Have doing exposures these few days as I need to go yo the university and I return home totally collapsing and crying, why my mind doesn’t want to release the thoughts?
Our brains evolved over millions of years to protect us from danger and keep us safe. Hearing the crack of a branch in the forest and making the split second decision to run for it is what kept our ancestors alive long enough to allow us to exist today. With OCD our brains are continuing that longstanding job of keeping us safe by looking for threats, but they're misfiring, creating fear and guilt, and generating intrusive thoughts and images in a misinformed effort to keep us safe from a threat that isnt there. Its why OCD feels so real, because to that primal part of our brain it is. Its also why our brain doesn't want to let these thoughts go, because it sees them as a mortal danger to us. Its also what makes you and every other OCD sufferer so so brave. To get through it you have to learn to sit with these very real thoughts and feelings that are screaming at you to respond with the same urgency they would have shouted at our ancestors in order to get them to run from a Tiger. Really its genuinely incredible how brave people with OCD are when doing these exposures. It would be like asking any regular person to stand completely still and do nothing while a Tiger lunges at them, thats how brave you're being.
@FightOCDwithme Thank you very much for your kind words 🙏
What a great explanation! The best I've ever read on this community board. Might I add that ERP therapy may make us feel worse before we see improvement. Simply put, OCD is fighting to keep you on its treadmill. But it WILL get better if we work on it. Recovery tends to be messy, not linear.
Happy Tuesday friends. Question for you all: I have recently started ERP therapy (about one month ago) and I feel in a way it has helped. But I also notice that I feel the thoughts I do have are SO intense that I feel like I’m gonna explode and then I’ll cry and get upset but then feel better after having a “freak out”. Does this happen to any of you guys? Also, I told my therapist yesterday some of the exposures we had been doing made me uncomfortable. Like really really uncomfortable. She made me feel a little bad about not doing it and stated this would prolong my progress if I didn’t do it. I’m not sure if I should push my self to do this exposure because she told me to or to stick up for myself and move at my own pace. Thanks everyone.
I just started working on my first exposure today with my therapist after screening and creating the lists for several weeks now. We did an exposure together and now I feel 100x worse than I did coming in. I won’t go too into detail but it involved looking at a VERY gory image that had to do with my fear of natural disasters. I called my mom and talked with her and she was shocked and wondered how in the hell that would help me! I agree. Did any of y’all feel this way when you first started or is this just not the right kind of therapy for me?
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