How to recover with no support

I’ve been here and I still am a bit, I often think of OCD as a mindset. It’s negative nasty and ego dystonic, part of the reason of why it grabs us so much. I have found that listening to books is a great way of getting the information in, take a long drive somewhere by yourself, get a podcast on and listen to it, Robert James coaching is amazing and really helped me through my recovery. Whilst I appreciate that it takes some time and education to see through the OCD fog but once you do it’s only up from there, sure there will be days where it’s not great, but every single person on this planet has ghat, and I think that a lot of us just ‘wanna be normal’ so to speak, there’s no such thing. With regard to ERP it’s supposed to be difficult, after practice it starts to get easier until it’s just forgotten, you’ll come away from something that once terrified you to ‘omg I didn’t even think of it’ but that takes time patience and practice. Doing ERP - uncomfortable feelings urges emotions thoughts - do nothing about them let them be done react. That’s it you win that round, then you do it again and again and again until eventually your brain gets the message that there’s no danger and it’s not important. In actually fact OCD is a simple beast, like a bully, it wants a reaction, if it were a real bully it would get fed up after countless times of you not reacting and move on. Slow but measurable steps. I often say ‘oh yeah ocd bring it on, I really hope this sticks around forever, I love this feeling of anxiety’ go knocking at its door. You can say oh OCD your quiet today look a knife? Give me some intrusive thoughts? Antagonise the hell out of it, be the bully back and find the grit. Another win to you x Nathan Peterson - insta and nocd coach Robert James coaching - podcast Breaking the rules podcast- clinician guide but I find this really interesting Best of luck to you, you can do hard things

Please check out the NOCD live streams on YT. You can ask questions and find ways to make things a little easier. You’ll learn a lot too. I don’t have therapy yet but for now this has been helping me. I wish you well ❤️

I appreciate it. I totally agree. OCD is a mindset, unfortunately it seems very easy to fall in, and quite a bit harder to crawl out. 😅 I have done so much research and reading so far, especially in the first month or so that I developed it, and it was very helpful at first, as it gave me a lot of hope, but eventually it wore off as ERP seemed to do nothing for me. I was able to do scary things, and did them consistently for almost 2 months, but honestly all it did was make me exhausted. I could do it, but my anxiety never lessened despite me refraining from compulsions. Maybe I was doing it wrong, I've no clue since I don't have professional guidance, but I think ERP might just not be for me. It does only help 60% of patients, and while that is the majority, it still leaves a huge gap. I've so far been finding I-CBT more helpful, as it breaks down process behind my obsessions and the compulsions that follow. I guess I just fear that this might not work as well, because it is slightly more involved and nuanced than ERP, and there might be things I'm missing out on. I do still somewhat practice ERP in my day-to-day, as I think it's still somewhat important, but it mostly just exhausts me, which makes me more vulnerable to being in a worse mental state.