You may have read my first blog above about how sobriety helped me onto the right path, yet I have found I needed more help. This was a huge shock to me, and has taken a vast amount of adjustment for me and my family. The last thing I ever thought I would be doing at over eleven years sober was going to see a psychiatrist and yet another therapist, but, it was one of the best things I ever did. I’ve had to learn to live in a different way with this new found anxiety, and my life has improved so much since I asked for help.
There have of course been twists and turns. Exposure and Response Prevention, or ERP, eventually with the right therapist, has been transformative. It is worth looking up ERP online or checking out my resources tab, but ostensibly it is a behavioural therapy where you learn to acclimatise to the sometimes hideous threat of anxiety by not doing the compulsion which in my case, was seeing reassurance and obsessive thinking. This technique is how I have been able to acclimatise to a new way of life.
For others, the OCD may be physical. We all know the OCD speak about compulsive hand washing, checking door knobs or cleaning. These are rituals or compulsions which keep us in the vicious loop of anxiety. You may find this diagram below interesting. It is what happens when we continue to do compulsions rather than practice exposing ourselves (ie. ERP) to the fear.
ERP gets our brain to break out of this loop, slowly but surely, by teaching us to sit with the anxiety, and not perform the compulsion (hand washing / reassurance seeking etc). As you can imagine, this is incredibly hard, and if it is too strong, too soon, it can be disastrous. Done correctly, it’s life changing.
© Jessica Drake
Jessica Drake - OCD / Anxiety Psychotherapist 