Wastelands of OCD

 

Now let's talk about ERP, which works for me. First of all, ERP is a painful thing. It’s not something we will enjoy, something we will be eager to do, and something that will heal us as soon as we do it. It took me a long time to understand what ERP is. Perhaps we always forget that it is something that needs to be learned. The rules seemed simple, but I could never quite grasp them. Generally, ERP means desensitizing our brain by reminding it of scenarios we don’t like, but I wish it were that easy. Usually, when I tried to apply ERP, I expected a good feeling from myself because I believed I would get better. I was so tired of this damn illness and had been living in fear for so long that I wanted to immediately apply a successful treatment and get better. Therefore, when I did ERP, I wanted to feel a sense of success and happiness that it was done successfully, to find hope. The problem is that the result of ERP is not finding hope but feeling discomfort and, despite that discomfort, focusing on the task at hand without resolving the issue. You can see the problem here: my search for a feedback feeling that I was managing the illness correctly was, in fact, an attempt to find relief. From this, I think we arrive at a universal principle. When it comes to OCD, the approach of breaking it down into small issues and thinking about it is completely a hopeless approach. I call this a universal approach. ERP should be addressed with a universal approach and should be a holistic life philosophy. In other words, if I enter a search for a good feeling that I am managing the illness well, I am actually managing the illness poorly. God, what a disgusting illness. But once you learn the rules of the game, how easy it becomes!

 

Yes, it requires a holistic approach. I need to disregard the data collected about how the illness progresses. But this act of disregarding is inherently dangerous. After all, if I had the power to disregard certain things, I would easily dismiss the disturbing thoughts and overcome the illness, but I can't do that, can I? So how will I disregard them? I have developed a method. Even if this isn't a new invention, it has worked for me. I especially distanced myself from all kinds of positive feelings. I was now a being that should burn in hell (no religious reference), and no matter what happened to me, I had no power to change that. Accepting this requires a methodological process of training, but in the end, I learned to disregard the little chemical happiness my body gave me, saying, "Oh, how well I applied ERP." It’s impossible to eliminate those happy moments, but I could treat them like intrusive thoughts. Just as I try to live with an intrusive thought without engaging with it, responding to it, or trying to neutralize it in any way, I used the same tactic in response to happy moments, approaching them distantly and even consciously trying to disrupt them. For example, when a thought like "Oh, I'm managing the illness wonderfully, I'm doing great ERP" came to me, I would not join the happiness in response to my body that was pleased and would turn it around by saying, "How do I know I'm managing it well?" Here, I discovered a very interesting trick. I believe this is truly a discovery because it works incredibly well. The thing that materializes thoughts in our brain is language. In other words, when I say "table," I write it with letters, and a sound is produced. That sound echoes in my brain, and thus I experience this concept as a thought in my mind.We can use this to our advantage. If we can strip words of their meanings, the concepts that produce anxiety can become meaningless. You must have all experienced a situation where a word loses its meaning after you repeat it over and over again. There comes a point where the weight of the sound feels strange, and a sense of alienation arises. In managing OCD, the temporary memory loss I mentioned earlier on the Before ERP page is actually related to this topic. Now, if we take a holistic approach to everything and apply the principle of maintaining distance from both good and bad emotions and thoughts while creating a temporary memory loss that allows words to lose their meaning, what happens? This is exactly what ERP treatment asks of us. For example, when I experience a violent-themed OCD and face a horrifying scene that comes to my mind, I try to remain unresponsive while allowing my brain to freely generate creative ideas. I learned to program myself to focus on something else, as if I were caught in a temporary memory loss, while not avoiding the topic but also not engaging with it, feeling like a fool who can't remember what I was thinking. The words were there, but the computer program to analyze their meanings wasn't working. It was like a state of blank staring. I can't claim that this is simple or that it can be done on the first try. It was quite difficult and a process where anxiety used every possible tactic, making me feel like I was making an incredibly fatal mistake. But eventually, there is a limit to both the horrifying thoughts and the creativity of your brain. After a while, frightening thoughts become automatic, and if you don't feed them, your brain and subconscious struggle with new variations of terrifying thoughts. Do not interpret it as if your brain is continuing to find new variations, meaning those thoughts are really true. We don't really know whether thoughts are right or wrong, and we never will.

 

Now let me talk a bit more about practical things that really hit the mark. First of all, it took me time to learn to stop without mixing in fresh thoughts against my automatically flowing comforting thoughts that I mentioned above. This could be the first stage of the approach called ERP. In the second stage, the automatic thoughts gradually disappeared because there were no intervening thoughts to feed them. I can call this the second stage because, at this point, when anxiety arose in response to a trigger, I managed to not respond and also to not respond without automatic thoughts. The final stage could be creating self-triggered stimuli. Some doctors say that there should be a ratio of 40 to 60 between automatically occurring triggers and self-created triggers, suggesting that self-created triggers are more important. I don’t think so; a deliberately created trigger can be less effective than an automatically occurring attack because it eliminates the surprise power of the spontaneous attack, that’s for sure. Nevertheless, I believe that the responses I give in general are more important than the significance of the triggers I create. However, there is a general consensus among professionals and patients that self-applied ERP treatment is very important for recovery. I’m not saying otherwise, but I have some priorities here.

 

Another practical point that I found very beneficial is that feelings are much faster, so it’s impossible to stop them with thoughts. When a comforting feeling arises, instead of trying to stop it with words, we should focus on the feeling and learn to disregard it without speaking, because any kind of verbalization is something to be avoided. Especially during the OCD rumination phase, self-talk should be stopped even on topics unrelated to the OCD theme. I have definitely seen the benefits of this. Once rumination decreases and begins to be controlled, I allowed myself to verbalize counter-thoughts in a controlled manner, one at a time, and without creating a thought train, to reject comforting feelings and thoughts and create discomfort. However, this can only happen after the rumination has ended because, in a heavy rumination state, any conscious thought introduced is drowned out by dozens of automatic thoughts.

 

I have never understood the advice that experts constantly give about living your life based on your values. If I truly knew my values, I wouldn’t have a problem like OCD, right? I needed to learn that what I really think during an attack doesn’t matter. We must not forget that we don’t do ERP to understand that the intrusive thought is wrong; we do it to show our brain that we don’t know whether that thought is right or wrong and that we don’t care. There is a critical difference here. We must understand that what we actually think during a crisis loses its importance because we need to allow for a temporary memory loss. Once the attack passes, preferences based on values can emerge again, but unfortunately, this is not possible during the attack. I learned, almost stumbling, that the only thing I should do at that moment is to stare blankly at the thought and look at it robotically, as I mentioned above, almost as if I were in a daze.

 

In summary, after the learning phase where I experimented with the mechanisms of the illness through cognitive elements, a period of fighting against rumination will come, during which we need to allow the brain to be creative while canceling out automatic relaxation suggestions. We can call this allowing counter-arguments driven by automatic relaxations and freeing creativity.