What's real?

You ask yourself "when am I going to be normal?", so that means you have some fantasy of what normal is in your mind. And your fear is never being normal and being miserable your entire life.

Fantasies are symptom of pure-o. The problem in fantasy is you compare your reality to a dream were everthing is perfect and makes you miserable. It creates a problem for your mind to resolve.

Most basic example of a fantasy "If I could just get rid of this thought everything will be perfect". Then you try try to neutralize the thought some how... like using logic to prove or disprove the thought and just make things worst.

If you hate pizza no amount of logic can change how you feel about pizza.

You torment your self by trying to resolve emotions with reason/logic/fantasy but the feeling will never go away, it gets worse and so does your life.

Your brain has 2 modes. Being mode, basically when you are in autopilot and doing mode, when you are actively thinking(trying to solve a problem).

When you use doing mode on your fears you make your fear will grow, the problem will get worse and then you go back to doing mode to solve the problem and it keeps going on and on until you have created a huge problem and you are miserable.

You cannot use thoughts to change how you feel. You need to accept your life as it is and any possible future you fear as possible. Accept reality and not fantasy.

Posting on this forum, searching for solutions, will make your problem worst and is part of your ocd. Any attention to this problem will strength your ocd.

You need to get help from an expert that practices cbt and erp.

The things that make you happy will not change. Anything else is not relevent, focusing your energy on that instead of things that make you unhappy.

The thoughts will come, you have trained your brain they are important and need to resolved so they will keep comming. It is hard and will take time, it is a skill to learn but try not to engage the though AND the underling fear behind then. You will get better at it.

Our brains have stupid thoughts all the time, our brains never stop working and bringing things to our attention. If the thought does not bother us then we let it go. If it does we try to solve it and the problem gets worse.

These thoughts are not important, do not believe they are too important and must be addressed.
Buy a book on mindfullness meditation, it will teach you how silly your brain really is.

You cannot fight your way out of this. You cannot solve this. You will never feel normal 100 percent of the time. Be kind your self and dont get frustrated, work on what makes you happy.

/r/OCD Thread