1st Article on Compulsions in Mental Health: (Chapter No.o1)

 1^st Article on Compulsions in Mental Health: (Chapter No.o1)

Dear readers, something that shaped not only my recovery from a bunch of mental illness diagnoses but continues to shape, how I spend my time and energy in life and how, I proactively take care of my mental health and fitness. So, understanding compulsions beyond, what we consider a clinical compulsion, I would say is really what's helped prevent any relapse. Because it is the runway to ending up in a clinical mental illness struggling.

 Situation again becomes so obvious and so long there's so much distance between kind of everyday life and struggling and ending up back in a mental illness hole. It becomes much easier to maintain great mental health and fitness, So hopefully by pulling apart this machinery tonight you can see all of the different pieces of it. It'll start to change how you approach some experiences in life experiences in our heads but also experiences around us. I will get to the definition first of a compulsion, so speaking of experiences compulsions are unhealthy ways that we interact with experiences. I would define a compulsion as anything we do to cope with check on or control uncertainty anxiety and other feelings we don't like and so feelings i mean that very broadly from emotions to physical feelings so anything we can feel not just something like anxiety or depression or something like that but also things like the weird physical sensations, we'll get in our bodies that will then spend hours checking online or or going to multiple different doctors you know chasing reassurance and things like that as well as pain so a very very broad spectrum here. When we're talking about this and when i say anything i i really mean anything we will explore each of the three compulsions there the coping the checking and controlling in depth.

 I will share a bit more about each of them we'll talk about why this can be so useful beyond what we typically see as a definition for a mental illness diagnosis. We'll look at something called the distress clause which is in the dsm i call it the distress clause they don't they don't actually call it that. But I WIll explain why i call it the distress clause and then we're gonna get into actually exploring the variations in compulsions from a normal compulsion that we would see as like doesn't everybody do that. Like what's wrong with that to a compulsion that you know is probably obvious to most people as like something. That's like clinically disordered or insane or irrational but the real insight that was so useful for me was to recognize that to get to that point right. So for anybody that's unfamiliar i was way separated from reality lik,e i was just explaining to somebody, how i used to struggle with de-realization and depersonalization symptoms. So, I used to i would stare at myself in the mirror to check if i felt like i was me and  I didn't and i would look at pictures of myself to try to convince myself that they were me and i would I feel like that wasn't a picture of me. I used to check my id i'd take it over my wallet or especially if I was in the airport or something i would be convinced that my passport or my license wasn't actually me and I was going to get arrested for impersonating somebody and that's just a tiny teeny tiny segment of the compulsions and symptoms, that I struggled with but I was well off on the extreme end of things right.

 I thought people were trying to poison, all sorts of different things, I was like of course like washing my hands repeatedly until they hurt. I used to have to watch the stove all sorts of lock checking and extensive we would be here all night if I had to list out all of the compulsions but they really did begin with practices that I think everybody would say are normal and understanding. Compulsions begin with a whole bunch of normal patterns of behaviour is what really helped me make that change from, where i used to be to where i am now. So, if some of what i'm saying tonight you hear you go but those are just normal like anybody would do that. Any anybody would and just like with physical fitness i mean any pretty much everybody does things that contribute out as well.

Actually, you're guaranteed everybody does things that can contribute to developing poor physical fitness, likewise everybody does things that practice poor mental fitness. It all begins with normal, so we'll explore that so, we'll read a couple segments. We'll read a couple segments from you or not, where it's getting last this is an amazing lab just look at it. I can make physical objects disappear we'll take a look at a couple segments from you or not a rock looking at coping checking and controlling, if you've got the book this covers all of the compulsions already and a bunch of exercises for exploring them. So, if you want to go into this more in-depth that's totally doable and this covers all. I mean urinary covers all the exercises and concepts that really helped me with recovery and now taking care of my mental health and fitness and so there's no weird secret to this stuff that's really important too. (Continued---)