Wednesday, September 22, 2021

But...That's Not Real

    Part of living with OCD is dealing with intrusive thoughts and the irrational fears that those intrusive thoughts can cause. And I have a few: demonic possession from the years before I was diagnosed; the whole death by cleaning products issue that I mentioned in a previous post; unknowingly and accidently being the cause of someone's death; and most recently, since we've been living through a major health crisis, contamination. (I'm sure I have more, but let's not go down that rabbit hole today.)

    The pattern is always the same: I have an intrusive thought that is triggered by something, like a situation, a person, an event, or something else external. The intrusive thought leads to an irrational (meaning not based in reality) fear of the thing from the intrusive thoughts. The irrational fear leads to a physical response (AKA my anxiety and panic attacks). Then I'm left in a battle between trying to maintain my healthy patterns or reverting back to old, unhealthy patterns that involve compulsions to make the fear and the physical response stop.

    All the while that I'm experiencing the irrational fear and the anxiety that was caused by my irrational fear, I know it's not rational. I know I don't logically need to be afraid of the thing that I'm afraid of. While my anxiety is building up, even all the way to the tipping point, and sometimes even during a panic attack, I know I don't need to have such fear of the thing. I also know, logically, that I don't need to be anxious about the the thing that I'm anxious about. I am fully aware the whole time I'm lost in the land of irrationality that I'm being irrational, and I hate it. I hate that the fear and the anxiety keep happening anyway even though I know it's not a "real" fear.

    I was talking to my therapist about this very thing in my last phone session with her. I was telling her how much it bothered me to be anxious about a thing, and to know, logically, that I was being irrational while still being unable to stop the anxiety. 

    My therapist was quick to stop me from being too harsh with myself. She explained to me that the brain hasn't yet evolved enough in its most primal areas to be able to tell the difference between a real fear and an imagined fear. The brain just recognizes fear, and then it sounds the alarm so my survival instincts kick in. Then, because I can't run away from or fight my irrational OCD fears, I'm left with anxiety since the extra adrenaline, tense muscles, and all the things that go into the fight or flight response aren't actually put to use.

    So, *I* know my fear is irrational and not a thing that is really likely to happen. My brain, however, does not, and my brain, since it controls what chemicals get released into my body, wins a lot of the time. I can desensitize myself to the fear and lessen the emotional response over time with exposure and response prevention therapy, though, but even with ERP it'll take time for my emotional brain to catch up with my logical brain.

    I'll end with this: Just because somebody knows a fear is irrational doesn't mean that they can just stop having an anxiety response to that fear. A person can be fully aware they're being irrational, and yet they won't be able to stop the fear and the anxiety because the brain doesn't know the difference between a rational (real) and an irrational (not real) fear. The brain only has one blanket response when it comes to fear, and that setting is, "DANGER! DANGER! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!" So, it doesn't matter if the fear isn't actually a "real" thing because the brain treats every fear as real, which can leave a great many of us left to battle anxiety and panic attacks when we can't run from or fight those fears that live inside our heads until we work to desensitize ourselves.

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