Hello..so I stopped doing compulsions and my harm ocd has gotten weaker but it I’m sure switched to a new ocd but I don’t have any physical compulsions to do, however I’m pretty sure I’ve been doing mental compulsions which in my opinion is harder to deal with than physical. Any tips? Sending love and strength to us all ocd is a nightmare to deal with I can’t wait to live my life again without this bully inside my head

Hello, I had the same problem and my therapists told me to do imaginal exposures. Search on YouTube about it :) Stay strong, it will get better even if it doesn’t feel like that.

One tip I have is to recognize when your doing a compulsion, and call your brain out on it. I struggle with constant rumination as one of my biggest compulsions, and one thing that’s helped is when I notice I’m ruminating, I stop and tell myself in my head “you’re ruminating.” By pausing and shifting my focus away from the content usually I can move on from it. Yea my brain might start ruminating about the same thing or something else seconds or minutes later, but when that happens I can do the same thing. It doesn’t stop the urge to ruminate, and I still do it quite a bit, but now when I do it, it doesn’t last hours, but minutes at most (usually, obviously not always the case).

@boyinjeans That’s happened to me before too, where I would stop ruminating about one thing but then start ruminating again without really realizing it. That’s why it’s so important to disconnect from the content of the thoughts, and look at the motives. Are you analyzing a thought out of anxiety, or out of curiosity or for some productive reason. For example if your having conversations in your head all they time, you can stop and think “do I plan on actually telling someone this,” and if the answer is no, or not anytime soon, then it’s probably best to do something productive with your time and not ruminate about a conversation that won’t actually happen. If you start ruminating again, ask yourself the same question “is this productive thinking, or is it out of anxiety?” It’s important to note that some anxiety filled thoughts are important, like if your worrying about a grade for a class you know your not doing well in, but it’s only useful up to a certain point. That’s why talking to a therapist is so valuable, they can help distinguish what is a healthy level of worry and what’s more on the side of OCD/anxiety, and they can help you commit to ERP (you can do ERP on your own, it’s just harder to commit to, as you may not see immediate results after a few times of trying it, and there are multiple ways to do ERP)

Thank you! It’s just so hard because a part of my brain is slowly recovering and I feel like myself again but at the same time a part of my brain is still obsessing over the thought it has been bugging me for two days now. I can’t seem to get out of it

@michaelk I’ve been doing that but I just made a mistake of reacting wrong about it and ruminate without even realizing I’m ruminating now I feel like I’ve made the thought worse and I’ve been having random theories and been trying to solve the thought in my head which I know isn’t good because analyzing has no place in ocd

@michaelk thank you so much! And yes I’ve been doing ERP on my own last Monday and have seen my fear on certain things fade away. It’s just the feeling of false guilt that’s been making me uncomfortable, a bunch of what if’s in my head, not very extreme anxiety but It comes and goes, it’s also on the same family tree of ocd thoughts I’ve had before. I wish I could do a compulsion to get a temporary relief from this but I couldn’t think of any, I didn’t do a compulsion at the time the trigger happened instead I did an ERP and told myself maybe I did maybe I didn’t who cares but I think I made a mistake along the way and accidentally made myself believe it because it felt a little real. Do you have tips to distinguish ocd thoughts from our real thoughts?