I am having a really hard time figuring out how to address my obsessions and compulsions using ERP. It's actually turned into a main OCD theme of mine and it's terrifying. No reassurance please. I've never had an OCD theme so severe and last so long. This "theme" has been going on for 5 years now & has been the hardest to manage out of any OCD themes in the past and I've had many: Harm, Sexual, Just Right, Symmetry, False Memories, Scrupulosity, etc. I just wanted to put this out there because it's hard to function with these distressing, intrusive thoughts around therapy and how to do it racing inside me.

I've gone back to re-read them and really take in what you & Estrid / others have said about just letting the obsession be there & then not doing the compulsion. I don't know why my mind is doing what it's doing, it's extreme and hard to dismiss the intrusive thoughts as just thoughts, because they are coming in the form of therapy. For example: "What if I've purposefully gone and pumped a moderate/high amount soap into my hands and then smeared soap on the TV?" "Since I had the above thought ^ , that means you might need to smear soap on your TV permanently and habituate to that for exposure therapy." "Now there might be soap smeared on the TV because you might have done it for exposure." "You need to be just as comfortable with soap smeared on the TV if there wasn't soap smeared on the TV." "Letting myself have the original obsession & not perform the compulsion isn't enough. You need to be doing an exposure. I'm not trying to be difficult, it just feels real and seems like no matter how hard I try to just things be as they are/the way id like them, my mind finds anyway to convince me that I'm doing recovery wrong.

I will plan & apply it to the money situation too, as well as the TV, and getting thoughts about rubbing soap on my body and not being able to rinse it. I'll apply it to all of these and really practice taking it in. Thanks, Katie.

@canigetawitness My pleasure ? happy to help

@NOCD Advocate - Katie I really wish I could find an OCD therapist who could understand what's going on. Everytime I try to explain, it seems the question "Well, would it make you anxious to have soap rubbed over your body, not rinse it off?" or "Would it make you anxious to drop money?" It's like they aren't understanding the mechanism of my OCD, how it presents itself, even when I explain to the best of my ability. ?. I know it's possible to do this on my own, but my OCD is pretty severe around this "Recovery" theme & I feel like I do need help from someone.

@canigetawitness I was wondering if you had any advice on how to explain what's happening to a therapist? Maybe a simplified way to describe how things have gone off the rails/OCD is warping therapy.

Thank you for the videos. I'll check them out :)

Thank you. I'll watch it.

Yes, your OCD had hijacked your therapy. It's being sneaky. You need to spot it and not fall for it's tricks. Typically, an obsession is about a feared outcome: that I ran over someone with my car, that I'm going to have bad luck, that my grandma will die, that I'm going to hell, that I'm going to catch HIV, that I'm a pedophile, that my teacher will think I'm stupid, that my house will burn down, etc. Exposure is about intentionally triggering the obsession. Exposure IS NOT about creating the feared outcome. This is where your OCD is warping things. For the examples I gave, we don't do exposure by running over pedestrians, killing grandma, having unprotected sex with someone who is HIV positive, downloading child pornography, getting a expert to tell your teacher to put you in remedial math class, or actually lighting your house on fire. We DON'T expect you to accept that if those things happened, they would be good. Response Prevention, as you said, is refusing to engage in comoulsions or avoidance. So, think about the soap on the tv example. The exposure is a task that triggers the obsession "what if there is soap on the tv"- not doing something to actually slather the tv with soap. An exposure task might be setting a bar of soap next to the TV, touching the tv after putting a tiny dab of soap on one finger, or even just hanging a paper with a big question mark on it next to the tv. The response prevention is not checking. Then, you need to be prepared for your OCD to follow up with the second obsession "I'm not doing the exposure well enough/perfectly/etc". Response Prevention for this second obsession is acceptance. "Maybe I'm doing it right, maybe not. I'm not changing my plan now". Also, remember that the purpose of exposures is to create planned opportunity to practice Response Prevention. Response Prevention is what retrains our brains. Response Prevention is where the growth happens. Now, I remember one of your other frequent symptoms is about fear of dropping change from your pocket and then thinking that to do exposure properly you need to throw money on the ground. Using this information, write out an ERP plan. Include both the initial and secondary obsession

@NOCD Advocate - Katie Also, please bookmark this! You'll likely want to ask this question again, and when you do, if you completely can't resist compulsions, you can reread this thread instead of making a new post

their* words add shame/guilt, not yours.

Possibly? It's like whenever I'm triggered and have the obsessive thought, my mind tells me I actually need to do the content inside the obsessive thought to get better. I think it's irrational, but it's hard explaining to people. For example if I'm taking a shower and I get the obsession "You might've left some soap under your armpit, re-rinse it" and so I re-rinse it, my mind then immediately shifts to a new obsession "Well now you need to rub soap on your body. You aren't allowed to rinse it off. Ever." And this is now the OCD. So Everytime I shower I get thoughts saying "you can't rinse. Put more soap on you after the shower, etc. etc " and then those thoughts get to the point where I start to question if I'm done that and now actually do have a lot of soap dried on me and so I go to rinse. It's a mind twist.