OCD or using it as an excuse?

[GM777]

Hello-

First off, I have OCD and it makes things difficult and stressful. Last night, I was reading the Bible and asked how I could better honor my father, who I have a fairly walled off relationship with. Well I got a thought that was go to church with him. God? OCD? Who said it? Do I want to think it's OCD because it was an uncomfortable thought?

A nice gesture no doubt, but the idea has gotten me in a bit of a rut and while I feel calm now, it startled me and I don't want to get into an OCD spiral, therefore, I am attempting not to think about it. Stress and OCD do not mix well, and this has the potential to stress me out. First off, I do not have a church I go to, however, I do have tentative plans to go to a local church with a friend tomorrow. Maybe I can ask him to go at a later date? He may say that we could go to my town church...I have forgiven my town, which I have had a bad history with during high school and a lot of mental pain, but I feel that is an unnecessary step and also unfair and stressful.

My question is based around the fact that I don't even want to go with him. I want to honor him by being respectful, changing my attitude towards him, reaching out in little ways like a conversation at dinner. I know I will never have a complete relationship with my dad because he is emotionally walled off just as I am, and it is difficult and awkward, to be quite frank. I want to learn to love my father and accept him for who he is, but I can see going to church with him as being an hour of unneeded stress following a day of stress thinking about it. I just don't want to put myself in a stressful situation like this when I am finally having a good day. I think this idea seems nice, but the fact that it gave me as much anxiety as it did is not something I want to deal with. Is it bad if I never go to church with him and will disregard this thought as an attempt to spiral me into OCD? Because that is what I am doing to keep myself sane.

 

[jerusalem]

be assured in knowing that all of our relationships are ongoing. it isn't a matter of doing some one thing and the relationship is magically 'there'. sometimes it is the biggest help in knowing why someone behaves the way they do. my own mother for example is emotionally unavailable. she and her 2 older sisters were taken from their parents by junior league during the depression as they were considered high risk for tuberculosis. my mom was then placed with her grandmother who was tired of raising children after 14 of her own. she would feed her breakfast, give her a sack lunch, send her off into the woods with the instruction to come home at sundown. when raising us her highest priority was to teach us how to survive in the event that we would become war orphans. both her older sister's had joined the military as nurses and as a teen she lived by a factory that manufactured tanks which rolled down the streets daily. my vindication came the day she casually mentioned that she must have been very self absorbed when we, her children, were growing up. she is still very self absorbed and emotionally unavailable but is blissfully unaware of it. i pray that you will work this out. i hope you will start asking your father questions about his past if you haven't already.

 

[RedTent]

There are ways of managing your thoughts. Our body works based on our thought patterns.

When we have joyful, happy ones those thoughts produce hormones and chemicals like serotonin so it produces more joy, more happiness. You have heard the phrase "riding on a high". The opposite is true. Let depressing, "ain't it aawwwfuull" thoughts in and it actually changes our body chemical to produce more of them.

We get the idea that our thoughts just are there, we have no control of them. We do have control. Our brain is never idle, and we can listen to the stream of thoughts that flow through, or just react to them. God says words are powerful. In John 1:1 it says: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." It is interesting to look up "word" in a concordance. I found 110 matches in the NT alone. To put the words of our creator in our minds instead of depressing words that come to us is like giving your body a dose of serotonin that you are not producing correctly.

You are stressed over your Dad because you are taking on God's work having to do with him. God is in charge of what he does, you aren't. God used him to give you life, for that you owe him respect. God says so. God created him, just as he created you. You are to respect and love that part of him. The other is, frankly, none of your business.

There are other things you can do for OCD. It responds to exercise, and in line with happy thoughts, they found that if you are unhappy about doing the exercise it does not help the OCD, you have to like doing it! So as helpful as exercise is, our thoughts are more powerful.

Love cures! One person gets someone to rub her back, and just the touch helps.

With how my very literal mind works, and with my bible saying God is light, I sit in a chair and put this light all around me. Of course, this light God is talking about isn't what comes from the sun, it is a deeply spiritual light. But I use sunlight to symbolize this.