What is different now?

I saw a headline about one of my health obsessions yesterday, and I felt forboding and fear, remembering the erosion of my functioning and my life in the summer of 2006, when my OCD went unchecked, went by leaps and bounds. What is different now? When I'm vulnerable it's hard to remember the changes. I don't want to ever go back to the pain I felt then. I'm afraid of even the memory of that year, afraid it will suck me back in, that I am the hopeless defective person the OCD told me I was.

We are vulnerable creatures. We can be hurt, and die. This makes my heart heavy, and the OCD is more than willing to rush in and tell me if I just try hard enough, I can make myself completely safe. The perfectionism is bearing down and taunting me, and demanding I resolve my confusion about this health issue, even if there isn't any definitive evidence or answer. There's a lot of discussion in the medical world about "evidence based medicine" but sometimes the evidence is lacking or not clear cut. I hate this. My urge is to start researching, but I would be taking my sanity into danger by doing that. Researching is part of what gave the storm of anxiety such power in 2006.

And the deeply stubborn beliefs bubble up. "If you hadn't started Exposure Therapy , you would've researched this definitively and known what to do, but no, you stopped researching. What kind of fool are you? Obviously worthless, negligent, defective." All the old stuff. I need the possibility of grace, the hope that I am loved, that even if I am a fool, I am forgiven. The uncertainty about how to proceed with my medical issues is painful enough without this sense of being on trial, obsessive interrogation of my every move.