Things that Help Writing my thoughts down

One my blogger friends wrote a post about the notebook she keeps of all her symptoms, and how she wishes she could throw it away, that it's not a journal but a type of compulsion. I have a whole collection of dayplanners full of notations about body symptoms, plus charts I sketched out on big sheets of paper to try and figure it all out. I felt anxious if I "lost" a symptom--couldn't remember when it started or what it used to be like, and I felt compelled to document it all. Logging symptoms can be useful in some contexts, but in the context of OCD, it can be a ritual.

When I started treatment with Leonard, he suggested I write down my obsessive thoughts, as a way to recognize that they are thoughts, not facts, giving myself something breathing room, some distance. I was still dealing with remnants of an OCD meltdown that drove me into treatment, so I started writing thoughts down, even though the perfectionist aspect of my OCD threw a fit, "Are you sure you doing this right?" It was a fascinating revelation when I realized I could just write that thought down as well.

I'd done thought records in the past where the assignment was to dispute the thoughts, but this would quickly bog down in self-loathing of my perceived inadequacy in thinking. But writing down the thoughts and simply labeling the thoughts wasn't as scary, because *I* was the observer. Leonard likes to say that I've never been gone, that I'm in there, that my OCD thoughts do not define me, and I am not defective.

Everytime I write the word "Thoughts" at the top of a page, and then begin with quote marks, I feel freedom to just observe, rather than getting into a battle that usually ends with even more obsessive thoughts than when I started. Some labels became very familiar, "critical voice," "self-loathing," "figuring out," "retracing," and I had enough support from Leonard to risk looking at my thoughts without spiralling into even more self-loathing.