7th ) Article on Compulsions in Mental Health: (Chapter No.07):

(7^th ) Article on Compulsions in Mental Health: (Chapter No.07):

Whether, it's like harming different people sexuality anxieties, gender anxieties, things like that all get roped into that feeling or that compulsion. But they all start with very normal practices around. I need a particular feeling before doing things, I value. I need to get things right in a particular way and totally normal but then it just grows and grows. It becomes a practice and eventually, it becomes something, that's problematic.

 I find making a plan or schedule in a day that connects with my values helps. Often either the night before or the morning of and it's not even necessary. A schedule and now in part that's because I just end up. You know like especially say the last couple weeks, I've been doing tons of workshops, like coaching clients. I had to stop taking on new coaching clients until, the new year's, the things that you know that like ends up booking in a particular schedule already and so what I look at then is what do I want to give. So, either the night before or the morning of i'll just take a second. So, like what do, I value and so what am I what do, i want to give today and just look at that.

So, when I have a moment, I can just come back to that kind. They're more like a set of priorities instead of a schedule just. So, I can say now I have some time. What do I want to give and this is, what I value giving the most today and then I go and do that? So, I find that I like seeing it, more as a set of priorities or even when something's going on. That I'm already scheduled into just knowing, what's most important to me. So, that whenever something comes up, whatever I'm doing or something comes up in my brain or whatever I already know which direction I want to go. I don't want to try to like figure it out at that moment, what about and the question is, what about yoga or meditation. How is that giving, that's like giving care to myself absolutely. One of these is a neat one to explore.

This is a great one, let's do this one next how we care for ourselves. So, a normal compulsion might be only you know taking care of how I look if people will see me right. This is how many and how many people there in the chat do that, I used to do that all the time. Maybe, you're doing that a lot during the pandemic. What are pants people only see our tops anymore, if you're, I used to really not take care of myself. Unless I was going to see somebody else because I had all these fears social anxiety fears. What are people going to think about me and so on and so I only took care of myself as a practice of control. What other people would think to control me to look a particular way because of what I thought other people would think and so the moment other people were removed from the equation, I would just be, I would just let myself go not take care of myself in any way and it really helped me to realize, that it's useful to take care of myself.

For me and to give myself that and to develop a practice around caring for ourselves, that's just about ourselves and so something like yoga or meditation. I'm giving myself that with meditation that practice of being, so only taking care of how, I look if people will see me might be a totally normal compulsion, that might develop into. We see this a lot, what's going on there a lot of social anxiety compulsions. It becomes quirky people will avoid a lot of different situations because it's not going to give them the time to control themselves and so and often people will disguise it to themselves and to others as self-care. But actually, it's more about anxiety avoidance around other people and so the end, it'll start to become that quirky thing like, oh i don't do that on those particular nights or I don't do that, I don't go to those particular places or so on or I you know even avoiding responsibility at work. Because maybe there was going to be a role that would involve meeting more customers or travelling and because we would travel and then not have access to all of the compulsions we want to do around controlling ourselves.

 We'd be like, I can't do that because I can't take my compulsions on the road, I need to be at home. I need to have this like a very structured process around compulsions. We present it as a quirk of social avoidance behaviours avoiding responsibilities. Let's put it social avoidance, we can just put social avoidance behaviours, we disguise as self-care, how about that there we go challenging. Once a challenging one to look at and then, when it gets to like a really clinical compulsion, there could be all sorts of things. Social anxiety, compulsions come up in all sorts of unusual ways that people don't often recognize as social anxiety, compulsions for example contamination compulsions like washing hands until bleeding. (Continued---)