Lately I’ve had a pretty weird coping mechanism, whenever I feel overwhelmed by the anxiety my intrusive thoughts bring me, I’m imagining myself in therapy with my psychologist. She’s not even speaking or anything, I’m the only one having a monologue on how I feel about those thoughts. Is this a compulsion? Or I am just compensating for something, or even just a very imaginative person tbh?

Ayyup that’s been me as well lmao. I would either imagine myself talking to a therapist about it or imagine being a youtuber talking about the struggles of OCD. ??

It’s so weird isn’t it! But it works so well. I think it’s a compulsion but sometimes it’s needed when you lose yourself to the thoughts. It’s free therapy lol

Sorry to tell you but it's a compulsion, basically anything you do that calms you down is a compulsion, you are supposed to calm down without doing anything,i know it's pretty tough

Bang the thing is im saying this because it's true the best way to treat ocd is to avoid doing anything that calms you down,by exposing yourself to the anxiety from obsessions your brain gets desensitized to them,im trying to help by steering people in the right direction, unfortunately the medicine for that fatal illness is erp which means avoiding compulsions as much as you can

Yeah unfortunately Starboiklem is right. It’s a compulsion that’s been very hard for me to cut out myself but exposing myself to my anxiety has proven me that eventually it does go away and it does get less intense each time. It takes a while and I’m still having my spikes here and there but it does work. The point is not to “shut the thoughts off”. You can’t really do that lol but you will notice as you allow the anxiety to stay that the thoughts will become less frequent until eventually you barely have them anymore because your mind will get bored of them. Once that begins to happen you will also feel less the need to do those compulsions because they won’t feel as necessary anymore. It’s something I’ve been noticing myself for these past few weeks while doing ERP myself.

Well happy to know I’m not the only one lol, hope it’s not a compulsion because it’s the only thing keeping me sane right now????

YESSSSS

I talk to myself as if I’m in therapy or if I’m with a doctor and it helps

Idc if it’s a compulsion or not, I feel better from it and it’s how I cope. Ocd is such a tiring thing and to hear that low key pisses me off. Nothing else would make it better or make it stop so it’s not like I have a lot of options on how to shut the thoughts off. That’s like saying to someone they have a fatal illness but they can’t take medicine to get better because they have figure out how to not die. That makes 0 sense to me.

Compulsions worsen your OCD, that’s a fact, but I think if you aren’t in therapy in the moment and you’re slowly losing your mind then it’s important to remind yourself how you truly feel about the intrusive thoughts. It’s not a long time thing though!! Because it is still a compulsion, we need real professionals to help us out