I am so thankful that I now know the whys of why it is that I deal with some of the fears that I deal with. For a long time I dealt with this fear that I was going to do outrageous things or act inappropriately in public. I also for a long time dealt with fears that I was going to hurt people or that I was going to cause people to sue me or that I was going to be a disappointment to my family and that they would cut me out.
I came to realize two things. That a lot of these fears are OCD driven. Because many of them do drive me to the compulsions of actually doing research and looking things up on my fears. This is not something that is new either. This is somethng that I have been dealing with since I was in high school and maybe before. For years nobody knew why I was the way that I was. But answers came when I was diagnosed at UM with autism and OCD 35 years ago.
Reading up about OCD on websites like Mayo Clinic and the Mighty helped me to understand. Because for years my family didn't understand and I didn't understand. I had no idea what it was that was causing me to have these irrational crippling thoughts that I had.
I also know that true healing comes from God and that God's word can help me to overcome some of this. There is that verse that is in my bathroom "Whatsoever things are good and lovely and honest and true and pure and right keep your mind on them.". My pastor and I were talking about this this morning when we talked about OCD and I told him that the key is that verse to keep your mind on things that are of good report.
The more I give it to God, the more peace that I am feeling. I used to be bound up with fear and anxiety and scrupulosity (religious compulsions) at work. But I have learned to give these things to God and let him have my entire life and he has been giving me so much peace over it.
Recently I was a part of mental health training through Be Nice. We watched a couple videos involving people on job sites that were dealing with mental disorders or with anxiety depression and in all of them it was the encouragement of coworkers that led to them going to get diagnosed and to get the help that they needed to get.
My next appointment with my counselor is the 16th and I am going to be opening up more and more about just my past and some of the trauma and PTSD that I have dealt with and I am trusting that God will open the doors that need to get opened so that I can get the diagnosis and the treatments can start. And I want to say what I have always said over and over: Don't be shamed into not taking medications. God uses doctors to prescribe medications that help a great deal of different conditions and it's not "witchcraft" like some Christians claim.
When I watched the old GI Joe cartoons in the 80s public safety was promoted in a lot of those cartoons at the end. One of the GI Joes would always talk to a kid about ways to be safe in the community especially when it came to not talking to strangers and when it came to crossing the road and being safe on the way to school and such. The same applies to mental illness. People need to know. The more people know., the more there can be understanding. God bless you all.
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