Hi everyone! I’m new to this and just had my first therapy session yesterday. For those of you who have been doing ERP for a while, what is something you wish you’d asked your therapist early on? Or anything you wish you knew earlier in general?
This was a great question! Here are a few ideas that came to mind: • attend therapy with a commitment to be 100% transparent with your therapist. If you hide the truth or parts of yourself, you are delaying and possibly negatively impacting the speed of your recovery. If you go to a car mechanic for a tune up, you wouldn’t hide the engine from them…so why be cagey with a therapist? •the goal is not to “fix” or “cure” your OCD, but to develop tools and skills that help you cope with living with it. OCD is part of you—part of your brain’s overactive fear center, essentially. Treating it as a part of yourself to take care of changed things dramatically for me (instead of treating it combatively as a bully, monster, demon, etc.) led to less irritation, which seemed to lessen symptoms. • consistently doing the ERP homework (no more or less that what you and your therapist have agreed upon) will help you improve. It is possible to do too much or too little, just like weightlifting. If ERP is not working for a certain OCD theme, let your therapist know and work together with them to develop another ERP for it. OCD can adapt quickly and shift themes; learning to manage your OCD means learning how to adapt and shift to manage it. • the less you feed OCD with compulsions, the more “extinguished” it becomes. As it grows quieter, it lashes out in what are called “backdoor spikes”. What that means is that *you will have really bad mental health days out of nowhere* as you improve. This is part of progress…but feels very far from it. If this happens, hang in there. It means what you are doing is working, so keep it up! • Work with the goal of becoming self-sufficient. As you consistently do your ERP and attend therapy, try to approach it with the longer term goal of eventually being able to manage it all on your own, without help. Managing OCD means developing an awareness of what is going on inside you…and you are the only one who can build that awareness! There are many more tips, but the most important thing is to be studious and diligent with your own therapy. Everyone’s journey is unique, and you will have your own breakthroughs and things that make a big difference!
@j vv Thank you so much for taking the time to write all of this out! This was so helpful and gave me a realistic but hopeful view of the road I have ahead of me!
It feels worse before it gets better! And up and down progress is normal
To somewhat add to the other comment. Recovery itself often feels very uncertain. The goal isn’t to have certainly amidst the processes however, but to rather persevere through despite questions and fears. You’ve got this!
That it is hard work but so worth it. You may get worse before you get better. But start slow and don’t do exposures that are too difficult or leave you crying. Slow and steady progress will always be the best. Congrats on your first session!!
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