How things have changed…

Over the past few weeks & months so many things have changed in my life. We have had a family member staying in our spare room for some time now and although they will be moving out in the next few weeks it’s hard having that extra person. I’m pregnant, which in itself is a massive change especially when it comes to mental health, we have a dog who will be around a year old when the baby comes.

When I stopped writing here I was doing so well with regards to my CBT, I was well on my way to combatting my compulsions at work and I felt like I had really got ahold of my intrusive thoughts with regards to H. I had techniques which I used and I used them well. When covid-19 came along it didn’t really affect my OCD much, I’ve never really had health anxiety or OCD around cleanliness and contamination and with being pregnant it meant I was quite limited with what I could do at work due to the nature of my job. When I stopped taking my medication I felt so good for weeks I really thought that my CBT techniques alone were enough to help me deal with my thoughts better. However, I slowly started to notice more reassurance seeking creeping in, I was becoming snappy and I was feeling really indifferent in a lot of ways. It took me a while to notice what was happening but eventually I did, there was still that voice in my head telling me it was all in my head and I found it hard to accept what was happening. I finally spoke to J about how I was feeling and boy did that help! It was such a relief to just get it out so it wasn’t all bottled up in my head.

Since then I’ve felt better, not great and still incredibly worried about the time that is coming with having a newborn baby at home and potentially slipping back into old habits with my compulsions. But, I have been reassurance seeking a lot less especially in the past week. I am going to start my workbook this week which will hopefully reinforce some of the techniques I’ve already learnt in my CBT sessions.

Such a large amount of change in a relatively small amount of time was bound to bring up some of the feelings and thoughts that I used to have and I feel like I need to be kinder to myself. But at the same time I need to give myself a shake sometimes and remind myself that I know how to deal with these thoughts and I have learned good techniques of how I should deal with them. Putting them into practice is the challenging bit! I am sure that is the case for a lot of people and I know the challenges I feel are in no way exclusive to me, in many ways I am lucky that I have had access to this free CBT service and that it has been working so well.

Over the next few weeks I am going to be working really hard at using my CBT techniques every day in the hope that when the baby comes I will be in a much better place and therefore able to deal with the thoughts that I am so worried will come at that time.