- Date posted
- 51w ago
accept uncertainty
how do you accept uncertainty I find it impossible and so distressing? It’s ruining my life😔
how do you accept uncertainty I find it impossible and so distressing? It’s ruining my life😔
I have found it tremendously helpful to actively try to challenge some of my black-and-white thinking on my themes. I have found that I can’t really “live with the uncertainty” if that means trying to straddle an extremely sharp good-vs-evil or hell-vs-heaven line. That simply doesn’t work. You must try to soften that line, learn and think more deeply about your fears, and try to identify grey areas where you can perhaps find some peace when required. Check out OCD Recovery videos on youtube for helpful advice on this. By the way this is not at all an exercise in abandoning your values or moral judgement, it’s more about trying to see things more clearly, calmly, compassionately.
If it helps, as a starting point, here are some irrational beliefs you might find helpful to try to challenge: - I am my thoughts - This thought/ urge/ bodily reaction means I want this - OCD is not the reason I am obsessing about this - If people knew, they would totally reject me - If people rejected me, my life would be over - Etc. Etc. Etc. If you’re anything like me, you probably have a whole range of these waiting for you back there! I hope this helps!!
I’m really struggling with this too. Something that has been helping me is Matthew Marshal on YouTube. He has some shorts about his ocd that relate to accepting uncertainty. I’ve yet to achieve acceptance for the uncertainty but really striving to hopefully one day be there
I struggle with false memory ocd and accepting uncertainty makes me feel sick
I feel like no one cares about me... Im struggling in college and it just feels like I cant catch a break... Ive made bad choices that make me a bad person... I have to be uncertain about worst case POCD scenarios that may or may not have happened unknowingly... I genuinely dont feel like any one cares about me... and if I pass away, ill be laughed at and forgotten by everyone... Im alone with no gf, barely any friends, and I cant even be certain that my POCD fears of unknowingly cybering with a minor did or didnt happen... im stuck in hell...
Really bad theme right now is death, I keep thinking about how one day or at any moment my heart will stop my brain will stop & my memories & everything I know will all fade away. It is giving me so much anxiety I’m only 18, but I realize it all happens to us it is bound, we are born to die. I know it’s a silly thing to be scared because it’s not helping the quality of my life worrying about it and even when I do die, I won’t care , if you don’t have a working brain then how can you care 🤷♀️. It is tainting my everyday life currently & honestly making me terribly depressed & it is giving me derealization & making me feel nihilistic, I’ll remind myself it’s okay but then with my ocd i don’t stop thinking and thinking about it and it’s seriously so hard to stay present in the moment because this thought just feels like I can’t scrub it away it’s miserable I struggle with religion, but I do pray to anything that’s out there possibly listening, because it is comforting, it just feels like this whole experience Is pointless & I am afraid of the unknown and what is to possibly happen but I’m subjected to it anyways so why should it matter
My last and almost life long theme/sub-theme largely subsided recently and my ocd felt like it wasn’t even an issue. Then I went on winter break from uni and being alone made my mind come up with a whole new topic to obsess over. TLDR on my fears, my advisor wouldn’t email me back for a while about signing up for classes so my mind started to worry “what if he doesn’t in time and you can’t enroll this semester and you lose this whole life you just built and all these new friends” So when that issue was resolved my mind found other scarier ways I could be uprooted from my current life and friends that I’ve grown so attached to. Then my mind remembered back when I was struggling with false memories and scrupulosity and I essentially made a post on a forum 2 and a half years ago saying I did something or was convinced I did something that I never actually did. Now I’ve been spiraling about someone finding it reporting me and I either get seen as a horrible person or arrested or something over something I never actually did but “admitted” to out of fear of going to hell. My mind won’t let it go and keeps finding new reasons for it to be “valid” “logical” or even inevitable. I feel like it’s just hanging over my head and I can never rest easy. Especially when I try to focus on my daily tasks or plan for the future I get this horrible flair up of “why plan for the future when this could come back in that future and you get uprooted from all of it” my mind won’t rest without certainty being uprooted won’t happen but certainty doesn’t exist, at least not with ocd. This sucks and I miss being care free.
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