- Date posted
- 1y
Quick Question
Does going about your day while having intrusive thoughts and urges/sensations count as a exposure?
Does going about your day while having intrusive thoughts and urges/sensations count as a exposure?
It counts as response prevention! The intrusive thoughts are kind of in place of an intentional exposure. You're already feeling the discomfort that doing an exposure is meant to bring up... if that makes sense. What matters is how you manage your response when you experience anxiety or discomfort... whether you intentionally do an exposure, one comes up in your regular day, or you're having intrusive thoughts, it is how you respond that helps you get better. Sorry, I'm not sure if I'm communicating that clearly...
Yes, I’d say so. Me also having Pure O, I’ve been told you’re pretty much always in exposure because we don’t usually have any outward symptoms besides googling or reassurance and we’re worried about our thoughts. How you react to the thoughts is our ERP work. Reacting with a disregarding mindset. “Eh, maybe that will happen, maybe it won’t” “i don’t need to worry about that” and do it with all thoughts/sensations.
It’s response prevention. Sometimes these thoughts are more scary than if we actually did an exposure in purpose. At least, that has been my experience
It’s response prevention but it’s how you get better and keep up the recovery process. I do this every single day.
I'm not sure if it's an exposure, but it sure sounds like a good thing to do. Going about your day and not letting intrusive thoughts stop you, make you ruminate or do other safety behaviors is how you will get your life back.I think there are two kinds of exposures - planned and those that occur as you're living your life (in vivo?) I think its called.
I've been avoiding doing my usual routine due to a new set of intrusive thoughts that appeared alongside intrusive urges/sensations, and it's been leading me to feel quite down and I mean down, down, it doesn't feel like I'm going to get better or that it's too late for me. My OCD is linked to my online friends and it's a battle everyday
It sounds impossible! Congratulations for tuning things out.
I'm thinking of trying some ERP on my own while I wait for treatment, but I'm having some trouble knowing what is a compulsion and what would be good exposure. For example, I have huge fears of being a narcissist and/or a generally bad person. So whenever I watch a movie or read something that has an evil character in it I automatically compare myself to that character and stress over if I'm like that person. A couple of things I do when this happens is Google other people's experiences, seek reassurance, rumination, etc. Sometimes I'll also google different symptoms of narcissism, freak out over things that I relate to, then get relief over things I don't. So my confusion is, would researching people who have narcissism be an exposure, or a compulsion since it's something I sometimes do during a spiral? Or, would the exposure be watching movies/living life hearing these stories, and refraining from the spiral of rumination and no Googling at all?
My NOCD therapist (who has been awesome) and I are both struggling to identify ways in which I can practice exposure therapy while in-session, because the vast majority of my OCD symptoms are mental compulsions. For example: indecision and inability to commit to a choice; seeking reassurance on decisions from friends and family; mental review of things that have just happened / social situations; over-thinking and catastrophizing. I also have some other hallmark symptoms (contamination fears, moral scrupulosity, etc) but those tend to be inconsistent too. It’s hard to really practice these during my sessions because so many are in the moment and fleeting. By the time I join my session they are no longer active. How can we establish exposure responses during my sessions, if most of my OCD involves mental rumination and overthinking patterns/thought loops that only occur “in the moments - rather than specific or consistent compulsions (such as hand washing)?
So I've been working to address my OCD for about a month now. So far, I haven't been working on it with a therapist and have instead been trying to create my own exposure exercises. The primary obsession I'm working on is the fear that I'm somehow flawed or invalid on a fundamental level. The best way I can describe it it is that its similar to the feeling you get when you have germ OCD and you feel contaminated, except my whole existence and being feels contaminated, so to speak. I've identified a list of triggers, and a list of compulsions (pretty much all mental) that I've noticed myself performing. I started out by doing imaginal exposures and scripts where I'd write out triggering fictional scenarios and read them over and over, combined with mindfulness techniques to focus on my breath and bring myself back to the present when I noticed myself performing compulsions mentally. At first it worked to some extent, but eventually I started to feel like the stories I was writing about this obsession weren't triggering any anxiety anymore or a very low level. So I stopped reading them and focused solely on improving my ability to stay present and identifying compulsions as I perform them, and disengaging. Now, I'm at the point where it seems like my general anxiety levels throughout the day are lower, and the triggers I've identified are producing noticeably less anxiety. But that makes me wonder if somehow I'm just secretly doing mental compulsions without knowing it? Is only a month of rather disorganized and unstructured ERP enough to produce this much improvement? To avoid giving me re-assurance, I'd appreciate if you guys don't directly answer those questions, maybe just provide some possibilities or your own experiences so I can get a better idea of where I'm at. Any info would be appreciated. Thanks!
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