Anyone have any tips on mental compulsions? Sometimes it’s hard to catch myself because I can be unsure which is which. Pure-o life is rough sometimes

Thank you wow this was a great in depth answer. Helps me a lot. I have a hard time with rumination and it often starts the SECOND I wake up and often times I can’t tell whether or not I’m obsessing or conpulsing when the day goes on. And I try not to push away thoughts bc I don’t want that to be a compulsion but it’s hard when there’s radio talk in your head non stop about your fears that it just makes it super rough. Ive been in treatment now for around a month and a half-2months and I’ve seen significant improvement but I’ve also seen some backwards steps in terms of rumination. That’s my biggest one. I had a week or two where I was free from it, but it’s come back because I still have a lot of work to do with treatment and I’m working quite slow bc of how large I fear everything. Thank you for this, I’m trying to focus on stuff outside of my OCD now. But just waiting for these waves of derealization and ruminative thought to end. Thank you again for your response.

@charleejadeg Yeah I get that, I often wake up doing a compulsion and sometimes I've even been literally doing them in my sleep (self-soothing reassurance ones). It can be pretty difficult to find the line between avoidance as a compulsion and avoiding doing a compulsion. Sometimes just to get through the day it's necessary to kinda compartmentalise and forcibly refuse anything relating to the obsession, but this is something *everyone* has to do, OCD or no OCD, it's actually totally fine to do that harsh self discipline in a lot of contexts. If somebody without OCD is at work or having a conversation and needs to focus, and a distracting topic or emotion comes up in their head, it's not harmful to re-orient their thoughts back onto what they were doing, and it's not harmful for us either, it won't make the OCD worse. Don't be afraid to be self disciplined- it'll probably improve your quality of life. Avoidance really only becomes a problem when it extends to things like avoiding places, people, conversations and topics entirely because they're triggering for you, avoiding triggers is generally bad, but avoiding thought spirals is good response prevention. Sometimes just to be able to get a bit more control over your life and daily experience, refusing to think about an obsession-topic whatsoever is a bit improvement on constant rumination, and getting that break tends to allow you to develop better perspective and confidence that you're able to choose to not follow every thought. E.g. if you had POCD and think about it all day every day, it would improve your life a lot to start to forcibly redirect your attention any time your brain reminds you of the topic. But as it's a topic you might encounter on the internet, in conversation or on TV, yeah it's important to ultimately be able to have thoughts and speak about the topic, but that's something you can gradually expose yourself to once you've developed that ability to resist the urge to delve into the usual spirals and questions about it. My personal experience has been that it's much easier to develop healthy mental boundaries if you're starting with rigid boundaries rather than starting with no boundaries at all. So I'd say do check with your therapist about what I've said, but it actually sounds to me like you did really good and just need to get back on the horse. Not doing compulsions (mental or not) always feels like you're being negligent or doing something wrong but most likely your 'avoidance' would be described as avoidance of compulsive thinking rather than avoidance of triggers, it's just that this time a trigger really got you and your brain defaulted to the old habit. Which doesn't mean that you were doing something wrong or have failed or that it isn't working, it just takes a lot of practice and time to get those good periods to stretch out longer and longer- and I'm also not surprised you're having some stuff like derealization because frankly having OCD is a pretty traumatic experience and you're suffering right now. A rough thing about OCD is that doing the treatment of response prevention and quitting rumination doesn't always resolve the initial question/worry/possibility. But doing OCD about it doesn't resolve it either. It may always feel like an open question/like a bit of a threat which is lurking in the background with the possibility of sucking you in. But with time and practice of the new habits, the topic feels less and less important, less urgent, less threatening and less like something which *needs* to be resolved :)

@Scoggy Oh and the fact that it feels less and less threatening is what makes it possible to then *be able to* have thoughts about the topic without going into compulsions of stuff like imagining, replaying memories, analysing, looking for answers, self reassurance etc.