- Date posted
- 42w
I think I need more resources
Hi everyone, I’m 21 and I was diagnosed with OCD at 16. I had a great therapist who was trained to treat OCD and we made a lot of progress, but I moved out of state for college and had to find someone new. I’ve been seeing someone else who is trained to treat OCD too for about a year now and they’ve been super helpful, but I feel like I’m caught in a cycle. I did some ERP and it has helped, but I think I need to focus on it more than I ever have. I’ve only ever gone to therapy once a week at most, and I considered that a lot. But I have been struggling a LOT the past few months, and have only really been addressing new stressors that have triggered my OCD, rather than doing actual exposure work. I’ve also been in the process of finding an effective medication, and the past few months have felt like a vicious cycle of weaning off of a med and trying a new one, the weaning period making my OCD horrible, my OCD cooling down, a few weeks of being as anxious as usual (upsetting things usually being a 6 or 7 and obsessing in small chunks for up to an hour a day), then chatting with my psychiatrist about a new med, rinse and repeat. I feel like I’ve kind of boomeranged in progress, and I wonder if I’d benefit from more intensive (2+ sessions a week) treatment with ERP to address the obsessions that have been making me miserable. For anyone who’s recovered from severe OCD or has gotten a good grip on it, what resources did you use? Did you do intensive therapy (lots of erp multiple times a week) or was once a week enough for you? Did you see an expert from NOCD or something else? How did medication come into play? I feel like I’ve plateaued, and I want to put the hard work in to get to a place where I have power over my ocd and can live a more care free life!