I often worry about what it means about it me as a person if I dont like soap smeared across my TV screen or soap dried across my body all the time. Does this mean I'm a bad person?

The best way I can describe it is that I had the thought "I'm going to smear soap across my TV". But it was a random thought. And now I think because that would bother me anyway, that means I'm doing something wrong by not purposefully smearing soap across my TV. So, I feel like I'm guilty in the sense that I'm not proving to myself that soap smeared across my TV or on myself all the time wouldn't bother me, even though it would anyway. I'm sorry if that's really jumbled & doesn't make sense again. It's becoming increasingly harder to put my thoughts into words now.

@canigetawitness1992 No worries, it can be really convoluted!

@NOCD Advocate - Carl Cornett Yeah, it is. I wish I could find a simple approach that would work for my OCD, but it's been hard to find that.

@canigetawitness1992 I know you have thought about this for a long time. I know its hard for you. But I do think you have to make a decision to stop your rumination. You cant stop the obsessive thoughts, but you can stop the rumination, thats an active process. Have you tried mindfulness?

No, not doing compulsions would be doing the RP portion of ERP. So that would be correct.

@NOCD Advocate - Carl Cornett Yes, I'd be skipping the "E" (exposure) part. I don't know how to create exposures.

@canigetawitness1992 Exposures are an intentional exercise you do for a predetermined amount of time. My theme was harm OCD, for example, so an exposure was holding a knife while I stood next to someone.

@NOCD Advocate - Carl Cornett I take it that exposure helped you overcome your intrusive thoughts of harm? That makes sense & I see how that can help. I feel like everytime I try to create an exposure, I'm not creating them effectively. I know it doesn't matter your theme, OCD is OCD.

@canigetawitness1992 Yes, very effectively. I only occasionally deal with harm thoughts, and when I do, I just lean further into the distress rather than avoid or engage in compulsions. A good idea is maybe list your most consistent thoughts. The ones that distress you the most and most often. Then you can come up with scripts about them.

@NOCD Advocate - Carl Cornett If get thoughts watching TV to smear soap across my TV, I wonder if that would bother me and needs to be an exposure. It would bother me to smear soap across my TV, so would it be more effective to accept it as just a thought, write scripts or actually do it?

@canigetawitness1992 Whatever increases your distress level the most would be the ideal.

@NOCD Advocate - Carl Cornett Well, smearing soap across my TV would bother me regardless of OCD. So If I had I thought that I've thrown my phone in a lake, I should throw my phone in a lake?

@canigetawitness1992 I thought we treated all intrusive thoughts the same, with no attention and compulsions. I'm very distressed and confused.

@canigetawitness1992 I thought our OCD thoughts weren't reflective of us.

@canigetawitness1992 Okay, so I’ll try and break this down as well as I can, because I think you’ve got a misunderstanding about what exposure is and how ERP works. Exposure is an intentional exercise you do to trigger distress. For harm thoughts, that might be holding a weapon. For HOCD, that might be looking at pictures of the same sex. For contamination OCD, it might be touching something dirty and not washing your hands. What specific exposures someone might do will vary from person to person. Although they’re usually something actionable (like holding a knife) or maybe they’re imaginal like writing a script about getting deathly ill from contamination. You don’t have to respond to every weird thought that pops into your head or do exposure about it. You’re trying to get to the core fear and trigger that distress to practice the key component: response prevention. Which is not engaging in compulsions like checking/ruminating/etc. DURING exposure sessions you do exposure. During the rest of the time you’re doing response prevention. You don’t have to break any personal property or cause harm to yourself or someone else. If it’s would, that’s a time to use an imaginal exposure or script. I couldn’t actually kill someone when I had thoughts of killing someone, right? So I’d write a script instead.

You’ve developed an obsession about doing therapy. To clarify, exposure is just intentionally triggering the thought so that the urge to engage in compulsions arises. Then you intentionally resist the compulsions. Having a random thought doesn’t mean you have to engage with that thought, in fact, not analyzing and ruminating would be doing response prevention, which is good. What’s effective here isn’t “Oh my gosh, am I doing this right, what should I do!?” It would be doing nothing.

@NOCD Advocate - Carl Cornett Yes but with ERP, we do engage with the thought.