Hello everyone, My name is Tor and I have OCD (my nod to past AA meetings :)). Currently I’m listening to a podcast from ‘The OCD Stories’ with guest Dr Michael Greenberg. He has a slightly different approach to ERP. He calls his ‘RF-ERP’ and it focuses mostly on discarding rumination and habituation. I’m still deciding whether his approach is ‘better’ but I did come away with one thing: I realised that the ‘question’ my OCD constantly poses (or, taking agency, the question I constantly pose to myself) came before the intrusive images. Before I had OCD (age 19) I asked myself a question unconsciously and put it out of my mind, not thinking much of it. Then I started smoking cannabis (age 20) and the OCD began. But actually the question was asked before and I had no problem with not having an answer. Do you see? It’s as if the images were my mind’s way of offering an ‘answer’ to the question — a question which reared up again after the cannabis. But I was disturbed by the question this time because my thoughts (the images) did not align with my feelings. So that was a helpful thing to learn because if I go by Dr Greenberg’s approach, my focus ought to be on discarding the rumination. In simpler terms: discarding the question. With his approach, this is the first focus, before any exposure therapy. For me this is much easier than trying to go headfirst into exposure without having made peace with the question. Perhaps you can consider what the ‘question’ your mind is trying to answer is, for you. “Am I X?” “Does this thought mean Y?” etc. I also noted that he prefers not to use the term ‘intrusive thinking’, and uses a phrase that allows us to take more agency. You can find the episode online (Apple, Spotify, etc.) and it’s called “Putting Rumination and Agency at the center of ERP”. Good luck, dear warriors. Sincerely I hope you find something that eases your symptoms even just a bit, in the quest for complete freedom from OCD; that funny and awful condition the French call ‘the doubting disease’.