I need advice

[Guest Abi g]

 Hello my name is abi and I am 14 years old. So I have had Ocd for many years however recently it's only gotten worse. I decided to make an appointment with my doctor and they told me I might have to wait quite a few weeks to see a therapist. This is really hard for because every moment of my day (even writing this now) I feel like I have to do a certain ritual to make my worries go away or to make me feel safe. My parents are very supportive and so are my friends however I am crying everyday because I am fed up with all the rituals I have to do and it's so hard to live like this. I feel so sad don't want to go out with my friends I haven't been eating as much and I just feel so unhappy  Someone please help me or give me advice Thankyou 

Edited July 29, 2016 by Abi g

[photog13]

Hi Abi,

Welcome to the forum :)!  

It might be helpful to get some information on what OCD therapy involves while waiting to see a therapist.  The current gold standard for treatment is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or CBT.  The cognitive part helps you to see the thoughts in a different light since it's very common to believe assign meaning to the thoughts and thinking that they mean something is wrong, dangerous, says something about you as a person, etc.  The behavioral part of the therapy usually involves a technique called Exposure and Response Prevention or ERP.  In this, you make a list of what triggers your anxiety and the feeling like you need to do a ritual and you rank them in order of which triggers or situations would be the easiest for you to resist doing a ritual to what would be hardest to resist.  This is called a hierarchy and the idea is you start on the low anxiety end of the list and practice resisting giving in to do a ritual.  By resisting, the anxiety will increase at first because it feels like you need to do the ritual, but as you resist the anxiety will fade naturally.  This helps you to re-train your mind to not have to respond to the anxiety with rituals and by not giving in to doing the rituals, your brain begins to reduce the anxiety response it sends to you when there is a trigger.  As you master each easier trigger, you will move up your hierarchy working to tackle a trigger that's a little bit harder to resist.  It's important not to go too fast since a trigger that provokes too much anxiety will be initially be hard to resist responding to with a ritual.  You can always adjust what you're trying to work on with ERP if you find something too hard or too easy.  Your therapist will help you with the the cognitive and ERP techniques while you work on both viewing the thoughts differently and tackling triggers in your hierarchy.

You might also want to check out some books on OCD (this one is recommended often on the forum: http://www.ocduk.org/break-free-from-ocd as well as information available on OCD-UK, IOCDF, and other reputable OCD websites.