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Pants

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  1. My lovely brother's battled with OCD all his life, in recent years, essentially in the 'Pure O' sense. He's sought therapy and tried Exposure & Response Prevention, but now that approach seems to have become part of the problem. I so want to help him, but it has become a vicious circle. He starts with a random thought - say he looks at a car driving past, and can't decide whether it was a Ford or a Fiat. 'Knowing' which it was/making a decision becomes an obsessive thought which he can't get out of his mind. So he starts to try to employ ERP, but then the focus of the obsession moves to 'am I doing the exposure properly?' 'Am I minimising the original obsession?' 'If I'm not doing the ERP properly, am I making my OCD worse - if not now, then in weeks to come?' etc. He's desperate to get some benefit from ERP as he's heard that it can really help with OCD management and he's suffered for a long time. He tells me that if he manages to break out of the cycle of thinking/ruminating by minimising or ignoring the thoughts, he often feels really disconnected and numb for the rest of the day - a little like the day after a bad migraine headache. I so want to help him, but I've no idea how. I keep finding resources on the net about how ERP is a powerful tool, but not how to cope when ERP becomes the obsession! Any suggestions very gratefully received.
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