Wanting to start reaching my repressed emotions.

@stevow7, your fears are just symptoms, they are not emotions.

It is not easy to explain the difference, but I'll try!

The kind of fears you are talking about (and which you have described quite often over the last eight years) are just symptoms of your OCD/rumination behavior. They are irrational. You know they are irrational because you have said so, often. This means that they are meaningless and not worthy of examination when we talk about examining and writing down repressed negative emotions. It goes like this:

1. Your OCD behavior (a form of TMS) is an addiction.
2. Addictions are DISTRACTIONS.
3. The purpose of DISTRACTIONS is to repress the negative emotions that evolved during your childhood as a result of some kind of trauma or adversity.

Did you ever answer the ACEs questionnaire? You can access it here: https://www.tmswiki.org/forum/threads/aces-quiz-online-printable-versions.27061 (ACEs "quiz" - online & printable versions). The questions are only useful if you can answer them with your viewpoint from when you were a child. This is really important. Are you able to do that?

 

That's Dr Sarno's theory in a nutshell, yes! And many of us over years and years have found it to be true.

I sympathize, because I understand that the repression mechanism of your brain is very strong and very resistant. @Baseball65 has written many times about the STOP Method to fight OCD flares. Let's see if I can find one of those posts - try this: https://www.tmswiki.org/forum/threads/what-i-would-change.24382/page-2#post-127257 (Day 20 - What I would change)