Moving Towards Our Values

What is motivating you to keep pushing in treatment or to take the first step to start ERP treatment? For my OCD treatment, I wanted to feel more present in what I was doing and I wanted to live a life that aligned to what was important to me. I love to golf, fish, be out nature, walk my dogs, read, listen to music, and eat some good food! When I was in ERP treatment, I made sure to align my treatment to my values! I would construct exposures that were valued based which really motivated me to keep go towards my goals! What is your motivation?

Help! My OCD has caught onto this thought for awhile and I keep spinning on it. I know you are supposed to follow your values and what your actions suggest with OCD, but what if that is even blurry right know? For example my whole life I wanted to be with a man, and now my OCD is having major intrusive thoughts about women. How do you tell if those thoughts are wanted or not? I can’t figure out if I like the thoughts or not. I’m trying to live the life “I want” but what if I don’t know what that is?

The subject of OCD matters to the sufferer because it feels like confirmation that they are fundamentally unlovable and unwanted—as if even existence itself doesn’t want them. They feel like an error, carrying a deep sense of guilt and shame, as if they were inherently wrong. They suffer from low self-esteem and a deep internalized shame, because long ago, they were fragmented and learned a pattern of fundamental distrust—especially self-distrust. But the real trouble doesn’t come from the content of the most vile or taboo thoughts. It comes from the fact that the sufferer lacks self-love. That’s why, when you begin to walk the road to recovery, you’re taught unconditional self-acceptance—because that’s what all sufferers of OCD have in common: if you aren’t 100% sure, if there isn’t absolute certainty, the doubt will continue to attack you and your core values. It will make you doubt everything—even your own aversion to the thoughts. You have to relearn how to trust yourself—not because you accept that you might become a murderer someday—but because you enter a deep state of acceptance about who you truly are. It’s not about becoming a monster at all. It’s about making peace with what lies at the root of the fear. Making peace with the guilt. With the shame. Making peace with yourself and the person you fear you might be. Because that fear is not rooted in reality. It’s not rooted in any true desire to act. It’s rooted in your identity—specifically, in what might threaten it. That’s what confirms the belief that you are fundamentally wrong. And OCD fuels that belief by using intrusive taboo thoughts to attack your very sense of self. But then I wonder: let’s say, for example, someone fears being or becoming a sexually dangerous person—how could that person practice unconditional self-acceptance? I would never accept myself if I were to harm anyone—the thought alone makes me want to cry. I know it’s not about whether or not someone acts on the thought. It’s about the core fear underneath it. So how do you accept yourself when the thoughts—and the feelings around them—feel so completely unacceptable ?