Brokw up with my boyfriend so he doesnt have to deal withh my rjocd or rocd anymore

It fucking suuuucka

I been working so hard and trying my best for 6 months and its just not getting better for me its not fair to drag anyone into it

@Goagoa The question is: working so hard at what? trying so hard to do what?

@CaptainKierkegaard Erp and my intrusive thoughts from ruining the way i feel about him

@Goagoa It’s hard to make progress on because it seems different than the other themes. My therapist hasn’t been able to help much with it. But I think the problem is moreso that I haven’t been able to access the benefits of ERP, due to depression, confusing explanations, etc. I am going to start some exposures with this soon, actually, and I actually am optimistic that they will help. If you have any questions, feel free to ask, though I would ask you to avoid sharing details about your boyfriend’s past with me.

@CaptainKierkegaard I just been feelin super insecure and thinking hes constantly trying to find something better and probably cheating on me. And just sitting in anxiety waiting for him to break up with me

@Goagoa What has your practice of ERP looked like?

@CaptainKierkegaard Writing down all the worse case scenarios and re reading them for like an hour out of the day

@Goagoa How would you decribe your mental process during those exposures? What are you attempting to do with them?

@CaptainKierkegaard To trigger myself until im descenzitized to my thoughts to that i understand that theyre only my ocd thoughts and not whats really going on

@Goagoa Does your anxiety ever come down in that hour?

@CaptainKierkegaard Also, if you weren’t worried about him cheating or looking for someone better, do you think the thoughts about his past would still make you anxious?

@CaptainKierkegaard No not really

@CaptainKierkegaard No i think the cheating is the biggest thing and the thing is ive never been cheated on so its even more fucked

@CaptainKierkegaard I was mainly asking because the cheating anxiety is not the main fear for me. I discovered that the more I tried to identify exactly what I was afraid of, the more fears seemed to pop up. So my exposures have been in the form of habituating to the kinds of intrusive thoughts I have (visual thoughts of her past or what I think her past might have been) rather than stating my fear in sentence form. Tbf this has been a brutal exposure, but it’s mainly the depression and low self-esteem that makes it so. I do believe my anxiety is going down and it does go up and then down each session like normal exposures. Not completely down, but it has a peak, at least. It sounds like possibly you could be using the exposure to ruminate. I have foubd it helpful to remind myself of why I’m doing the exposure, which is to habituate to the thoughts.