Therapy Question

@Julian2006 Thank you for sharing. My therapist has OCD herself but she seemed to be hard stuck on reducing anxiety being the way to overcome OCD. We did a handful of exposures in about 30 sessions. None of them helped if I’m being fully honest. I never fully understood how to reduce anxiety. She also claimed it shouldn’t take more than 20-40 minutes to have an anxiety level of a 1 but I truly just didn’t get that because I’d spiral and panic for days. She diagnosed me with panic disorder but then told me my panic attacks shouldn’t last more than 20 minutes. I know that’s a common fact that psychiatrist and therapists believe and share, but it has never been my experience. I do understand that the level of my anxiety may have hindered the impact of exposures and limited how many I could handle but in reading your comment, I feel like we kinda wasted time. I’m glad your experience has been positive and I really hope you’re doing well:)

@pokemelon I love that you mentioned that you don’t focus on what you’ve been struggling with for too long because it feeds the obsession. I definitely feel like that is the opposite of what we did. I’d ruminate in therapy out loud with her and then we try to bring my anxiety down by sitting there. We did an exposure only a few times in 3 months. She never encouraged me to stop thinking unless it fell under ruminating but the whole trying to reduce anxiety thing felt like “don’t think” and yes my anxiety would go down but it never felt like progress. I don’t know. Thank you so much for sharing, it does help! Thank you :)

@OneDayAtATimee Hi, thank you so much for replying. We did some exposures, but they never really seemed to help. She would usually have me do them, then take them away and tell me to focus on reducing my anxiety. Her main advice was to take deep breaths every couple of minutes to signal to my brain that I was safe and that the anxiety would eventually go down. But after reading what you wrote, I realized it always felt like I was forcing myself to calm down, not actually letting it happen naturally. It probably would have helped more in a panic attack situation, but it helped *her* OCD. From the very beginning, she told me I would be feeling so much better by sessions two to four, and I honestly do not know if that is even realistic for OCD therapy. She explained what OCD is, what compulsions are, and not to give into them, which I already knew, and acted like that was the full solution. And yes, technically that is the idea, but if it were really that simple, none of us would need therapy in the first place. I felt like I was pushing myself to get better because I wanted to so badly, and she made it clear she had already given me all the tools she had. She told me it was fully up to me now. But I never really understood how she would have used those tools herself. A lot of the time she sounded like she knew what she was doing, like when she said she used sarcasm or said the opposite of what OCD wanted to hear and just waited it out, but then she would also tell me it should not take more than a certain number of minutes to feel better. She would use a timer and imply I was doing it wrong if my anxiety did not drop fast enough. I felt like I had to force myself out of it. Like I had to kick myself out of feeling anxious or else I was failing. Eventually it started to feel like I was just masking it. Pretending to be fine or giving her a lower number just so the pressure would go away. Once she even told me how long it took someone else for their anxiety to go down, and it kind of felt like that was the limit I was expected to stay under. I honestly felt kind of crazy during the whole process. Like I was annoying her or being a burden because I was not progressing fast enough. She even told me she was considering referring me to a higher level of care, after ignoring NOCD’s recommendation to offer me three to four sessions a week because of how severe my OCD was. She said it seemed like I just did not want to give up my compulsions. I know I am ranting now, but I think I am just scared. Maybe I misunderstood her, or maybe her approach just was not right for me. Either way, my obsessions became SO much stronger and I am really afraid the next therapist will be the same. Thank you again for replying and if you read all of this, again I’m sorry I went on for so long. It is sad I didn’t recover but it gave me hope to read that you said it makes sense. Like it’s possible for me to recover with another therapist. Thank you for that hope 🤍