PolarBear

Thanks guys.

Excellent! Outstanding! Don't expect a big change right off the bat. Small steps.

Dan, you should not have had any expectation that he would reply. Your perceptions are skewed. As for the number of emails he receives, you have no idea either how many he gets. You're assuming he should have had time for you to offer free advice.

Good for you mummy.

What this says is he is an author of a fairly popular book. He likely receives hundreds if not thousands of emails from sufferers. He can't answer them all and he is not getting paid to do so. This is not about an author ignoring you. It is about you having expectations that are far too high. Actually, you are fortunate you got a reply at all. That he replied at all does show a lot about his character.

You're practicing having the obsession appear, hang around a but and leave, without you doing anything. Your anxiety will rise and fall on its own accord. What you're trying to do is get to a state where the thoughts appear but font cause you distress.

In a way, yes. As I said before I responded very well to meds. They helped a lot.

Ditto. It won't help. Regardless what answers you receive, OCD will find a way to cast more doubt on the subject. Going the way you are, you will never be satisfied. Get off the treadmill.

Go AJ!

Mummy, when I was 11 my dad was driving on an icy road. He hit a patch of ice and slid into the front end of a fully loaded gravel truck. He died instantly. For the next nearly 40 years, every time I saw a gravel truck, I could see myself grabbing the steering wheel and jerking the front end of the car toward the truck. You bet real events can cause obsessions.

Gooner you are a special case. I know at its peak my OCD was spiking at hundreds of obsessions in a day. I'm not a therapist but if I were yours I would offer this advice. Treat your obsessions as a group. Since they overlap, treat them like one long obsession. Pick a time when you are going to practice ERP. Preferably a couple of times a day. You don't need to expose yourself; the obsessions come at you regularly anyway. Sit quietly with no interruptions. No TV, nothing. Practice deep breathing while you work. Allow the first obsession to appear. Breathe through it and consciously let it be. No compulsions. Just sit with it. Keep breathing. The next obsession comes and you repeat. Keep doing that for the duration of the exercise. Allow the obsession to appear, acknowledge it, let it be, breathe. At first I would suggest sessions of 15 minutes. Practice a lot until it works. Then expand the time for sessions. You will make mistakes. An obsession will appear and next thing you're ruminating. That's okay. Acknowledge you're ruminating, stop and continue on. Results will be slow in coming. Don't fret. Keep doing it. You're in charge. You can't become a football star without practicing the fundamentals repeatedly.

OCD can creep up on you. You should always have a plan ready to put into action when it does. Like any other type I'd OCD, you need to stop feeding it. You can't control the obsessions but you can control your response to them. No ruminating, no checking, no reassurance seeking. Let the thoughts be and don't react.

Saz you are going backwards. You are ruminating and checking. This isn't going to stop until you make it stop.

You have described many well known OCD obsessions and compulsions. Wanting to know what is wrong with you is not a compulsion; it's being proactive about your health. You needn't worry about being taken away to a mental hospital. Everything, right down to worrying that you'll hurt other people, are well known OCD obsessions. Your therapist should have a least a minimal understanding of OCD. You start out with, "I think I have OCD. Can you help me or can you direct me to someone who can?" You can do a search for an OCD inventory form but, really, what you described above is more than enough for an experienced therapist to work with. The good news is that you are not alone and there is help available.

OCD does a great job of making us fear something personal and doubt something fundamental about ourselves. You need to realize you have a disorder that is playing havoc with your thoughts. You cannot directly stop the obsessions. You can make them weaken and become less frequent by not performing compulsions.

Smack your therapist, take a breath and refocus on resisting the compulsions.

Me too. I guess if we don't call it the right name we can't expect to win. Or qualify.

Wow I'm in a poem. I'm getting all red in the face....

You've got to get your compulsions under control, heartplace. Whether you did or did not is irrelevant.

With the right therapy you should be able to get to a point where the perceived risk is much lower. Then it won't be a problem.

Let's start with an OCD primer. OCD is a mental disorder where obsessions cause distress and compulsions are performed to try and alleviate the distress. It is important for anyone trying ERP to understand the difference between an obsession and a compulsion and to be able to identify their own obsessions and compulsions. Now an ERP primer. What the research on OCD has found is that you can't stop the obsessions directly. It just doesn't work. By their very nature they are intrusive and unwanted and just show up, leaving you to deal with them. What can be done, with practice, is to resist and eventually stop the compulsions. This helps in two ways. First it frees up your brain and your time because you aren't working on compulsions. Second, it's been found that when compulsions stop, the associated obsessions become weaker, less distress inducing and less frequent. ERP stands for Exposure and Response Prevention. The idea is to expose the sufferer to an obsession and then prevent a response (prevent a compulsion). ERP is a type of CBT and is about retraining your brain. A sufferer normally gets an obsession, anxiety rises and the a compulsion is performed to lower the anxiety. It's a constant cycle, as the obsession returns and the whole thing repeats. In ERP, the sufferer is taught to not perform compulsions. The first time the obsession comes and anxiety rises. It starts high, without a compulsion performed, for some period of time, at which point the anxiety begins to lower. Anxiety always goes down on its own and that is what ERP teaches the sufferer. Over time as ERP is practiced, the sufferer should find that anxiety peaks at a lower and lower level and the duration of anxiety shortens and shortens. Therapists will often have the client write down anxiety levels on a chart. It could be like, I was at a 3 (out of 10) then I had the thought. My anxiety went to an 8. If took 2 hours for it to get to a 6 and another hour to get back to 3. So here we have a peak anxiety level of 8 and an episode that took 3 hours to return to normal. Repeating the exposures, the client should see a decrease in the peak and a reduction in the episode length of time. Eventually anxiety rises only a bit and quickly returns to normal, which by all accounts means the obsession is no longer a problem. Clients should always track the numbers so that over time they can see the therapy working. Some sufferers can trigger their own obsessions (expose themselves). For instance, a person with contamination obsessions can touch a toilet. The response Prevention could be it wash hands for one hour to start and progressing to a longer period of time. Some Pure-o sufferers can also trigger obsessions by just thinking about that which bothers them. Still others may have difficulty triggering an episode but must rely on doing the work when an obsession pops up. One thing to do before therapy is to write down a hierarchy of obsessions, listed from the least anxiety provoking to the most anxiety provoking. The sufferer should start on an obsession that causes a moderate amount of anxiety first. Too high and the work will be too overwhelming. Too low and it's all too easy.

I'm not going to tell you what's normal. You tell me. What would make you happy? Give me a number of hours per month you want to spend on self improvement.

You are stuck in a loop and all the reassurance in the world won't help. It's time to start doing the work so you can become better.

Are you saying you have no compulsions? Just rapid fire obsessions?

And I'm sure you've been looking for certainty in the situation along the way.