Dear Midnight:

You are welcome. If you take on healing from your long term anxiety, it is and will continue to be a difficult process. No easy solutions, no “from now on everything will be fine.” Extreme patience is required. Sometimes you will feel better and think: “I got it” but soon enough distress will return. Then you may think something like: “What is wrong with me? I thought I got it! Why am I struggling again?” And this is where that extreme patience comes in, patience with yourself and with the process and a gentle attitude toward yourself. Prepare for a long road, but if you persist, there will be progress and there will be healing.

If we do keep communicating here on your thread, we will bring up different points at different times. The road, the path of healing is not something that can be summed up in one post. It involves you experimenting with this and that, over time and things come up throughout your actual experimenting and experiences.

One point to clarify: you seem to fit very well into the ROCD diagnosis but you were not born with ROCD. This diagnosis like so many other mental diagnoses are combinations of symptoms. A baby is not born with a combination of symptoms. Those combinations were decided on, or put together by psychiatrists. The root cause is almost always one: anxiety, that is excess, ongoing fear, most often since childhood.

You are wondering if you have OCD since you didn’t experience other symptoms of OCD- but this line of thinking is based on a false assumption: that a person is born with OCD, an OCD gene, or is infected with an OCD virus or such… no. The symptoms for people are many, the combinations of symptoms are endless really (This is why psychiatrists are trying to organize the mess into groups or combinations of symptoms aka diagnoses).

Focus on the root cause, your anxiety which predates the particular ROCD category of symptoms.

You brought up other things. We can talk about it more later. For now: I had CBT with Mindfulness. As to mindfulness working sometimes but not at other times: I am still making progress with mindfulness- it is a skill that you have to practice over months and years- I have- and I still am amazed that there is more to it.

anita