It’s an actual joke how in the UK private therapy is really the only successful route for treating OCD but it costs so much, even if there is a chance you can get treated on the NHS you could be waiting for months and have to go through the stress of therapists who don’t know what they’re doing. So then you’re left with the reality that this is your life now and you just have to cope with OCD.

That’s amazing and to be honest big props to you. Told myself that quarantine was the time I could do self directed therapy but I seem to be going round in circles and can’t get out of my faulty beliefs, have read extensively on the topic but it’s hard to just ‘accept uncertainty’ and ‘let go of doubt’ as if those phrases just cure you of rituals you’ve been stuck in for months.

@Soph Gotta decouple the beliefs from feelings by feeling the feelings first. And I suppose part of the thing it's important to get your head around is that the goal is not to get out of what you've labeled your faulty beliefs, it's to accept that they might be right, literally. Not as a secret hack aimed at getting rid of them. I mean literally accepting they could be true. Not that they are true, just that they might be and that you don't know. And then not doing rituals designed to look for answers and comfort when that makes you freak out and feel doomed. Doing that does cure the rituals. It doesn't answer the questions or leave you with correct, non "faulty" beliefs. It just leaves you not caring enough about them to go back to making yourself sick over not knowing. It's not the phrases which are supposed to cure you, you have to actually put them into action. You have to choose to actively accept uncertainty by refusing to do comforting rituals to get answers or rumination and just being extremely anxious instead. The choice about whether you do rituals is yours. You choose to do them, you have the choice to not do them and to instead process the anxiety that you get when you don't do them. Nobody can do it for you. No therapist, no book. But if you want a practical, step by step guide through the actual process of decoupling thoughts and beliefs from feelings and processing feelings rather than thinking or doing compulsions or rituals, I recommend a book called "Letting Go" by David R Hawkins. It did the job for me.

Stoicism is definately very helpful, I have dealt with real event and I remember reading a reddit post of a user who used stoicism to cure herself/himself. They said that their real event OCD was do bad they'd cry so loud the neighbours would hear them, and using the philosphy helped them move past the trauma of it all.

@MJocd Hell yeah! It's all about acting according to your virtues in the face of the worst circumstances, and noticing that suffering is a choice and is a result of thinking there is something wrong with your thoughts, feelings or life which needs to be different and so suffering by rejecting them instead of letting them flow through you. Marcus Aurelius is my bro. Seneca the Younger had his shit together too

@Louw Haha, I've definately seen quite a lot of stuff on stoicism. Do you think you could direct me to where I could understand it better? Like reading material etc?.

@MJocd Buy meditations by Marcus Aurelius! It's a really short book, any translation is good, it's on Amazon and there's probably pdfs and ebooks of it for free. That's where I'd recommend starting. Then Seneca the Younger's Letters to Lucilius which are also online with a quick Google. Stoic literature is pretty widely and freely available and shared. If there are things in Meditations that you don't get, like what the Logos is etc, just Google them (it's literally a book of a long list of pieces of wisdom, super readable). The idea of the Logos is very comforting to me, it's basically the idea that nothing is wrong and nothing can go wrong, everything happens as it's intended and resisting it is trying to swim against a current.

@Louw That sounds so great, thankyou so much. I can see philosphy such as stoicism may help me with my thinking. I have seen examples online of people saying how it really helped then, in particular with real event. Real event/moral/responsibility ocd are such difficult ones to cultivate acceptance for. I used to have health OCD, for two years I was terrified and then all of a sudden one day I woke up and was able to accept acceptance. But things with a moral ambiguity as a foundation are extremely, extremely hard to get over. It affects me in every single way when I'm in a bad way, in every single interaction I've felt like im a fraud, that this person doesn't know the "real me" and always have a feeling of being in danger. Its a horrible way to live With your mind torturing you like that.

@MJocd The fraud/danger thing and that it's dangerous to be vulnerable... There's a possibility that you also have something called toxic shame, which can fuel moral OCD. Worth a Google. If you feel it sounds like you, get the book "CPTSD: from surviving to thriving".