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lithium
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19 Apr 2015, 7:38 pm

hello everyone, wow i haven't posted on these forums for quite a while.
so i was diagnosed with aspergers in my younger years and with OCD in my late teens and i was hoping some kindred spirits would have similar experiences with this.

as someone with both aspergers and OCD and considering both conditions kind of compliment each other does anyone ever feel like they can't tell wich part of your rituals, mantra's and tics are part of your aspergers or your OCD.

i have become much more aware of my "flaws" these past few years and it's been occuring to me how much i've missed in life because of it and i've been trying to get to the root of the problem but it's really hard to pinpoint where the aspergers ends and the OCD starts.

does anyone else with a similar condition have similar problems?


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jimmyboy76453
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20 Apr 2015, 9:02 am

I don't think there is a place where one starts and the other ends. They bleed together. The only thing you can do is figure out a way to work around it no matter why it exists.
I can't say I have OCD, but I have always been very strict about my routines and procedures. However, I recognized at a young age that if I let them get out of hand, I started to become more rigid about them. The more I repeated the same ritual, the more necessary it became to repeat it and the more disturbed I became if I couldn't or was interrupted. If I find myself doing something the same way and NEEDING to keep doing it that way, I purposely change something about it to break myself of the need. It is frustrating as all hell and it makes my skin crawl for a few days, but I force myself to do it until the need to keep it the old way is gone.
For example, when I was a teenager I would need to shower at exactly the same time every day. When I say exactly the same time, I mean to the minute. 7:00am. Not 6:59, not 7:01. If it was 6:59, I would stand outside the shower and wait until the clock read 7:00 am. But, having 4 brothers and sisters who also needed to shower meant that sometimes the bathroom would be occupied at my shower time. I found myself being stressed and angry the rest of the day because I had to break my schedule and wait 10 minutes. That bothered me, and I recognized the OCD tendencies in it, so I purposely made myself wait until at least 7:30 to shower. Then, when I got used to that, I started showering at 6:30 instead. Sooner or later, I had made enough small changes that I didn't care when I showered anymore. Not sure if that would work for you, but it works for me.


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MollyTroubletail
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20 Apr 2015, 9:42 am

Just like cream and coffee melt together to create creamy coffee, various mental disorders can be what they call "co-morbid". It means they go together and not able to be separated.