so one of the ocd specialists i contacted told me that she would do erp with me to treat my ocd but also would do talk therapy to treat the trauma from the incident with my brother. will the talk therapy going to somehow worsen my ocd? im scared it’ll hinder my ocd recovery

yes that’s exactly what she said! she said we would do erp for the ocd, and then utilize emdr to address the trauma part of it. how has therapy worked for u?

@ocdsvcks That sounds like a good plan. After ERP for the obsession, you'll have a much higher tolerance to unpleasant emotions (and less of those emotions will be triggered) so you'll be able to talk through the memory and consider alternative perspectives and beliefs and use the EMDR to kind of plug them in. That way reminders of what happened will trigger the alternative beliefs instead of lots of unproductive, painful anxiety and shame. Therapy's going good for me on the whole. It's been 10 sessions or so, we EMDR reprogrammed one whole trauma which has worked really well so far and has stuck, but now we're working on my major trauma which involved me having OCD at the time and it's really messy. I feel very exposed and anxious after these sessions and it's hard at times to explain what happened because it's complicated and I dissociate from unhappy feelings and memories. So she has to go really slowly and ask a lot of questions and be really gentle, and I have to do a whole lot of trusting her not to judge me. Ngl it's rough. I hope at the other end it's worth it, I think it will be. We can unpick this, explore some of it, reprogram some of my beliefs and emotions and that should dislodge some of my OCD by making it seem less realistic as it should feel less emotionally relevant. Then we can do ERP properly and work on me feeling less powerless and that I could handle my fears coming true.

@Scoggy ur story makes me so happy! im so glad we’re able to share this experience even though i know it’s tough and we both know we’d rather not be doing it. just know that i’m right there with u! im so glad therapy has been working for u! ocd likes to convince us that therapy won’t work or won’t last but i’m so glad to see that you’ve gotten better. i hope this brings u nothing but healing in the future. it’s hard but you’ll get through it. just out of curiosity, how does edmr work? or at least, how does ur therapist do it?

@ocdsvcks Thank you :) She pretty much gets me to trigger myself of a memory and then watch a light going back and forth while I think about the worst part of the memory and a negative belief I associate with it. Then she gets me to come up with a scene involving the memory but where it happens differently like I stand up for myself or where I'm watching it in a way that gives me distance from it. Like that I'm watching it in a cinema from far away from the screen and it's a small screen and my friends are with me and we are all under a blanket and they're talking about how what's happening isn't fair on the character who is me. So I think about that and add to it to make sure I find it comforting and then pair that with a different belief or perspective about the memory. So I watch the light and do the bad memory and belief and then she changes the speed and gets me to think of the safe memory and nice belief a few times, focusing on the parts of it that make me feel the most opposite of the bad emotion from the memory. We do that until I can casually bring up the memory of what happened and it doesn't distress me because my mind goes to the safe version and I feel better and I have the new belief and it feels more real.

@ocdsvcks It's basically self-brainwashing but it does wonders for memories which cause you a bunch of pointless distress that doesn't help you or anyone else.

@Scoggy omg that sounds really cool actually. it kind of reminds me of mindfulness where u kind of detach ur self from the memory or thought. im interested in seeing how this is gonna work for me. im just really excited to be finally getting my life back to normal

@pure093 yeah! she said 30 percent of her clients usually have successful recoveries

i will!! thank you!!