Let’s share our tips for living with an open / unanswered question! For me, the open question I live with is “how do I know I’m not / don’t be attracted to (insert taboo content)?”

I love this approach! It’s a great way to affirm your skills and know that you can do hard things ?

I think to our brains even an awful outcome can actually be better than just not knowing. That's why I think it's still important to do ERP about the maybe, not only about the worst possible scenarios.

Do you prepare catastrophic scripts and read them regularly? If not, what is your approach?

@Fear Strikes Out I actually practice the scenario in my head and think about how I would genuinely cope with it. Instead of relieving the anxiety by trying to convince myself it can't come true, I accept the maybe and brainstorm how I would go forwards from there. It's made me realise that in most disaster scenarios I'd still have my family and close friends and their support and that it doesn't need to be life-over the way OCD loves to say it would be. Which also helps me to spot my other catastrophising- like, maybe if I really am into beastiality it doesn't have to mean I'm a bad person, I could still do good things, I wouldn't have to act on it and maybe I'd even be able to share it eventually and have a normal relationship. So it's not exactly ERP with scripts to acclimatise me to catastrophies, it's just that if I know that many aspects of life would go on and I could be okay, I feel less like I hardcore need to prevent it. When I get fears of going to jail (linked to tons of my fears), I watch and read stuff about it and sometimes I do ERP of just accepting the increased anxiety, and sometimes I imagine how I could get by and even the positives in it (lots of structure, no money worries, lots of free time to read, study, I even had an ex-con lecturer at uni so it's never the end of the world, etc). It works for pretty much everything other than ones which end with death. And then martial arts works great for some of those ? I'm planning to start classes.

@Fear Strikes Out Sounds silly probably but it helps! I think of it as another way to get accustomed to the "maybe" instead of fighting it.

@Scoggy I am glad it works for you. The one concern I might have doing similarly is if thinking out the worst case outcomes can actually become a compulsion itself? It would seem that you would have to spend more than a minute or so thinking about how you might cope with a hypothetical situation and outcome rather than just accept the uncertainty and live out your values. Maybe I am misunderstanding?

@Fear Strikes Out I don't think it's a compulsion, my therapist supports it very much and as I said I don't replace ERP with it. I think it through and flesh it out and then sometimes remind myself of it. It works pretty quickly to reduce the anxiety about the topic and make ERP and avoiding compulsions a lot easier. It's also worth reading my reply to silverarman below. It's not there to reassure or as a crutch to reduce my anxiety, it increases my sense of my own coping ability with the fear which reduces the intensity of the need to try to work it out which can trip you up in recovery.

@Fear Strikes Out It makes me not need to investigate which makes me leave the topic alone which over time gets rid of the obsession. I've certainly never ended up in a cycle of having high anxiety about a fear and using the idea that I could handle it to calm me down and the obsession remaining with the same level of intensity or worse etc, which is what you get from reassurance compulsions. Probably because I also do ERP and because doing this actually makes it easier to leave the topic alone. Big difference between reassuring yourself that something won't happen or isn't true, and doing work to improve your resilience and estimation of your own level of resilience, as far as my OCD therapist is concerned anyway. It's learning to be flexible and not feel so vulnerable all the time. I've already done it successfully for three different obsessions I can think of, which haven't come back. The end result speaks for itself I think.