dont know wether to take a break of certain things

it does make perfect sense! to be perfectly honest, its what i believe, too. but interacting with content regarding the thing in question, at the moment, just makes my ocd give me intrusive thoughts every second and makes it an exhausting experience... not to mention gives me more intrusive feelings. so i dont know what to do!

@waddydoo Let me give an example from personal experience since I can’t speak to your exact case, a lot of things have come up for me regarding current events and my ocd has gone off the rails 😵‍💫 naturally if I’m not checking things constantly and in a certain order this could be a HUGE deal. 😬 So what I’ve done to combat it is slowly pull away, delete apps, don’t check, literally doing the opposite of what I’m also telling myself I’m supposed to do ? 🤔 now I’m rambling…….

@XwitnessX SEE!!! its so confusing....do i take a break or not?? agh!!! usually id interact even HARDER with the content my ocd insists i feel weird about but if everything i get are more intrusive thoughts then

@waddydoo Ughhhhh😭 I don’t even know but I’m also bawling on the daily and raw dogging life 🙃 I wish you luck!

talking to others that have gone through the same thing definitely helps!! it helps you feel less alone, if anything. i know so from experience!

@waddydoo Hi there. I can see you are still feeling really torn so I will give what advice I can. You love the show but right now it has become a trigger for you. Therefore to stay with it, and keep watching, would be choosing discomfort (in other words, it would be an exposure.) And to stop, would be an avoidance of the discomfort. The problem sounds less that it is triggering you, and more that you are struggling to manage the VOLUME and INTENSITY of the intrusive thoughts coming out of the trigger. Exposure work is really most effective when you are in a tolerable level of discomfort. Otherwise you can overdo it and get flooded and it can reinforce your whole loop. Or not do enough and just end up avoiding everything. I like to think of it in terms of a color gradient. Green is safe, easy, no real discomfort. Yellow is a little uncomfortable but not too distressing. Orange is more distress, and maybe you need to work a little harder to bring yourself back down. And red is full panic. So what are these intrusive thoughts to you? If you are in the yellow I say keep watching and use it as an opportunity to practice exposure work and when the thoughts come up go: “thank you for your input but i’m enjoying my show rn.” But if you are orange or red maybe you need to step away and wait until you are feeling steadier and have more capacity to approach it again. You can even scaffold to watching it again. Maybe you need to stop watching it for now because it’s orange/red but that reading articles about it or looking at fan art is green or yellow. And you can practice shooing away the intrusive thoughts with THAT and build back up to watching the show again. Just remember. You are not in control of whether or not the intrusive thoughts happen. You are only in charge of what your behavior is. The goal is not to make them go away completely. It’s to live your life ANYWAY. They lose power when you make them bored. ;-) I vote keep watching and practice. They are just thoughts. As uncomfortable as they are, they cannot hurt you. But they CAN steal your joy if you shrink your life. Enjoy your show. Give your OCD a name. Let them grumble in the background and you just keep saying “hush and eat your popcorn Javier, I’m watching my show.” So what does this feel like? Green, yellow, orange, or red?

@PaladinFrog whoa, this is probably the most useful response ive gotten for these situations hands down. i feel like right now its a yellow with a bit of orange? what messes me up is not so much the intrusive thoughts, but intrusive Feelings. ocd is trying to make me feel weird and uncomfortable about something in the show ive been LOOKING forward to happening but just so had to be revealed when i was in an OCD episode. the thoughts i can deal with, but right now theyre also at a point where its like "youre so loud youre not even letting me enjoy this at this point". so i dont know. any more advice would be greatly appreciated!