Interesting questions, GeeN!

As you implied, I think expressions can be literal or just a figure of speech. Sometimes it's hard to know which a particular expression is. Like reading facial expressions, I think you kind of have to know the person as well as what "smiling" is. Context is always important as well as knowledge of all the people involved, including one's self.

I don't think anything "naturally" stays the same but I think your and my wish that it would makes us try to pin things down by seeing things as literal or fixating on them. Think of that word, "fixate". It is very similar in what it does as "literal", or the favorite one people use for me, "concrete" :-)

Being literal/concrete, fixated and having OCD are anxiety problems. We have difficulty with things changing. I think the difference between fixated and OCD is a matter of degree and scope. I would say inability to "change" readily from one thought to another is to be fixated whereas being obsessed is being tangled in the "thing" that is being thought about, itself.

I think your T was saying you were fixated in wanting to know the answer to particular puzzles and keep turning them over and over in your mind. People obsessed don't really "think" but are driven by their feelings. So maybe I'd say if you have a "mental" obsession, it's a fixation :-) Like I say, I think your questions are great.

But, the problem is that you are thinking about questions that don't have anything to do with you and your circumstances? I think normally that would interest someone but they'd be able to get ideas and answers or not and drop the question or move on. The intensity with which one wants to know the answers and tenacity in insisting on getting them is what makes it a fixation. People exhibiting OCD don't know or care about "answers".

"Morality" is not something there is an "answer" to except a personal one. Why one person is "moral" and another not is a personal decision by an individual (I may think you are moral and someone else may think you are not) or a group (society thinking call girls or women who sleep around a lot are not). It's just a rough "estimate" of how to quickly categorize people depending on your own thoughts and values or, those you have been taught but haven't evaluated for yourself.

I don't know what Myron meant by, "a woman who slept with everybody at the post office but me" because I don't know the whole story, Myron's writing and how he felt about those kind of situations. It could be literal, it could be to make the woman look like she slept with a lot of men, it could be making the point that he was hurt because the woman did not think well enough of him to include him in the "group", that the woman was deliberately performing an important personal act to exclude him on the personal level.

It's all right to have stray thoughts, even thoughts about the morality of sleeping with multiple partners when you're watching a clean film. But we have zillions of stray thoughts a day and sticking with any of them that aren't in "context" or useful/enjoyable to us in dealing with our lives or communication with those around us tends to get in the way? I don't think that is so much that you are obsessed with infidelity as that you are fixated on thoughts and questions that aren't useful to you that your therapist is trying to help with? That they are about infidelity and sex can be a bipolar symptom and bipolar mania often includes hypersexual awareness.

Hope I've given you other things to think about :-)