Doing What's Needed & Measuring Progress

[taurean]

Key things for me in tackling OCD are :

Accepting we have this mental illness. 

Realising we have no fault for that, and no-one should judge us so. Around 1% of the population happen to be sufferers. 

Recognising it's the OCD that makes us feel bad, causes us to feel that its lies, exaggerations or revulsions are true - because it so makes them feel like it. 

Learning that the threat or fear from the underlying OCD is what evokes an anxiety response, and the urge to carry out compulsions to "fix" this upset. 

Taking onboard that, in fact, the compulsions give belief to the intrusions, and make them stronger and more persistent. 

Changing our behavioural response to what we come to realise is OCD starts a timeline towards disarming the intrusions through changed thinking and exposure and response prevention. 

When we get really good at all this CBT, what would previously have pressed a - false -  alarm bell can be gently ignored and eased away. It happened to me when watching TV tonight, but I was able to act as above. 

When people report in to give progress, and they realise over time they have come to manage things quite well, it's commonplace for them to gauge their recovery in terms of a percentage - say 80%.

They can then share here what the 20% remainder is and we can try and shed some light on how they might best tackle it. 

OCD may for example be in cahoots with another form of anxiety-inducing thinking distortion. There may be ongoing stresses, ERP may not be being correctly carried out, or being done without the necessary level of cognitive understanding. 

Or there may be an OCD core belief not being tackled so still extant. 

We can wait so long to get to CBT therapy, but find time constraints when we do only give us the essentials, and miss the specifics. 

Here our only constraint is the willingness of others, who may be able to enlighten, being willing to get online and do so. 

Fortunately, at the moment there are sufficient active forum members to provide a pool of ideas and experiences that just might tackle the unresolved percentage of a fellow member's recovery. 

[gingerbreadgirl]

another great post Roy, really useful x

[Emsie]

Only just seen this, this is great, thank you Roy! X

[taurean]

Glad it is helpful. 

Summarising like this gets the nitty gritty over in an easily-digestible way. 

I wish someone could have done this for me.