Did I close the door before I left home? Why this box is not in its place? Where are my keys? did I lose them? Am I good enough for the job I am going to apply? Why does everybody look at me? Is something wrong with my appearance? Are the photos I have captured today good enough in order to share them on my social media accounts? Does the text on my posts have any mistakes? I will check it again just to be sure. But is it good enough to share it on my blog? All the coffees I made at work today were very bitter and didn't smell as good as I wanted! What if other people assure me that my coffees are great, one little voice inside my head tells me that they are not. What if people understand that I am not so good as they think? Why I can't enjoy?
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All these bad thoughts domineer my mind since I remember myself. During the day, millions of thoughts, bad and good cross through my mind and I can't focus at anything. I continually fall into contradictions because a single thought is able to change my mind momentarily. I am full of good ideas but I can't fulfill anything because I will start something new after a while. But is this normal? Till recently I thought it was. I was thinking that this is who I am and I will always be like that until 2 years before that I asked the help of a therapist and the journey to my self-awareness has begun.
From the very first sessions with my therapist, I was starting to understand that the human soul is extremely complicated and sometimes very difficult to understand it. I learned that all feelings are substantive and totally acceptable and if we know how to recognize them as time goes by, they won΄t be painful and they won΄t affect our behavior and mainly our judgment. Furthermore, I learned that most of our daily actions and behaviors are done unconsciously because our brain is programmed to repeat situations and behaviors. But if we are able to understand what is going on behind the scenes of our soul and harm us, we can change that and take better decisions in order to improve our lives. We should never care what other people think about us, we must keep going to fulfill our goals even if anyone believes in us. Eventually, our value will be recognized by people who have the same ideas and passions in life. And we will finally fit somewhere. At last but not least we must accept who we really are, the paths that we have walked through and ourselves must be the number one priority. If we are not satisfied with our life is because we care too much for others and we forget to take care of ourselves. I learned to love myself and do things I really wanted and I started to say no, something that was very difficult for me the previous years.
After 3-4 months of psychotherapy, I was feeling a completely different person. My surroundings were amazed by the change of my behavior and how optimistic I was about life. At work, I stopped to overreact, every time that I was observing something wrong, that was exceeding the obsessive rules of perfection that I had in my unwholesome mind. I was feeling strong and I left my job in the middle of the summer season because I wasn't satisfied with the working environment. One week later I started at a new job with a little lower salary with a boss that recognized my value very quickly and gave me a promotion 2 months later. I believed in myself for the first time and I had whatever I wanted. A good work, a nice appearance internally and physically, and a lot of amorous conquests which made my self-confidence fly to the moon. It was one of the best summers of my life.
This period a young beautiful feminine boy named Konstantinos which was a customer at the bar I was working, was hitting on me through facebook messages and I was trying to reject him kindly because he was my customer. He insisted to send me messages for a long time and after about 2 months I accepted to go out with him for a walk at the beach. From the first moment of our meeting, I was feeling very uncomfortable and I realized that we were two totally different personalities that could never match each other. On our first date the music genre he was listening at his mobile phone was very annoying to my ears and I wanted to leave immediately but my kindness didn't allow me to do it. After the first date, others followed and we started to develop a bond between us, but back then I couldn't accept that I was falling in love with a 21 years old boy with feminine behavior and totally different personality from me. We live in a small town of 35000 residents and we know personally almost everyone. Every time I was going out with him I was feeling huge stress and crazy ideas were emerging from my mind that everybody is looking at us.
Meanwhile, I had stopped the psychotherapy and all these terrible thoughts were starting to emerging again and torture my mind. I decided to stop every contact with Konstantinos and I blocked him everywhere because I knew he would never stop trying to contact me. We had to talk more than 2 months until one night which I was feeling very lonely. I called him and invited him to my new house. Since that night we live together and we are partners, lovers, and good friends. At the age of 30 I learned from a 21 years old boy, how it is to love and be loved unconditionally.
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Everything was great in our relationship, but the stress was overwhelming me and I couldn't enjoy anything. I was having panic attacks that were lasting for 12-24 hours at least 4 times a month and I was suffocating. During these panic attacks, I had difficulty to breathe and I was feeling that I needed more air, also I didn't have the strength even to talk. In order to feel better during these panic attacks, I was repeating 3 processes. Hot shower, water drinking and afterward I was immediately used my fingers to throw up and empty all the water I have drunk before. For some seconds I was feeling good but the same symptoms were emerging again very quickly. I was wondering why I had panick attacks and what causes all this stress. The answer came when I visited my therapist and everything came clear!
The answer was in front of me for a long time but I couldn΄t see it. It is the first time I am in a relationship with a boy, living together and share everything. Till now I had ephemeral relationships which were lasting very little time but now I live it regularly and I have dived very deep into this relationship. The problem is that I feel guilty about my homosexuality and bad thoughts slate my mind everytime I go out with my partner. As a result, I feel stressed all the time. This stress which always was present in my life is being created by some obsessive thoughts that coming from a disease of the brain called OCD.
Actually, I don΄t really have ocd but some bad compulsive repeatable thoughts which are emerging in my mind. these thoughts set me back and don΄t let me enjoy the good moments because they make me feel very stressful. My therapist told me that my soul feels guilty about my homosexuality and I am doing some things that I unconsciously think that they will make me feel redemption for the bad things I supposedly do. The last ten days I had 3 panic attacks and I was feeling very heavy inside me. I was feeling a lot of stress and I coudn΄t relax neither one moment. My psychologist advised me to visit a psychiatrist in order to prescribe me some anxiolytic pills in order to use them every time I have panic attacks.
Very soon, I booked an appointment with a psychiatrist I found online and after one very intense week full of anxiety, I finally was outside the door of the doctor, feeling very nervous about the upcoming diagnosis and the medication the psychiatrist was going to prescribe me. The doctor was very friendly and he even let me smoke in his office. From the first moment of our meeting, I started to describe extensively my situation and very quickly he understood how overstretched I was. Also, he asked me some questions in order to understand if I had OCD. Finally, he announced to me that I have developed some obsessive elements and these were leading to compulsive behaviors which I can΄t control and I need to take an antidepressant pill to help me get rid of all these obsessive thoughts and the stress. As he told me I will understand the impact of the drugs after 2-3 weeks. Also he gave me some anxiolytic pills to take for one week, in order to relax and kick away all that stress that tortures me all this time.
I was very skeptical about taking these pills because we all know that they considered as a taboo. I was thinking that if I take them, I would be addicted to them and I will take them for my whole life. The doctor patiently explained to me that my brain has a problem in communication between the front of the brain and the deeper anatomical structures. These brain structures use a chemical messenger called serotonin. My brain doesn't send correctly the serotonin to the deeper anatomical structures and that's why I can't enjoy anything. The pills will do this work for my brain and as time goes by I will stop suffering from these obsessive thoughts and the stress will disappear. If I don't take the pills the problem will get worse through the years and I will end up with real OCD.
The best treatment for patients with OCD is cognitive behavioral therapy which I am doing for about 2 years now but the combination with antidepressant pills makes the success rates of healing very high. Today I am on the seventh day of my treatment and I feel very optimistic about the upcoming days. I already feel much better and the previous days I have been exposed to situations that were making me feel nervous before I have started taking the pills. I am not 100% relaxed yet but I am improving and I feel very happy for that.
The reasons I wrote this post today are many! Firstly I wanted to write down my thoughts and make a little research about OCD which I was always saying for fun that I had it, but finally many years later I discovered that indeed I suffer from that. Secondly, I wanted to share my story about my obsessive behavior because I want people to understand that it is something absolutely natural and it can happen to anyone. Also, I want to meet some people who suffered in the past or still suffering from OCD or anxiety and read about their experiences. Lastly, I hate to lie, and I lied at some posts of mine about my beloved girlfriend who is not a girl but a handsome boy who loves me and take cares of me these difficult moments. Every time I refer to him with the pronoun her, my heart hurts because I am sick of lying. I am homosexual and unconscious all these years I was feeling guilty about that despite the fact that a lot of people know it and have accepted me as I am. I know it is not your business and you don΄t care about my sexuality but I wanted to publish it in order to accept and love myself as exactly it is. One other reason I wrote all these down today is that I know plenty of people who are very unhappy about their life and they hesitate to visit a specialist who can really help them. It is not a shame to have childhood traumas, to have a mental disease or to be very stressful. Every problem can be solved if you deeply believe that you can overthrow it. It needs time, pain, and money but if you don΄t do this for yourself you will lose more time of joy and happiness and believe me everyone wants to feel happy.
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So that was it for today. Thanks for reading, I hope I wasn΄t too long. I would love to read personal experiences and opinions about OCD and medication.
See you in one of my upcoming posts. BYE