I've been really struggling for five years with a theme after I received intensive ERP. OCD knows my weakest point and it's therapy & recovery. I do care a lot about beating OCD and the OCD knows that. It's throwing out demands in the disguise of exposure & it's really hard to know what's therapy & what's OCD. Sometimes I'll even question whether or not I have listened and following through on it's "exposure" instructions, which then I'll go back to check if I did listen. Of course that doesn't help. My character is being destroyed by this, constant instructions that if something bothers me as me, or I don't like it, that it's OCD and I need to habituate to it, when in reality, it's just something I don't like. I really wish there was a therapist in my area who could help me navigate through this. I agree that keeping it simple is key. I do wish somehow this were easier to convey to a therapist. No matter what the OCD content, it should be about letting yourself experience the obsession & not performing the compulsion. Not actually doing what's inside the obsession, which is where my OCD warps everything. Really struggling and really need help.

It sounds like grey areas are your best bet. OCD will improve even if you don't do ERP perfectly, or all the time, it just has to be "good enough". So it's best to resist the urges to question/check whether you've done an exposure correctly, and maybe only doing exposures for things where your therapist agrees it's become an obsession. It sounds like you've fallen into a new OCD theme here via excessive rumination, so you probably need some overarching principles to live by which are going to work for all forms of OCD including this theme. Although it's clear that something mildly bothering you is not at all the same thing as an obsession, arguing that point with your own brain isn't going to help the situation. A good response to the thought "maybe I should do ERP for this random thing" would be "yes, maybe" and then not doing it despite the urges to do so. And ESPECIALLY, not ruminating and debating it to try to figure out if you should be doing ERP for the annoying thing. Just refocusing your attention to something else. I'm confident that if a *genuine* new obsession did pop up, then you'd be able to recognise instinctively that it's an obsession by the fact that it would bother and worry you all the time and include compulsions which get in the way of your life, like this theme and past themes. There would be no need to try to work out whether it's an obsession, therefore you shouldn't try to work that out for anything.