Tag: HealthObsessionsAndOCD

Welcome back to our Themes of OCD series. Today we are covering all things health related, physical health, but also mental health obsessions.

Hello and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD with Carrie Bock. I’m a Christ follower, wife and mother, licensed professional counselor who helps Christians struggling with OCD get to a deeper level of healing. When I couldn’t find resources for my clients with OCD, God called me to bring this podcast to you with practical tools for developing greater peace. We’re here to bust through the shame and stigma surrounding struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories of healing and helping you replace uncertainty with faith.

I’m here to help you let go of the past and future to walk in the present abundant life God has for you. So let’s dive right into today’s episode. You may not know that some people have obsessions about developing schizophrenia. or some type of psychosis. And for whatever reason, this seems to be common in the prenatal postpartum period.

There are a lot of women nowadays that are afraid of developing postpartum psychosis. They’ve heard things on the news or read stories on the internet. Let’s talk about the variety of health obsessions that you may be struggling with. You might have a concern about having some type of long term illness such as cancer, such as an autoimmune illness, an autoimmune disorder.

You may have concerns about long COVID. What we find is that these obsessions usually capitalize a lot on body sensations. You will have some type of body sensation and then OCD comes in and tries to make some immediate meaning out of that body sensation. I’m having a headache. I’ve had a headache yesterday.

What does that mean? Could I have a brain tumor? And that’s a tough one, right? Because you can have a headache for about a hundred different reasons. You might have heart palpitations and think that you’re having a heart attack. What this looks like on the mental health side is that you may have a down day or maybe going through an experience that genuinely makes you sad.

OCD rushes in and says, Are you depressed? Do you think you might have to go to the mental hospital? Are you developing bipolar disorder right now? You were just up yesterday and now you’re down. The OCD has a tendency to take these normal, everyday experiences such as having a headache, feeling heart palpitations, Having a down or sad day and then exploiting it and expanding it into making meaning about something that there’s no actual sense data evidence for.

OCD may cause you to think that you’re actually hearing sounds, or maybe I think I see something out of the corner of my eye, and then I’m making some type of meaning. Did I just hallucinate right now? With the compulsions for this theme, there’s a lot of internal checking that people do. People will check on their feelings internally.

They may check on their body sensations internally. A lot of reassurance seeking from friends, family, but especially reassurance seeking from the internet. There are so many forums out there like Reddit that people will look up their symptoms on, googling everything to do with the first signs of schizophrenia, or how do you know you’re going crazy, or postpartum psychosis, what is it like to live with schizophrenia, how bad does it get?

I mean, you can just imagine the amount of information that we have now at our fingertips. That people did not have 50 years ago. If you struggle with this, there’s two things that I’m going to encourage you to do. The big one is get off Google, if you can. Get off searching for things related to your health or your mental health.

Clients will argue with me sometimes that it helps them a little bit. But then other times they read things that cause them to be more distressed. It doesn’t matter if you read something and it causes you relief or you read something and it causes you distress. Either way, you’re perpetuating that obsessive compulsive cycle.

Because every time you do the compulsion, you reinforce the fact that you need to pay attention to that obsession. This is really key to understand when it comes to reassurance seeking. Because I think people think that when they get that temporary relief, that’s a positive. It’s actually not. It’s a negative.

We’re just strengthening the whole process all over again. So we want to do our best to remove yourself from Google and Reddit and those types of websites. Now, if you can’t right away, that’s okay. Can you set a timer for two minutes and tell yourself, I’m going to wait two minutes before I get on Google?

Or can you set a timer for five minutes and say, I’m going to not get on here until it’s five minutes has gone up. Now, sometimes you may find that the urge passes in that five minutes. It may not, but if it does, let’s take the victories where we can get them when it comes to OCD. Okay. The other thing I really stress to my clients is not all sensations are symptoms.

Let’s repeat that again. Not all sensations are symptoms. Bodies are incredibly noisy. They don’t always act according to plan. They do strange things. And here’s the other thing you have to understand, that your body and your brain are in constant communication through your nervous system. This is happening super fast.

My grandmother had this book I remember a long time ago that said, Your body believes everything you tell it, and the premise behind the book was basically like, you shouldn’t say things like, my arm is killing me, or I feel like I got hit by a truck. Your brain hears and your body responds accordingly.

So here’s a test. I want you to bring up a memory, could be recent, it could be a little bit farther back, but a time where you knew that you genuinely felt happy or joyful. Could have been a graduation, a wedding, a birth of a child. See if you can picture that really vividly in your mind. And get really in tune with how you felt emotionally there.

And as you start to do that, even for a moment, you’re gonna notice that your body has a response. Hopefully bringing up positive sensations for you. Or you may feel areas of your body just go more limp or relax a little bit. It depends on your comfort with relaxation and whether or not your body cooperates with that process. However, the key thing to notice is that the reverse is also true. So if we get really fixated on a symptom and we start to notice it really deeply and really fully, That this can cause that symptom to increase all the more or to be louder. So if we’re focused on that headache, saying, Oh, I have this headache.

It’s awful. And now we add some anxiety on top of that. Well, what if there’s a deeper issue? What if I’m going to have a brain aneurysm? What if I’m going to have to go to the hospital for this later? What if it’s going to be the worst migraine of my life? Some of you have dealt with some of those. And that you can get really, really worked up in what we call the secondary suffering piece.

As you get really worked up in your mind about that sensation, that sensation becomes worse because now we’ve dumped stress on top of it. Being mindful is super, super healthy, I think for all of OCD, but especially if you’re dealing with health concerns. Being able to be like a third party noticer of what’s happening without feeling like you have to get sucked into an obsessional story surrounding this body sensation.

So what does that look like? It means practicing. Just noticing the flat facts of the situation. I have a headache. It doesn’t feel good. I don’t need to make any meaning out of it right now. Now, obviously, if I have the worst headache, that I’ve ever had in my life, and it also comes with other symptoms. So usually, that’s why we say not all sensations are symptoms.

Typically, if you’re having some type of medical emergency, you’re going to have other symptoms like a stiff neck, fever, you might have tingling or numbness in parts of your body. There could be all kinds of different things that could happen as our body’s way of letting us know that we need further attention and evaluation. And that’s where we can enlist your medical professionals that you see, not in a way of reassurance seeking, but in a way to help you, okay, this is something I struggle with, I struggle with having these headaches on a regular basis, for example. How do I know if I have a headache that needs further attention or evaluation?

Maybe your doctor says if you’re having this many, maybe they say if it’s at this level of pain, maybe they say if it comes with some of these other symptoms. And that’s a really great litmus test for yourself to know is this a health OCD concern or is this a medical emergency because we don’t want to flip all the way to the other side and say, well, I’m just ignoring all that because it’s just probably my OCD.

We want to find this middle ground, which I know is really challenging because it’s easier to be in all that black and white thinking. And you think about when you do go to your doctor’s office with a symptom, what are they going to know? They’re going to want to know things like how bad it is. What’s your pain level on the 0 to 10 scale?

They’re going to want to know, when did this start? Was there some kind of origin to it? How long has it been going on? These are all types of things that you can notice for yourself and maybe jot down a note or two, not in a compulsive way, not in a I’m searching for these symptoms, but just like, Oh, that came up again.

Let me jot it down day and time, maybe. You can look at concerns about your mental health in a similar light, hopefully, if you’re dealing with some of these obsessions that you’re able to talk with a therapist about them, where we can look at normalizing emotional experiences that you might be having.

You may have been through a major grief and loss incident and you’re afraid of becoming super depressed or non functional. Maybe you’ve had a specific trauma and you just feel like you’re walking through a fog or you don’t really feel fully connected to yourself. Those are things that can be worked on in therapy to get you to a better place.

In the cases with health concerns, either physical health or mental health, you might have concerns about being disconnected from your loved ones or not being able to care for them, such as in the space of being a new mom. This is that feared self piece that we talk about in ICBT, and we want to look at what, quote, evidence OCD is using to reinforce the need for these types of compulsions. All OCD themes can be highly distressing, and I want you to know that the high level of anxiety that comes with OCD is not indicative of whether or not your obsessions are going to come true. OCD draws you in with a story and gets all of these internal fears churned up inside of you is a way to say, Hey, pay attention to this.

It’s important. I’m not going to let you let it go. You’ve got to somehow find resolution and no amount of research after research, no amount of articles is ever going to lead you to resolving that obsessional doubt. And that’s how we know. that this is OCD. We all have periods of everyday doubt with our health where maybe they say, Hey, I’m not really sure, but something’s come up abnormal on a scan or in your blood work.

We need to do a little bit more testing or a little bit more digging. They may look at doing a biopsy or a follow up scan. And during the time that you’re waiting on those things, you’re naturally going to have anxiety. But those everyday doubts get resolved when we find out the test results or find out the treatment process and plan.

What OCD does is it comes in and may even doubt results that you have received from the doctor. Maybe somebody has told you you don’t have cancer. And you’re doubting, well, did the right specimen get to the right person at the lab? Did they miss something? Was somehow the report done wrong? What if I still do have cancer?

You’re not trusting the sense data at that point. If this is a theme that you’re struggling with, that you are kept up at night wondering if you are going to die, or If you’re going to have to go to the mental hospital, I really encourage you to reach out for help and support. I am in Tennessee and you can reach me online at carriebock.com or find a therapist in your area that can help you. Know that wherever your health journey has taken you, I certainly have a husband who is experiencing a medical disability right now. So I say firsthand that God loves you, that he has a great plan for your life, and is completely in control. You can trust him with your future.

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Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area.