I know everyone is different, but I want to hear about your recovery journey. How long were you in ERP before you started to see results? I’m three weeks in and struggling!
6 years of intense therapy for all my mental illnesses—and I have 6 mental illnesses.
@Nica That’s amazing that you stuck through it all and persevered because I know that’s not easy. That’s inspiring! May I ask if you take any sort of medication? (You don’t have to say what you take, of course) but do you find it to be necessary? I’m personally debating on whether I want to go back on meds or not. I like to hear about people’s experience with meds alongside therapy.
@Tee10 No medication works on me.
I started therapy in June 2022 and just ended it in January 2023. It was a lot of back and forth between feeling better for a few days and then back to feeling downright awful. Each time it spaced out a little more though and I was able to conquer things I wasn’t able to before. Keep at it and don’t give up. Don’t beat yourself up if you give into your compulsion. This takes time and healing isn’t linear. It’s hard to say how long it will take for you or anyone to heal from this. I was struggling a little bit today, but I did my best to not give in. It’s hard and takes a lot of practice. You can do it. ❤️
I’m also 3 weeks in and struggling. My therapist said it is different for everyone and it’s about building the muscle memory of this new practice we are learning. I’m frustrated because I wish it was quicker but a lifetime of this ocd prior and those brain groves of how to handle the anxiety (compulsions) are deep and will take time to revert to a new , healthy behavior - we can do this , I feel you
@smyers02 Same! I’ve had OCD since I was 12 and just got diagnosed last year. I have a lifetime of telling my thoughts to “stop” that I have to overcome.
I had just posted a summary of ERP for a group member, and I thought it might be useful for everybody. Here it is below (with a little extra added)…. ERP therapy is researched-based. Most other therapies don’t work. There have been people who have been literally stuck in their houses (from their OCD) who gained their lives back through ERP therapy. NOCD does ERP therapy exclusively. You can find it in other places too, but you have to ask around. There are two tenants of ERP therapy: The first one has to do with the repetitive thoughts inside our heads. These thoughts are actually defined as “obsessions”. You are not supposed to do anything with the obsessions. You are supposed to let them run through your head freely, without trying to fix them or stop them. Imagine a tree planted by a river. The leaves fall off and float down the river. You can see the leaves falling, but you don’t try to stop them or pick them up. You don’t try to fix them. You just let them float away. This is really important to do with your obsessive thoughts. The more you try to fight them off, the worse they get. I used to have blasphemous sentences running in my head 24/7. I felt like I had to put a “not” next to each sentence in order to “fix” it. But this just took hours of my time every day, and it was very scary, because I was worried that if I messed up, that I would go to hell. It was very freeing to learn later that I could just let those sentences run freely through my head without trying to fix them. The second part of ERP therapy is all about “denying your compulsions.” Every time OCD tells you that if you don’t do things a certain way that something really bad will happen, that is a compulsion. Once you recognize what your compulsions are, ERP therapy will have you practice stopping doing all of those things. For some people, that will mean stopping washing their hands or touching lights switches or, in my case, putting “fixing” words in their head. Compulsions are safety behaviors. During ERP therapy, you will practice stopping engaging with safety behaviors. All this is very hard to do and scary, so during therapy you will be given tools to help you deal with the fear. Often ERP therapy will take people from being non-functional to functional. I highly recommend it. ————————————————- PITFALL #1: After you have been doing ERP for a while and become somewhat successful, the OCD will try subtle little tricks to bring you down again. The first one is to tell you that your thoughts are REAL and not OCD, and therefore you can’t apply ERP therapy. Don’t fall for this trick! All thoughts are just thoughts. They are all meaningless. Don’t try to figure out what is real and what is OCD. Just treat all thoughts with ERP therapy. PITFALL #2: The second pitfall is that OCD will tell you that you can’t move forward unless you have absolute certainty that you will be safe. Hate to tell you this, folks, but there is no certainty in life. You will never know for SURE that you or your loved ones will be “safe” from the OCD rules. Therefore, you have to move forward in the uncertainty. It’s hard, but it gets easier with time and practice. We got this, guys !!!!!!
When you become a “conqueror” does it mean you’ve completed ERP or you’ve just gotten to a good place with it? If so, how long did it take to finish therapy and how did you finally make progress? I’m having a hard time sticking with it right now as it feels unproductive. I’ve been in ERP for about 2 months and I can’t wait to be done.
Has anyone else had a rough start? I’m 4 sessions in and have had no actual ERP work happen, I have 2 different therapists because none have availability to meet 2 times a week. Both those therapists are not available for the next 2 weeks so now I’m going to see a new 3rd one. Each time I’ve seen a new therapist I feel like the whole first session is spent with them re explaining everything. I’m paying for this out of pocket because they don’t accept Tricare which is my insurance as a Retired Marine. So I’m 960 in, and honestly feel worse than when I started. I get zero suggestions on what to do between sessions and feel so incomplete after my session finishes. I feel like I’ve gotten more help asking chat gpt questions on EPR and how to deal with ROCD than I do in my sessions . Does anyone have any insight or helpful advice here?
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