uncommon strength to live with these things. But I have seen that strength over and over again.

This will sound strange, and yet I'm sure it was the point: it was a bit like being high. That, for me, anyway, had always been the attraction of drugs, to stop the brutal round of hypercritical thinking, to escape the ravages of an unoccupied mind cannibalizing itself.

The return of the voices would end in a migraine that made my whole body throb. I could do nothing except lie in a blacked-out room waiting for the voices to get infected by the pains in my head and clear off. Knowing I was different with my OCD, anorexia and the voices that no one else seemed to hear made me feel isolated, disconnected. I took everything too seriously. I analysed things to death. I turned every word, and the intonation of every word over in my mind trying to decide exactly what it meant, whether there was a subtext or an implied criticism. I tried to recall the expressions on people’s faces, how those expressions changed, what they meant, whether what they said and the look on their faces matched and were therefore genuine or whether it was a sham, the kind word touched by irony or sarcasm, the smile that means pity. When people looked at me closely could they see the little girl in my head, being abused in those pornographic clips projected behind my eyes? That is what I would often be thinking and such thoughts ate away at the façade of self-confidence I was constantly raising and repairing. (describing dissociative identity disorder/mpd symptoms)

Not me," said Orion cheerily. "I'm just a teenager with hormones running wild. And may I say ,young fairy lady, they're running wild in your direction." Holly lifted her visor and looked the hormonal teenager in the eye. "This had better not be a game, Artemis. If you do not have some serious psychosis, you will be sorry." "Oh, I'm crazy, alright. I do have plenty of psychoses," said Orion Cheerily. "Multiple personality, delusional dementia, OCD. I've got them all, but most of all, I'm crazy about you.

You can't compare men or women with mental disorders to the normal expectations of men and women in without mental orders. Your dealing with symptoms and until you understand that you will always try to find sane explanations among insane behaviors. You will always have unreachable standards and disappointments. If you want to survive in a marriage to someone that has a disorder you have to judge their actions from a place of realistic expectations in regards to that person's upbringing and diagnosis.

I wondered how you would react when i revealed to you my hidden parts, my ugly parts that don't do well in the sunlight

Some people think mental illness is a matter of mood, a matter of personality. They think depression is simply a form of being sad, that OCD is a form of being uptight. They think the soul is sick, not the body. It is, they believe, something that you have some choice over. I know how wrong it is.

An average person can have four thousand thoughts a day, and not all of them are useful or rational.

Because now people use the phrase OCD to describe minor personality quirks. “Oooh, I like my pens in a line, I’m so OCD.” NO YOU’RE FUCKING NOT. “Oh my God, I was so nervous about that presentation, I literally had a panic attack.” NO YOU FUCKING DIDN’T.

According to scientists, there are three stages of love: lust, attraction, and attachment. And, it turns out, each of the stages is orchestrated by chemicals—neurotransmitters—in the brain. As you might expect, lust is ruled by testosterone and estrogen. The second stage, attraction, is governed by dopamine and serotonin. When, for example, couples report feeling indescribably happy in each other’s presence, that’s dopamine, the pleasure hormone, doing its work. Taking cocaine fosters the same level of euphoria. In fact, scientists who study both the brains of new lovers and cocaine addicts are hard-pressed to tell the difference. The second chemical of the attraction phase is serotonin. When couples confess that they can’t stop thinking about each other, it’s because their serotonin level has dropped. People in love have the same low serotonin levels as people with OCD. The reason they can’t stop thinking about each other is that they are literally obsessed. Oxytocin and vasopressin control the third stage: attachment or long-term bonding. Oxytocin is released during orgasm and makes you feel closer to the person you’ve had sex with. It’s also released during childbirth and helps bond mother to child. Vasopressin is released postcoitally. Natasha knows these facts cold. Knowing them helped her get over Rob’s betrayal. So she knows: love is just chemicals and coincidence. So why does Daniel feel like something more?

An obsessive is an addict-in-waiting.

We are up in the attic doing a jigsaw puzzle, which may be the single fastest way one OCD person reveals herself to another.

Some people think mental illness is a matter of mood, a matter of personality. They think depression is simply a form of being sad, that OCD is a form of being uptight. They think the soul is sick, not the body. It is, they believe, something that you have some choice over. I know how wrong this is.

Some people with OCD are compelled to pick up pieces of broken glass from the street. They worry that, if they don’t, then someone else might cut themselves on the glass. If the person with OCD fails to prevent that happening, they think, well I may as well have walked up to the stranger and deliberately hurt them. So they take

Personality is a slot machine, and the cherries, lemons, and bells are your SSRI system, your schizophrenic tendency, your left/right brain lobalization, your anxiety proclivity, your wiring glitches, your place on the autistic and OCD spectrums - and to these we must add the deep-level influences of the machines and systems of intelligence that guided your brain into maturity.

Much of what we do arises from automatic programming that bypasses conscious awareness and may even run contrary to our intentions, as Dr. Schwartz points out: The passive side of mental life, which is generated solely and completely by brain mechanisms, dominates the tone and tenor of our day-to-day, even our second-to-second experience. During the quotidian business of daily life, the brain does indeed operate very much as a machine does. Decisions that we may believe to be freely made can arise from unconscious emotional drives or subliminal beliefs. They can be dictated by events of which we have no recollection. The stronger a person’s automatic brain mechanisms and the weaker the parts of the brain that can impose conscious control, the less true freedom that person will be able to exercise in her life. In OCD, and in many other conditions, no matter how intelligent and well-meaning the individual, the malfunctioning brain circuitry may override rational judgment and intention. Almost any human being when overwhelmed by stress or powerful emotions, will act or react not from intention but from mechanisms that are set off deep in the brain, rather than being generated in the conscious and volitional segments of the cortex. When acting from a driven or triggered state, we are not free.

Some people think mental illness is a matter of mood, a matter of personality. They think depression is simply a form of being sad, that OCD is a form of being uptight. They think the soul is sick, not the body. It is, they believe, something that you have some choice over. I know how wrong that is.

Someone asked me recently, what it is like to live with OCD. I paused for a while and said, imagine watching your sibling getting run over by a truck in front of your eyes, not once, not twice, but repeatedly like in a looped video, or your child getting beaten up at school, or your partner getting abused by strangers on the street - and the only way you can stop that event from happening is to keep on repeating the task that you were carrying out when the vision first appeared in your mind, until some other less emotionally agonizing thought breaks the loop of that particular vision and replaces it - and though you know, it's just a thought and not the destiny of the people you love, you feel it excruciatingly necessary to keep repeating the task until the thought passes, so that nothing bad happens to your loved ones - and that's what it is like inside the head of a person with OCD, every moment of their life.

takes a lot of energy to be a good person all the time and never show a trace of annoyance, and there are times, like just now, when my mask slips.

Oh, I’m crazy, all right. I do have plenty of psychoses,” said Orion cheerily. “Multiple personality, delusional dementia, OCD. I’ve got them all, but most of all, I’m crazy about you.

Therefore, when I approach God with my petitions I need to be aware that ultimately He must decide what needs to stay and what needs to go in order that I can become the person He created me to be. 

Alternatively, the person may be reacting normally to an intolerable situation, but misguided professionals incorrectly focus on changing the individual rather than modifying the person’s situation or environment.

[I]f he had to guess, he would say that the reason he doesn't want to loan the book out, to Ethan or anyone else, is because of the part of his personality that is one gigantic record-keeping system, a complex sifting and filing scheme that dictates what goes here and what goes there, turning his life into so many marks on a tablet. His mind would busy itself with the book's whereabouts every second it was away. He knows it would.

Some people think that mental illness is a matter of mood, a matter of personality. They think depression is simply a form of being sad, that OCD is a form of being uptight. They think the soul is sick, not the body. It is, they believe, something you have choice over.

shocking conclusion. It suggested that there appears to be one common pathway to all mental illnesses. Caspi and Moffitt called it the p-factor, in which the p stands for general psychopathology. They argued that this factor appears to predict a person’s liability to develop a mental disorder, to have more than one disorder, to have a chronic disorder, and it can even predict the severity of symptoms. This p-factor is common to hundreds of different psychiatric symptoms and every psychiatric diagnosis. Subsequent research using different sets of people and different methods confirmed the existence of this p-factor.25 However, this research was not designed to tell us what the p-factor is. It only suggests that it exists—that there is an unidentified variable that plays a role in all mental disorders.

Because now mental health disorders have gone “mainstream”. And for all the good it’s brought people like me who have been given therapy and stuff, there’s a lot of bad it’s brought too. Because now people use the phrase OCD to describe minor personality quirks. “Oooh, I like my pens in a line, I’m so OCD.” NO YOU’RE FUCKING NOT. “Oh my God, I was so nervous about that presentation, I literally had a panic attack.” NO YOU FUCKING DIDN’T. “I’m so hormonal today. I just feel totally bipolar.” SHUT UP, YOU IGNORANT BUMFACE. Told you I got angry. These words – words like OCD and bipolar – are not words to use lightly. And yet now they’re everywhere. There are TV programmes that actually pun on them. People smile and use them, proud of themselves for learning them, like they should get a sticker or something. Not realizing that if those words are said to you by a medical health professional, as a diagnosis of something you’ll probably have for ever, they’re words you don’t appreciate being misused every single day by someone who likes to keep their house quite clean. People actually die of bipolar, you know? They jump in front of trains and tip down bottles of paracetamol and leave letters behind to their devastated families because their bullying brains just won’t let them be for five minutes and they can’t bear to live with that any more. People also die of cancer. You don’t hear people going around saying: “Oh my God, my headache is so, like, tumoury today.” Yet it’s apparently okay to make light of the language of people’s internal hell

I can actually follow the plot of TV programs now, and I no longer use books as masks—I read them like a normal person, just like you have read this. Which assumes you are normal; maybe you’re not. Maybe none of us are. Maybe none of us would want to be anyway. But, for the sake of argument, let’s call me normal now. I am better. I don’t know whether it’s for good, or if one day something might make me abnormal again. But that’s the funny thing about living. If you do it properly, you don’t know how the next sentence will begin.

The specific psychiatric disorders in which mitochrondrial dysfunction has been identified include the following: schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder, major depression, autism, anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, anorexia nervosa, alcohol use disorder (aka alcoholism), marijuana use disorder, opioid use disorder, and borderline personality disorder. Dementia and delirium, often thought of an neurological illnesses, also included.

Many of the haters call me mental, which, by the way, is quite true, both metaphorically and clinically. It's true clinically because I am a person on the spectrum with OCD, and metaphorically, because I refuse to accept the sanity of unaccountability as the right way of civilized life. I am not going to glorify the issues of mental illness by saying that it's a super power or that it makes a person special. On the contrary, it makes things extremely difficult for a person. But guess what! Indifference is far more dangerous than any mental illness. Because mental illness can be managed with treatment, but there is no treatment for indifference, there is no treatment for coldness, there is no treatment for apathy. So, let everyone hear it, and hear it well - in a world where indifference is deemed as sanity what's needed is a whole lot of mentalness, a whole lot of insanity, insanity for justice, insanity for equality, insanity for establishing the fundamental rights of life and living for each and every human being, no matter who they are, what they are, or where they are.

For many of my clients, they know something is off when they meet a person who they genuinely like and can see a future with, but their brain begins sending warning signals as if there is a major threat. They start wondering hundreds of times a day, But do I really like them? Are they really attractive enough to me? This dissonance is a dead giveaway that there could be some anxiety at play. It’s not that you have to like every person who is good for you, but generally a good person doesn’t make a neurotypical brain fire off in quite this way.

When Elon was nearly ten years old, he saw a computer for the first time, at the Sandton City Mall in Johannesburg. “There was an electronics store that mostly did hi-fi-type stuff, but then, in one corner, they started stocking a few computers,” Musk said. He felt awed right away—“It was like, ‘Whoa. Holy shit!’”—by this machine that could be programmed to do a person’s bidding. “I had to have that and then hounded my father to get the computer,” Musk said. Soon he owned a Commodore VIC-20, a popular home machine that went on sale in 1980. Elon’s computer arrived with five kilobytes of memory and a workbook on the BASIC programming language. “It was supposed to take like six months to get through all the lessons,” Elon said. “I just got super OCD on it and stayed up for three days with no sleep and did the entire thing. It seemed like the most super-compelling thing I had ever seen.” Despite being an engineer, Musk’s father was something of a Luddite and dismissive of the machine. Elon recounted that “he said it was just for games and that you’d never be able to do real engineering on it. I just said, ‘Whatever.’” While

A lot of times a new relationship might feel less exciting simply because it’s healthy! There isn’t the agonizing push and pull you had with that jerk who didn’t want to commit but liked to Netflix and chill occasionally. You’re not experiencing a roller coaster of emotions every twelve hours for days on end. You’re not so confused about their intentions that you’re rereading every text conversation fifty times. So your OCD or anxiety tries to make sense of this big change and falsely decides, “You don’t like this new person enough.” When in reality, drama does not equal love. Oftentimes, it means the exact opposite.

I like to say the idea of Phantasma came to me all at once, hitting me like a ton of bricks one cloudy afternoon in November 2021, but truly, my experience with obsessive-compulsive disorder has been building to this story for a very long time. During the process of brainstorming the sort of adult romance I wanted to debut with, I was going through a period where my obsessive-compulsive tendencies were flaring up more than usual and the voices in my head were getting a little too bold. To my friends, these compulsions were alarming little anecdotes over lunch—‘that sounds like a horror movie’ one of them said (affectionately)—which is funny because, to me, someone who has lived with OCD my entire life, it was just another day of being unfazed by the increasingly creative scenarios my mind likes to conjure. OCD has such a wide range of symptoms that it makes every person’s experience with it different. Unfortunately, it has also become a commonly misused term conflated with the idea of being overly neat and clean, when in reality a lot of people with OCD have much darker symptoms. In my experience this has made explaining the real effects of OCD very hard as well as making it more difficult for people to regard the condition seriously. It’s so important to me to convey, with the utmost sincerity, that I know people are not doing this to be malicious! Because of the misuse of the term, however, some of the ways this disorder is shown in this book may come off as exaggerated or dramatic—but the details of Ophelia’s OCD are drawn directly from experiences that I, or someone I know who shares my condition, have had first-hand. And it’s still only a fraction of the symptoms we live with daily. Ophelia’s story is a love letter to my journey of getting comfortable being in my own head (as well as my adoration for Gothic aesthetics and hot ghosts). And while her experience with OCD, my experience with OCD, might look a lot different to someone else’s, I hope that the same message rings clear: struggling with your mental health does not make you unworthy of love. And I hope the people you surround yourself with are the sort of people who know that, too.

ACCORDING TO SCIENTISTS, THERE ARE three stages of love: lust, attraction, and attachment. And, it turns out, each of the stages is orchestrated by chemicals—neurotransmitters—in the brain. As you might expect, lust is ruled by testosterone and estrogen. The second stage, attraction, is governed by dopamine and serotonin. When, for example, couples report feeling indescribably happy in each other’s presence, that’s dopamine, the pleasure hormone, doing its work. Taking cocaine fosters the same level of euphoria. In fact, scientists who study both the brains of new lovers and cocaine addicts are hard-pressed to tell the difference. The second chemical of the attraction phase is serotonin. When couples confess that they can’t stop thinking about each other, it’s because their serotonin level has dropped. People in love have the same low serotonin levels as people with OCD. The reason they can’t stop thinking about each other is that they are literally obsessed. Oxytocin and vasopressin control the third stage: attachment or long-term bonding. Oxytocin is released during orgasm and makes you feel closer to the person you’ve had sex with. It’s also released during childbirth and helps bond mother to child. Vasopressin is released postcoitally.

Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD) is unhelpfully named, since it is not particularly closely related to the better known obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). It does not tend to co-occur with obsessive-compulsive disorder, or even run in the same families. Obsessive-compulsive disorder is an anxiety disorder, in which the sufferer feels compelled to repeat particular thoughts or actions, such as checking or hand-washing. As an anxious condition, it belongs to the same family as depression and generalized anxiety disorder, and thus is related to high Neuroticism and responds to some extent to serotonergic antidepressant medications. Some people have even seen obsessive-compulsive disorder as a low Conscientiousness problem, since the affected individual cannot inhibit the checking or washing response in rather the same manner as the alcoholic cannot inhibit his desire to drink. Whether this is the right characterization or not, it is clear that OCPD is a very different type of problem.16 What, then, does OCPD entail? Psychiatrists define it as ‘a pervasive pattern of preoccupation with orderliness, perfectionism, and mental and interpersonal control, at the expense of flexibility, openness and efficiency, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts’.

was nearly ten years old, he saw a computer for the first time, at the Sandton City Mall in Johannesburg. “There was an electronics store that mostly did hi-fi-type stuff, but then, in one corner, they started stocking a few computers,” Musk said. He felt awed right away—“It was like, ‘Whoa. Holy shit!’”—by this machine that could be programmed to do a person’s bidding. “I had to have that and then hounded my father to get the computer,” Musk said. Soon he owned a Commodore VIC-20, a popular home machine that went on sale in 1980. Elon’s computer arrived with five kilobytes of memory and a workbook on the BASIC programming language. “It was supposed to take like six months to get through all the lessons,” Elon said. “I just got super OCD on it and stayed up for three days with no sleep and did the entire thing. It seemed like the most super-compelling thing I had ever seen.” Despite being an engineer, Musk’s father was something of a Luddite and dismissive of the machine. Elon recounted that “he said it was just for games and that you’d never be able to do real engineering on it. I just said, ‘Whatever.’” While bookish and into his new computer, Elon quite often led Kimbal and his cousins (Kaye’s children) Russ, Lyndon, and Peter Rive on adventures. They dabbled one year in selling Easter eggs door-to-door in the neighborhood. The eggs were not well decorated, but the boys still marked them up a few hundred percent for their wealthy neighbors. Elon also spearheaded their work with homemade explosives and rockets. South Africa did not have the Estes rocket kits popular among hobbyists, so Elon would create his own chemical compounds and put them inside of canisters. “It is remarkable

Given this new theory of mental illness, we can now apply it to various forms of mental disorders, summarizing the previous discussion in this new light. We saw earlier that the obsessive behavior of people suffering from OCD might arise when the checks and balances between several feedback loops are thrown out of balance: one registering something as amiss, another carrying out corrective action, and another one signaling that the matter has been taken care of. The failure of the checks and balances within this loop can cause the brain to be locked into a vicious cycle, so the mind never believes that the problem has been resolved. The voices heard by schizophrenics might arise when several feedback loops are no longer balancing one another. One feedback loop generates spurious voices in the temporal cortex (i.e., the brain is talking to itself). Auditory and visual hallucinations are often checked by the anterior cingulate cortex, so a normal person can differentiate between real and fictitious voices. But if this region of the brain is not working properly, the brain is flooded with disembodied voices that it believes are real. This can cause schizophrenic behavior. Similarly, the manic-depressive swings of someone with bipolar disorder might be traced to an imbalance between the left and right hemispheres. The necessary interplay between optimistic and pessimistic assessments is thrown off balance, and the person oscillates wildly between these two diverging moods. Paranoia may also be viewed in this light. It results from an imbalance between the amygdala (which registers fear and exaggerates threats) and the prefrontal cortex, which evaluates these threats and puts them into perspective. We should also stress that evolution has given us these feedback loops for a reason: to protect us. They keep us clean, healthy, and socially connected. The problem occurs when the dynamic between opposing feedback loops is disrupted.

among all psychiatric conditions, OCD is one of the few that does not respond very well to so-called placebo treatment—blank pills. Even with schizophrenia and depression, when people are given blank pills—pills that they think may be helping them—a fair number of them actually improve in the short term. But with persons with OCD, generally less than 10 percent get better when they are given placebos, so if something active isn’t being done to combat their symptoms, nothing really happens—or they get worse.

Family members can be most helpful by offering support, understanding, kindness, patience, and encouragement in doing the Four Steps—but not by pampering or indulging the person’s OCD. Reinforcement is essential; every improvement should be recognized. People with OCD need to feel good about themselves, since it’s been a long time since they’ve done so. What they don’t need is angry criticism; they are already critical enough of themselves. Nor should they be pushed too fast to get well; their goal will be reached by taking a lot of small steps, not giant leaps. Sure, there will be times when the partner is tired and out of patience with OCD and needs his or her own time out. That’s okay, too. There should be no guilt feelings about that—in fact, the person with OCD should encourage it.

Fourth, along these same lines, some diagnoses remind us of a more central role of the body in a person’s struggle. Psychiatric diagnoses remind us that we are embodied souls. We know this clearly from Scripture! But functionally speaking, we sometimes over-spiritualize troubles with emotions and thoughts. When you consider the spectrum of psychiatric diagnoses, it is clear that years of research demonstrate that some diagnoses may have a stronger genetic (inherited) component of causation than others. These include schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autistic spectrum disorder, and perhaps more severe and recalcitrant forms of depression (melancholia), anxiety, and OCD.2 Another way of saying this is that although psychiatric diagnoses are descriptions and not full-fledged explanations, it doesn’t mean that a given diagnosis or symptom holds no explanatory clues at all. Not all psychiatric diagnoses should be viewed equally. Some do indeed have long-standing recognition in medical and psychiatric history, occur transculturally, and therefore are not merely modern, Western “creations” that highlight patterns of deviant or sinful behavior, as critics would say. Observations that have held up among various

Now I want to be quiet. Reality is not a dissection sample passively waiting for me to hack it to pieces; it’s personal and transforms me. I want to position myself in the “habitat” of truth, then wait. I want to be open to the rustles that mean something—and those that don’t.** I want the moments and memories and meaning to come out of hiding.

Plenty of people have borrowed the term “OCD” to make fun of the way they feel compelled to alphabetize their spices or wash their tennis shoes. And many of us do exhibit OCD-like characteristics every now and then—running back to the front door to make sure it’s locked or stepping over cracks in the sidewalk. But more often than not, these behaviors are quirky and short-lived; they don’t cause us ongoing distress, significantly impede our lives, or drive our family members too crazy. A severe case of clinical obsessive-compulsive disorder, on the other hand, can be as debilitating as the worst case of depression. The constant pattern of repetition may help reduce uncertainty by creating the appearance of warding off trouble and keeping people safe—but it is enormously stressful and a terrible burden to bear. Some people with OCD commit suicide to escape the constant barrage of messages and impulses. “It’s horrible,” says Elias. “It’s torture from the inside.

I opened my heart a sliver. I wanted to remember the person God created me to be: someone with sensitive emotions, art, courage, and strength.

Sometimes, safety concerns are not just about staying safe. They often have more to do with our personal responsibility in the world. It's not just that we don't want bad things to happen, it's that we don't want them to happen on our watch.

Sometimes, OCD symptoms start after a major life event such as bereavement or job loss. Personality is also a factor. If you’ve always been a perfectionist, you are more vulnerable to OCD.

Exercise: Understanding Your Cycle Make a list of your obsessions, anxieties, and compulsive behaviors. How do they relate to one another? Draw up a diagram showing how your personal OCD cycle works.

10:00 p.m.: the only person in the whole building who hasn’t gone bonkers kills themself. The other patients cheer . . .

In chapter 3, “Redesigning the Brain,” we learned two key laws of plasticity that also underlie this treatment. The first is that Neurons that fire together wire together. By doing something pleasurable in place of the compulsion, patients form a new circuit that is gradually reinforced instead of the compulsion. The second law is that Neurons that fire apart wire apart. By not acting on their compulsions, patients weaken the link between the compulsion and the idea it will ease their anxiety. This delinking is crucial because, as we’ve seen, while acting on a compulsion eases anxiety in the short term, it worsens OCD in the long term. Schwartz

I built an idea in my head of the hero I wanted to be, a grab bag of traits from heroes, villains, and side characters. I did not have book role models, I had book blueprints. But there remained a huge gap between the person I wanted to be and the person who I was. This was because no matter how many book blueprints I had, as much as I wanted to make myself the hero of my own life, it didn’t matter as long as I kept telling the story wrong. Nowadays, as a storyteller, I know what the problem was. I had all the elements I needed to tell a good story. But I was telling it the wrong way, so I could never get to the ending I wanted. If you tell yourself you’re a winner, you know what kind of story you’re telling, and you will march toward that... Likewise, if you tell yourself you’re a loser, you’ve made that your story, and you will march toward that instead. The same setbacks could happen in the loser’s story as in the winner’s story, but the self-defined loser would let them be proof that they were never going to be anything. Here’s the story I was telling myself back when I was little edible child waiting to be carried away by hawks and making OCD rituals for herself: once upon a time, there was a girl who was afraid of everything. When I was 16, I realized that I knew what this story looked like and how it ended, and it wasn’t the life I wanted for myself. If I wanted my ending to look different, I needed to change the kind of story I was telling about myself. I needed to shape my events into a different genre: once upon a time, there was a woman who was afraid of nothing. At age 16, I legally changed my name from my birthname — Heidi — to one I thought sounded like the hero I wanted to be: Maggie. And I vowed that I would never be afraid of anything ever again. Did it work? No, of course not. Not right away. But it became a mission statement, my hero’s journey.

(In response to a picture critic.) I'm actually a very joyful person. But being a genius with a photographic memory mixed with a strong case of OCD makes for a difficult picture sometimes.

If my personal schema says I’m unlovable or unworthy of happiness, I will see everyone’s behavior through that lens. It won’t matter if someone actually does love me because my brain won’t allow me to process their affection correctly. That’s why self-awareness is so important.

facility

a celebration of the president’s bravery during the campaign, rendered in shiny black and white, like a giant Victorian steel engraving executed by OCD fairies. The president stood smiling, her arms outstretched to America. Her opponent loomed behind her, as he once actually had, Verity herself having watched this debate live. Seeing this now, she recalled her own sickened disbelief at his body language, the shadowing, his deliberate violation of his opponent’s personal space. “I don’t think anyone I know believes there was ever any real chance of him winning,” she said to Eunice. “I don’t know whether I did myself, but I was still scared shitless of it.” She was looking at how the artist had rendered his hands. Grabby.

Being a parent is hard. It's way harder than people assume it will be before it happens to them. It causes stress, overstimulation, sleep-deprivation, and worst of all, the sense that people are watching to see how good you are at it and how good a person you are in general. It may seem as if people care about you more, focus on you more, now that you are responsible for children. And children will press your buttons and try to make you frustrated, because making you /anything/ is fascinating to them. But what your children can't understand yet is that if you have OCD and you're stressed, exhausted, frustrated and over-stimulated, your disorder flares up. And when your disorder flares up, it targets everything you care about the most and tries to bind it to a living nightmare. This disorder can trick you into thinking you're the worst of the worst. But you are not the best or worst parent who ever lived. You are just a person with thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Remember, being self-compassionate mostly just means being honest. When you make a mindful statement about fearing harming your children, you are being honest about your experience. When you criticize yourself for having thoughts and for being afraid, you are essentially lying to yourself about what is evident. You have OCD. Commentary about how good a person you are is a distraction from the important work of keeping your OCD from commandeering your family. Similarly, it's important to remember that all healthy parents have "unhealthy" thoughts about their kids and have doubts about their abilities to raise them. They're supposed to. Treating yourself fairly and compassionately is the only rational way to navigate parenthood, with or without having OCD.

We can see this in Homosexual Obesessive-Compulsive Disorder (HOCD). It’s worth mentioning that this abbreviation does not really express the nature of the disorder in this manifestation, as it can happen to anyone who suffers from OCD, independently of their sexual orientation. So it might be more appropriate to refer to it as Sexual Orientation OCD. In Sexual Orientation OCD, the person is plagued by doubts regarding their sexuality, fearing that they might be attracted to somebody of the opposite sex (if they’re gay) or of the same sex (if they are straight). At the heart of this suffering, there’s the fear of never being able to feel fully attracted to their partner, or of having a fulfilling, loving relationship with someone they love and for whom they know, with absolute certainty, they feel attraction. When the disorder is in full-swing in this manifestation, the resulting anxiety can distract the sufferer from enjoying intercourse, which prompts them to believe they must be of a different sexual orientation. Here is when the OCD finds, yet again, a good disguise. To the sufferer, the notion that their obsessions are turning them off sounds absurd, and it seems much more probable that they are just in denial by telling themselves that they have OCD. A similar, but in many ways more extreme form of OCD is POCD, or Pedophilia OCD. As the name suggests, this OCD is characterized by the fear of being a pedophile

POCD has aspects of moral scrupulosity OCD and harm OCD, and may leave the sufferer feeling much the same as someone afflicted with HOCD--namely, afraid that they will be unable to have a normal relationship. Common compulsions that people with POCD engage in are avoidant behaviors such attempting to keep away from minors or places where minors gather, like schools and parks; checking for arousal or lack thereof, in an attempt to “confirm” whether one is actually attracted to minors; and confessing one’s fears to a close confidant, often followed by asking that person whether they think the sufferer is a pedophile.

Other common obsessions are a fear of hurting others (this is usually known as harm OCD), which might manifest themselves as intrusive thoughts depicting violence inflicted on oneself or others; or perhaps, the fear of running someone over while driving and not having noticed it; or the worry that one might commit a criminal act against somebody who is vulnerable, such as sexual assault of a minor, or abusing, or stealing from an elderly person, etc. Compulsions vary depending on the individual.

It’s worth mentioning that obsessions often take the form of questions (OCD used to be known as the “doubting disease”), typically “what if” questions. Some examples include: ● “What if my partner loves me more than I love him/her?” ● “What if this is not the right person for me?” ● “What if I am stuck in the wrong relationship?” ● “What if I made a mistake in getting together with my partner?” ● “What if there’s some with whom I would be more compatible?” ● “What if I’m attracted to someone else?” ● “What if I am leading my partner on?” ● “What if I am secretly a cheater?” ● “What if I hurt my partner by staying together?” ● “What if my partner is not as smart as I am?” ● “What if that other person is more attractive than my partner?” ● “What if I am deluding myself and/or my partner?

Do NOT reassure your partner. As tempting as it might be to try and reassure your partner that they are a good person, that their thoughts don’t mean that they are a cheater, or that they like someone else, or that they are in the wrong relationship, make an effort to not offer reassurance. A hug or a laugh might work better instead. Reassuring your partner only serves to decrease their anxiety at that moment, therefore feeding the OCD cycle. Reassurance-seeking is, after all, one of the most common compulsions in OCD.

Be patient with your partner. This can be hard to do sometimes, because ROCD, like all forms of OCD, is persistent. But the more patient and understanding you can be with your partner, the easier it will be for them to treat their disorder. That said, be firm. By now, you should have a pretty good understanding of what your partner needs to do to treat their ROCD. If you see that they’re just giving in to their compulsions, remind them that it’s important to both of you for them to continue treating their OCD. Patience is all well and good, but there’s no sense in being patient with your partner when they’re actively worsening the disorder. Above all, be supportive. In any relationship, partners have to support each other. ROCD naturally can be extremely painful for you as the partner, but it is also a very personal struggle for the OCD sufferer. And as with any struggle, one of the best things you can do as their partner is provide love and support. Remind them not to be so hard on themselves when they do fall into the traps of their ROCD.

(Home) ‘This land is beautiful, but the people are horrible.’ The people took this beautiful land and raped it, and put up a bunch of ugly boxes, however, my home is in the Victorian-style and it is old and has a handcrafted personality. There is an ancient oak tree outside my window, sometimes I step out my window then onto the roof of the porch, and sit in the tree branch that hangs over, and watches all the stars as they appear to turn on and off. Yes, I have wished upon a shooting star, that things will change, and that the towers will be no more. Looking straight ahead, I can see all the lights that go on the horizon, some days the sunsets are blazing before the lights turn on. Then there are some days that the window is shut because it is cold windy while everything is chilled with the color of blue. (Frame of mind) My mood can change just like this and that it seems. Yes, just like all the summer turns into winter, and the winters turn into spring, and all of these thoughts running in my mind fall like the leaves through my brain, and they most likely do not mean a thing. I guess you could blame it on my ADD, ADHD, dyslexia, bipolar disorder, or OCD. I do not have any of these… I do not have anything wrong with me. But, if you are like one of the sisters or someone from my school, you would say my mood changes are because of my- STD’s, HIV, or being as they say GAY or BI, and LEZ-BO. They have also said, I am a pedophile and a child stocker, and I get moody if I do not get some from them. That is why I am so sober at times, or so they say. Whatever…! They also have said that I am a schizophrenic- psycho and that I could not even buy love. I would not try that anyways. I think that having money does not give you happiness; I am okay being a humble farm- girl, the guy that finds me… needs to be happy with that also. I am sure there are more things they say. However, those are just some of them that I can dredge up as of now, off the top of my head. They have murdered me and my life, in so many ways. So now, do you wonder as to why I am afraid of talking to people or even looking at them? You know you and they can try to destroy me, and my life. However, I do not have any of those listed either; none of these random arrangements of letters defines me as the person I truly am. (Sight) Looking out the windows, I can see the golden hayfields of ecstasy, I see the windmills that twist and tumble. I can see the abandoned railroad track that lies not far from my home. I can hear the cries of the swing as the wind gusts in spurts. But yet I am still in my room, but that is just okay with me. Because I know that there will someday soon be someone there for me. (Household) My room is a land of peace and tranquility without all the gloom, with a bed and a canopy overhead but still, I am not truly happy? There is nothing- like the sounds of the crickets speaking up often in the cool August night breeze. It is relaxing to me, however; it is a reminder to me of how the last glimmers of summer are ending. Besides the sounds slowly fade away, yes- I can hear this music from my bedroom window. It is just like in the spring the birds sing in the morning and leave in the cool gusts to come. It is just like the hummingbirds that flutter by, and then before I know it, all has changed; so, it seems by the time I walk out my bedroom door, to start my day. ‘Life goes in cycles of tunes it seems, and nature is its synchronization in its symphony you just have to listen.

Dr Finch has explained ‘cognitive dissonance’: where a person holds two contrary beliefs, such as ‘I know I have not taken out my needles’ and ‘My needles might be in with the clothes.

the intrusive thoughts in OCD (such as What if I suffocate my baby?) are considered ego dystonic: they go completely against the person’s values, action, and true desires. It’s unlikely, for example, that a murderous person would even be in therapy discussing their murderous thoughts, because they wouldn’t register the thoughts as unwanted or intrusive, and they certainly would not receive an OCD diagnosis.

Effort in the Calvinist doctrine had still another psychological meaning. The fact that one did not tire in that unceasing effort and that one succeeded in one's moral as well as one's secular work was a more or less distinct sign of being one of the chosen ones. The irrationality of such compulsive effort is that the activity is not meant to create a desired end but serves to indicate whether or not something will occur which has been determined beforehand, independent of one's own activity or control. This mechanism is a well-known feature of compulsive neurotics. Such persons when afraid of the outcome of an important undertaking may, while awaiting an answer, count the windows of houses or trees on the street. If the number is even, a person feels that things will be alright; if it is uneven, it is a sign that he will fail. Frequently this doubt does not refer to a specific instance but to a person's whole life, and the compulsion to look for "signs" will pervade it accordingly. Often the connection between counting stones, playing solitaire, gambling, and so on, and anxiety and doubt, is not conscious. A person may play solitaire out of a vague feeling of restlessness and only an analysis might uncover the hidden function of his activity: to reveal the future. In Calvinism this meaning of effort was part of the religious doctrine. Originally it referred essentially to moral effort, but later on the emphasis was more and more on effort in one's occupation and on the results of this effort; that is, success or failure in business. Success became the sign of God's grace; failure, the sign of damnation.

OCD strugglers chase down thoughts they do not even need to acknowledge because a distorted personal responsibility is driving them to do so.

I enjoy cleaning and organizing as much as the next person, sure, but that’s not what obsessive-compulsive disorder is about. More often than not, OCD is fighting against a monster that feasts on your worst fears. A monster that makes you doubt everything, from your actions to your thoughts to even your emotions. There’s no upside to OCD. No superhero cleanliness. No extra sense of awareness. Nothing.

Surely the standards for servers are that they should *never* poison customers, not that they should poison them only occasionally, so what could it mean to say that Bridget goes too far? Is it when she checks much more than other servers? Maybe the others are just lax. Is it when she checks so much that she neglects other duties, such as serving her customers quickly? But isn't safety more important than speed? Is it when she creates a personal risk of getting fired? Shouldn't her boss also care about poisoning customers?

Creative Wellness TMS offers compassionate, science-backed mental health care including TMS, counseling, medication management, and genetic testing. With locations in Olympia, University Place, and Yelm, we help teens and adults feel better through personalized, whole-person care. Our licensed providers treat depression, anxiety, OCD, and more with innovative tools and deep compassion.

Development of brain growth, timing, and coordination in childhood are critical to proper function throughout life. If there is developmental delay in brain function in childhood, such as ADHD, autism, Tourette’s Syndrome, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), anxiety, tics, dyslexia, learning or processing disorders, or even more subtle symptoms, it is best to aggressively rehabilitate function before adulthood. Unfortunately, the current model of health care tells parents to wait for the child to grow out of it. However, many children do not grow out of it and miss key windows of time for ideal brain development. Unrelated to developmental delays, early symptoms of brain degeneration such as poor mental endurance, poor memory, and inability to learn new things are also serious issues when timing matters. The longer a person waits to manage their brain degeneration or developmental delay the less potential they have to make a difference. Datis Kharrazian, DHSc, DC, MS

Key survey results, which showed that Democrats were roughly twice as likely to have been diagnosed with a mental disorder as Republicans, included: post-traumatic stress disorder (Democrats 7.95 percent, Republicans 3.97 percent), ADD/ADHD (Democrats 9.13 percent, Republicans 3.97 percent), anxiety (Democrats 20.84 percent, Republicans 10.26 percent), depression (Democrats 34.43 percent, Republicans 23.51 percent). In fact, in every category polled – dyslexia, ADD/ADHD, Asperger’s/autism, depression, anxiety, OCD, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, PTSD, narcissistic personality disorder, anorexia, and bulimia – Democrats reported higher incidences than Republicans, except for dyslexia.37 Nevertheless,

Let’s take the example of a person suffering from OCD. In this case, one possible brain state corresponds to “Wash your hands again.” Another is, “Don’t wash—go to the garden.” By expending mental effort—or, as I think of it, unleashing mental force—the person can focus attention on this second idea. Doing so, as we saw, brings into play the Quantum Zeno Effect. As a result, the idea—whose physical embodiment is a physical brain state—“Go to the garden” is held in place longer than classical theory predicts. The triumphant idea can then make the body move, and through associated neuroplastic changes, alter the brain’s circuitry. This will change the brain in ways that will increase the probability of the “Go to the garden” brain state arising again. (See schematic on Chapter 10.)

Why and how does this person switch gears, activating circuits in the dorsal prefrontal cortex connecting to adaptive basal ganglia circuits, rather than the OCD circuits connecting the orbital frontal cortex to the anterior cingulate and caudate? (See Figure 4.) At the instant of activation, both circuits—one encoding your walk to the garden to prune roses, the other a rush to the sink to wash—are ready to go. Yet something in the mind is choosing one brain circuit over another. Something is causing one circuit to become activated and one to remain quiescent. What is that something? William James posed the question this way: “We reach the heart of our inquiry into volition when we ask, by what process is it that the thought of any given action comes to prevail stably in the mind?

A doctor once told me about a patient with OCD who’d been stopped from using the sink as a way to prevent him washing his hands all the time. He’d ended up kneeling over a toilet bowl, dunking his hands in the filthy water in a bid to keep them clean. That’s OCD in a nutshell – rituals which are illogical even to the person doing them, but which we find impossible to stop.

It made sense that all his rumination and avoidance was designed to protect others which only a caring and sensitive person would do.

I'll Be There For You These words are etched on our hearts. but they're so much more than just words, they're a complete emotion. But it's all just an illusion, a utopia, for which we long. we trade in drinking coffee on a couch, with drinking at a bar. we utter more words to Alexa and Siri, than to people face to face. we can never have six people in one room without anyone looking at their phones. we trade in memories with pictures. we actively look for reasons to not be around people. a Chandler is considered too mean and sarcastic, Ross has too much baggage, who has the energy to deal with that. Phoebe is too quirky to handle. Rachel, that spoilt and entitled bitch. no way. Joey is the fuck boy that will cause you nothing but pain, and Monica with her OCD, that's way too high maintenance. no, we don't say these things when we watch the show, we say these about people around us who bear similar characteristics. we adore these characters, we envy their friendship, their bond, their love. we long for nothing else, yet when confronted with them in real life, we belittle, avoid, cut-off, ignore. we don't want to disturb the utopia, are terrified of bursting the bubble, because if we start recognizing the flaws in our fantasies, we'll be forced to recognize our own. we love to live an à la carte life, wherein we pick and choose the qualities and personalities of a person that we wish to see, and the ones that may simply be brushed away. Generation after generation, will watch that show and call it their utopia, and each will give up hope of ever attaining that, alas! It was a different time! what we long for doesn't require a time machine to achieve, it doesn't need for mobile phones to not exist, or for less bars to exist, or to live away from your parents. it's only as complicated as we try to make it, when it can be as simple as, "I'll be there for you, 'cause you're there for me too

I'll Be There For You" These words are etched on our hearts. but they're so much more than just words, they're a complete emotion. But it's all just an illusion, a utopia, for which we long. we trade in drinking coffee on a couch, with drinking at a bar. we utter more words to Alexa and Siri, than to people face to face. we can never have six people in one room without anyone looking at their phones. we trade in memories with pictures. we actively look for reasons to not be around people. a Chandler is considered too mean and sarcastic, Ross has too much baggage, who has the energy to deal with that. Phoebe is too quirky to handle. Rachel, that spoilt and entitled bitch. no way. Joey is the fuck boy that will cause you nothing but pain, and Monica with her OCD, that's way too high maintenance. no, we don't say these things when we watch the show, we say these about people around us who bear similar characteristics. we adore these characters, we envy their friendship, their bond, their love. we long for nothing else, yet when confronted with them in real life, we belittle, avoid, cut-off, ignore. we don't want to disturb the utopia, are terrified of bursting the bubble, because if we start recognizing the flaws in our fantasies, we'll be forced to recognize our own. we love to live an à la carte life, wherein we pick and choose the qualities and personalities of a person that we wish to see, and the ones that may simply be brushed away. Generation after generation, will watch that show and call it their utopia, and each will give up hope of ever attaining that, alas! It was a different time! what we long for doesn't require a time machine to achieve, it doesn't need for mobile phones to not exist, or for less bars to exist, or to live away from your parents. it's only as complicated as we try to make it, when it can be as simple as, "I'll be there for you, 'cause you're there for me too

I'll Be There For You These words are etched on our hearts. but they're so much more than just words, they're a complete emotion. But it's all just an illusion, a utopia, for which we long. we trade in drinking coffee on a couch, with drinking at a bar. we utter more words to Alexa and Siri, than to people face to face. we can never have six people in one room without anyone looking at their phones. we trade in memories with pictures. we actively look for reasons to not be around people. a Chandler is considered too mean and sarcastic, Ross has too much baggage, who has the energy to deal with that. Phoebe is too quirky to handle. Rachel, that spoilt and entitled bitch. no way. Joey is the fuck boy that will cause you nothing but pain, and Monica with her OCD, that's way too high maintenance. no, we don't say these things when we watch the show, we say these about people around us who bear similar characteristics. we adore these characters, we envy their friendship, their bond, their love. we long for nothing else, yet when confronted with them in real life, we belittle, avoid, cut-off, ignore. we don't want to disturb the utopia, are terrified of bursting the bubble, because if we start recognizing the flaws in our fantasies, we'll be forced to recognize our own. we love to live an à la carte life, wherein we pick and choose the qualities and personalities of a person that we wish to see, and the ones that may simply be brushed away. Generation after generation, will watch that show and call it their utopia, and each will give up hope of ever attaining that, alas! It was a different time! what we long for doesn't require a time machine to achieve, it doesn't need for mobile phones to not exist, or for less bars to exist, or to live away from your parents. it's only as complicated as we try to make it, when it can be as simple as, I'll be there for you, 'cause you're there for me too

Excessive doubt or suspicion about loved ones can be a symptom of various mental health conditions, such as Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), characterized by recurring intrusive thoughts and repetitive behaviors. Anxiety disorders, like Generalized Anxiety Disorder or Relationship OCD, can also manifest as persistent worries or doubts. Additionally, Paranoid Personality Disorder is marked by pervasive distrust and suspicion of others. If you're experiencing these feelings, consider reaching out to a mental health professional for guidance and support to identify underlying causes and develop coping strategies.

It’s human nature to feel like you are the main character of every story. You are with yourself 24/7! Your perspective of the world is filtered through how different experiences affect you. So when someone rejects you, it feels like that decision is completely tied up in who you are as a person.

Excessive doubt or suspicion about loved ones can be a symptom of various mental health conditions, such as Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), characterized by recurring intrusive thoughts and repetitive behaviors. Anxiety disorders, like Generalized Anxiety Disorder or Relationship OCD, can also manifest as persistent worries or doubts. Additionally, Paranoid Personality Disorder is marked by pervasive distrust and suspicion of others. If you're experiencing these feelings, consider reaching out to a mental health professional for guidance and support to identify underlying causes and develop coping strategies. Meta AI Response: Excessive doubt or suspicion about loved ones can be a symptom of various mental health conditions, such as Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), characterized by recurring intrusive thoughts and repetitive behaviors. Anxiety disorders, like Generalized Anxiety Disorder or Relationship OCD, can also manifest as persistent worries or doubts. Additionally, Paranoid Personality Disorder is marked by pervasive distrust and suspicion of others. If you're experiencing these feelings, consider reaching out to a mental health professional for guidance and support to identify underlying causes and develop coping strategies.

Your neurodivergent brain isn't something to overcome. It's something to understand, appreciate, and work with. Let's figure out how to do that, together. You Already Have Everything You Need.

For anyone who was ever told they were too much or not enough, who tried to fit into boxes that were never made for them, who was told to quiet their spark or dim their light to make others comfortable, and who has been waiting their whole lives to hear: You are exactly right as you are. It is your time to thrive.

NeuroFlex ACT isn’t about striving to fit a mold. It’s about unfolding into your authentic self, with tools that honor your wiring and your humanity.

NeuroFlex ACT is built on a deep understanding that neurodivergent brains process the world in unique ways. It's not about trying to make your brain fit into a neurotypical mold. It's about providing a framework that works with your specific wiring.

Adopting this strengths-based view doesn't mean pretending challenges don't exist. It means reframing them. Instead of asking 'What's wrong with me?' you get to ask 'What are my unique strengths? What do I need to thrive? What kind of support would actually help?

At its heart, ACT isn’t about getting rid of difficult thoughts, feelings, or sensations; it’s about learning how to live well with them.

Embracing this identity means something powerful: instead of trying to squeeze yourself into a mold that was never meant for you, you get to understand your actual strengths, honor your real needs, and live as your authentic self.

To understand the neurodivergent mind is not to fix it, but to learn its language, honor its rhythm, and discover the strength in difference. This is where that journey begins.

The world doesn’t need you to shrink into its boxes. It needs you to stand tall in your unique brilliance and build bridges wide enough for others to walk beside you. Every time you show up as you are, ask for what you need, or celebrate your differences, you strengthen those bridges. With each person who crosses, the world grows richer with the creativity, insight, and joy that only comes when every mind has room to thrive.