Cost

@Invalid Thank you, I have contacted a private consultant. How did you find your experience of therapy in the uk? I am always frightened they don’t fully understand OCD

@Anonymous1012 Don't get me wrong the first 2 sessions felt like just a chat and filling her in on my back story. She even teared up a few times and I was thinking "how are you the one almost in tears?". She even said at one point "how are you even alive?" (I think she was implying how have you I killed myself with all the crap I've gone through) which made me laugh 😂 She was getting all the info to tailor my therapy for me. Stuck with her for 12 sessions and hit remission about a week after the last session. She did specialise in ocd as well as other stuff. She understood. I'm just happy I stuck with her because I had doubts 2 sessions in as I didn't understand what she was doing

@Invalid Thank you so much

@KevinL Np, any other questions and I'll try help

Hi mate I know we have spoken before. I just wondered if your OCD involved doing physical compulsions or not and what was your main intrusive thought/anxiety? I am interested in other people's OCD as I think it can give me an insight into my own. I do think that the best thing for someone with OCD is someome else who also has it.

@Invalid That question is for you btw 👍

@KevinL I don't want to put you off councelling kevin but if you are going to have talk therapy I would be a bit careful as I think the general consensus within the OCD community is that talk therapy makes OCD worse as it can just become another way of ruminating and seeking certainty. I am preety sure that talk therapy made my OCD worse. It certainly isn't any better than it was 4 years ago and I have had 3 different councellors and about 150 hours of talk therapy in this time. Can i ask a bit about your OCD like have you been diagnosed or do you just know that you have it? Also what is your anxiety/intrusive thought and what do you do to try and neutralise it?

@Joe87 I think I've had every subtype or theme. We talking about 27 years of compulsions though. Some I'd consider compulsions and not ocd related though, because it's not exclusive to ocd. So my main one was moral scrupulosity. My morals were wound incredibly tight. If someone, my heart was in the right place but my head wasn't. I felt as if I had to do something or it compromises me as a person. Kinda like " evil is the indifference of good men". Got me into trouble a lot. Almost fired multiple times because I'd undermined bosses as they were not being fair on staff,(they even tried promoting me to higher management above those bosses twice which was funny). If I saw something, I did something. These are some examples over the last few years. I was driving to work and I heard a girl crying somewhere and stopped. Looked around and there was this girl around 6 curled up in a ball crying her eyes out in an empty construction site. Every red flag in my head went off. Started asking her where her parents were, as I'm calling my friend who I live with to run down and talk to this girl because I felt a female presence would be more comforting. I'm inked up and had a mask because it was in between lock downs. I'm guessing I looked intimidating. I looked around as I'm waiting and my neighbours, a couple and their kid are look out the window at her, so I ask them if they knew what happened and they said no, we just saw her crying. That infuriated me that they could just stare and not do anything, imagine how the girl felt. Anyway after my friend came down the girls older brother and mates came and told me to f off. This was a relief, it was just her older brother being a bully to her, but he came back to protect her from what he probably saw as a threat from a distance. Was a relief. Another time someone laid down in the road on a corner trying to kill himself while I was in traffic on the other side of the road. Everyone is just staring and I knew when the lights changed, oncoming drivers wouldn't see them. I went over and blocked the road off. Police took over after a few minutes but it used to infuriate me how people just do nothing. There's been quiet a few caes over the years where I help people but get too involved. If I don't help people, I will mentally lash myself for weeks if not months or years. Therapy helped me realise how other people aren't me, and that's OK. Now I help by choice rather than feeling the need to. Used to have voices in my head when I was young to tell me to kill everyone etc. That was hell. I think the intrusive thoughts were so ego dystonic that they came in the form of voices that weren't mine. Basically my compulsions felt like self harm or self sabotage. I considered it mentally slitting my minds wrists to punish myself. When other people did things that conflicted with me I felt like they compromised me as a person and would flip out. Like how dare they comprise me??! Better now though. My past was embarrassing 😅

@Invalid Hey man sorry for the late reply I have had a hectic day....your OCD sounds/sounded quite complex. What type of work did you do with your therapist if you dont mind me asking? Was it just general talk therapy or was it ERP or something else? How is your OCD now?

@Joe87 No worries man. I had a few different therapies that helped. Some I had before I was even aware of the OCD but helped me figure out what started it all off, the cause. So cbt as a young adult, actually I think I hit remission for about 6 months but never knew why. ERP, for trauma a few years back. Then this year I did erp. The sessions were structured in a pattern. First bit we did the update over the week, then erp, then after I went back in time to forgive myself for crap in my life that prevented me from wanting to get better on some level. I practiced erp like made in between sessions though. I was determined to get better. I didn't wait to be stressed before doing it, I went out and caused it on purpose. Didn't need to be in relation to my themes at all. First big win was using erp to get rid of casadastraphobia I had for about 15 years. Absolutely terrified me but got rid of it in 4 minutes (therapist did not tell me to do this, it surprised her when I did it). I also went out to a club with friends and I have one that doesn't drink but dances all night and said I could never do that. I did that 😂 was awkward at first but danced the whole night sober and felt great. Ocd is in remission. I will always aim to "cure" myself as I don't want to get complacent and relapse. With erp, practice, practice, practice. Don't wait for the ocd to come to you before you do it. You wouldn't go to a MMA fight and choose the match to be your practice session would you? You'd get your ass kicked. Practice for it. Practice it on small things, every day things. Challenge yourself. Then when you do your structured erp sessions with a therapist or someone supportive (in the right way, no reassurance), it becomes easier to do it.

Oh yeh and hyper responsibility. But I think most people with ocd have that.