To both JosieGirl and Akuma, wow - thanks for posting what you guys have, talk about feeling alone and then finding others who have some inkling/experience of the type of thing that goes on inside my head, it's so good (not so good that any of us know what this all means, just good that at last someone somewhere understands, and can articulate it too.)

Snap snap snap to the having to get it all perfectly correct, or rather, knowing that there is some universal standard of correctness that everyone else knows, but that I am never able to attain - damned if you do damned if you don't but magnified a zillion times. Throw in feeling that I'm going to be judged condemned and punished for getting it wrong (which naturally, it's ALWAYS wrong) and that's my permanent state.

For me it stemmed from full blown paranoia, but has now after several decades 'mellowed' into what I have only recently recognized as obsessiveness based on extreme anxiety - and the notion of Pure O fits very well. No obvious compulsions for me, but a certain ritualistic bent to my ways of coping with the permanent state of anxiety.

I could go on and on about the different aspects of your set ups you describe, but, well, you've already described the fears on that front...

Thanks so much for posting this and for the links

LL