Thought associations/Thought replacement

I have pure O as well, but I never thought about my OCD thoughts being attached to an object specifically as a negative thing. I just thought I was overly sentimental or nostalgic about stuff that probably didn't deserve it. Is your association of OCD thoughts to objects getting to a level that's distracting in your life or disabling? I ask because when you're new to the ERP process it's easy to think that by "fixing" or thinking properly the thoughts will disappear, but that's usually not the case for many of us. You end up having the same amount and types of thoughts, but you tend to learn to manage the thoughts that pop up better, causing them to take up less time and stress you out less. That's why reassuring someone within OCD thought is not positive because it can solidify their negative thought processes as well. The idea of "partially neutralizing" is actually exactly the right step. I tend to attach strong memories of people, places, and other things to objects that I got them with, not any specific thought process I had when I bought it specifically, but I think it's similar enough to be able to give you some useful tips on this if you give some more info though. If you can create a pipeline of exactly how this process works for you, you can start taking it apart and figure out where you're looping

Honestly, one of the things that I did for certain objects I had strong attachments to that I didn't want to throw away is to just put them away. If I don't see it, it doesn't remind me, but that's only a temporary solution. I do find that the object becomes less triggering in the weeks and months ahead of when I put it away, the initial nostalgic pain of seeing something I bought with an ex-friend, for instance, and then thinking about how that relationship fell apart can be very painful initially. Part of the exposure therapy would be not to throw it away, but actually look at it intentionally the next time you come across it and feel those feelings again, then put it back in its spot and go back about your day. Keeping the object or throwing it away doesn't solve the feelings associated with it, if somebody else was cleaning your house, they would just see it as an object.