Irrational fear, OCD or both?

Like everyone else, I have gone through life having to overcome certain fears, some rational, some not so.  However; recently a certain fear has been developing to a point I think it might be verging on unhealthy and irrational.

For some unknown reason, I developed a phobia of losing my house, more specifically, it falling down.  I have researched subsidence and heave to the point I probably know more about it than a structural engineer!  It started with me becoming obsessed with small hairline cracks due to natural movement, which lead to be looking into the foundations of the house, the type of soil it is built on and common problems with properties of a certain age.  This has developed to the point I know every single visible crack on the outside and inside my property and I monitor them regularly on a daily basis.  I appreciate this is irrational and that I am probably obsessing over nothing, but I now have to inspect the cracks daily and have an internal sense of dread that seems to be getting worse as if I am waiting for some catastrophic to happen to my house.

My home is the only place I can truly relax, so to have my sacred place become a place of dread is a big deal for me.  I am becoming more anxious and agitated and I regularly have dreams of my house falling down or disappearing down a sinkhole.  This is a fear that is now becoming constant and beyond my ability to control and manage.

I have been through the motions of tackling it logically and assessing the probability of these fears happening, and although they are very unlikely, the fact that they could be likely at all is enough to drive it in my mind.

I'm not sure what to do now to try and manage things better.  Counselling, psychotherapy and CBT are out of the question as the services near to me don't cater for people with ASD.

Has anyone else had phobias suddenly manifest like this?  There is obviously a root cause, I just can't get to it at present.

Parents
  • Starbuck, maybe the thing to bear in mind is that the world, or 'reality', is full of imperfections but that does not stop things working okay and having stability. It seems to me that what you are doing is focussing so much on minutiae that you are missing the big picture. For example, there is no human being that is perfection, yet many people live to a ripe old age carrying physical problems that never prove to be fatal and this is the way nature really is, i.e, a compromise between imperfection and functionality. Take autism as a case in point. Many autistic people are not perfectly suited to the 'ordinary world' yet manage to lead productive and fulfilling lives, despite this. Actually, taken to extremes one could argue that things like sub-atomic particles don't really exist until we make a measurement, which seems to suggest that the fundamental basis of reality is highly speculative, yet we experience it all the time as an ongoing, stable process. Imperfections are an intrinsic part of nature.Hope this helps. 

  • Sadly I am an inherent perfectionist at heart and this has caused me endless problems in the past.  I now focus this obsession into my work and how I structure things to stop it getting out of control, but I am not sure if this issue is linked to my perfectionism.  Normally I will stress over the quality of things and how aesthetically they look or how well something works.  The house issue is none of them as I have my projects already mapped out for home improvements and I take my time with them so I can take a step back and not get too absorbed in making sure everything is perfect.  I guess I will just have to continue reassessing my perception of things and maybe sit down and write a bit of a sense check for myself to stop it getting too out of control.

Reply
  • Sadly I am an inherent perfectionist at heart and this has caused me endless problems in the past.  I now focus this obsession into my work and how I structure things to stop it getting out of control, but I am not sure if this issue is linked to my perfectionism.  Normally I will stress over the quality of things and how aesthetically they look or how well something works.  The house issue is none of them as I have my projects already mapped out for home improvements and I take my time with them so I can take a step back and not get too absorbed in making sure everything is perfect.  I guess I will just have to continue reassessing my perception of things and maybe sit down and write a bit of a sense check for myself to stop it getting too out of control.

Children
  • Well, think about this, Starbuck. How does a Jumbo-Jet manage to stay in the sky or a huge oil tanker not sink to the bottom of the ocean? The answer is that it is a balance of forces that make such things possible and this applies to everything in nature from engineering to human psychology. It's not perfection that runs the universe but balance, and it's when stuff gets too much out of balance that trouble starts. The moon still orbits the earth and will do so for a very, very long time.