From anxiety coach:
Whatever you do, here are three key guidelines. Your efforts to overcome OCD should follow these guidelines.
Your recovery work should emphasize taking an accepting stance toward the thoughts. You don't have to accept the apparent meaning of the thoughts, just the fact that you have them. The only real meaning behind obsessive thoughts is that you're nervous, and you already knew that.
Your recovery work should emphasize postponing the rituals and resistance. The obsessive thoughts always include the idea that you had better do something about the thoughts, or they'll continue to bother you indefinitely. But this is probably not so. As you get involved in your ordinary activities without going out of your way to bring the thoughts to an end, they will bother you less and less.
Your recovery work should include the practice of regular, scheduled exposure to the obsessive thoughts. This can take the form of written scripts that you read, audio recordings that you listen to, and other forms of routinely working with material that can trigger your obsessive thoughts.
From anxieties.com
Challenge 1:
Be determined to conquer this problem. This is a tough problem to overcome. You really need to spend some time making sure that you're ready and willing to go through short-term suffering for long-term gain. You need determination because you have to take the risk to experiment with behaviors that are totally opposite of what you would tend to do in these situations. You're going to have short-term doubts, and you have to be willing to overcome those short-term doubts and have a kind of faith in this approach.
The second challenge
as you begin is to gain the perspective that your worries are excessive, or irrational. The symptoms that your worries produce are so powerful and so disturbing that you get distracted by them and believe they represent true concerns. I am asking you to begin to practice a new belief, and it is this: when these obsessions occur, the content of the obsessions is irrelevant. It is meaningless, it is purposeless. Your obsessions represent an anxiety problem. The topic of your anxiety is not the issue, even though your anxiety leads you to believe that it is.
This is not an easy task to accomplish when you are dreading that you might pass on deadly germs, kill your own child or cause a terrible accident. Nonetheless, I am asking you to step away from those thoughts, to get perspective on them, and say, "Wait a minute, I have an anxiety disorder. What is an anxiety disorder all about? It's about anxiety, not about this content."
Try not to get into a battle of logic in your head. If you try to convince yourself of how illogical your worries are, you may become very frustrated, because you'll have a hard time being certain about anything. You'll always find a thread of doubt you can follow. So don't get caught in this trap of logic. Instead, keep stepping back mentally and saying, "I need to be addressing my anxiety, not this specific topic".
Your OCD is going to encourage you to do just the opposite. It's going to push you to think this is all about whether you really locked the door. Or it will get you to try to reassure yourself that you did actually make the appropriate decision. Or that you have not contaminated something. You'll work hard to get the right reassurance. And it's totally the wrong thing to be doing... You are falling right into the clutches of OCD. So this is a very important challenge to meet: address your symptoms of anxiety, not your fearful thoughts. Don't be fooled!
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