A Question wrote:
Totally off topic, but Not sure if you’ll see this reply but what you described is exactly what my child is going through. (OCD). They’ve been diagnosed and have tried some treatment, but they seem to be resistant to it (because it is hard). What type of therapy/treatment did you do? (ERP?). You’re statement about logic is 100% my child.
I already feel I have hijacked this thread (sorry, Roisin Willis fans) so I will try to keep this brief while hopefully giving you some more hopeful insights (the OCD subreddit is one of the most depressing places I've ever been, for example).
I did use ERP to finally recover along with a commitment to the mindfulness practice which I think serves as a complement to what we do in ERP provided the mindfulness isn't used as a compulsion or a ritual. What you are describing is something I've noticed in the OCD community where there are many people who are very resistant to treatment... where some people will have a diagnosis for years, but not get better because they won't commit to treatment. Treatment for OCD begins with answering the question as Dr. Jonathan Grayson writes in his book Freedom from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, are you willing to learn to live with uncertainty?
The gentleman (a former patient of Dr. Grayson actually) below has a channel that was (and still is) helpful for me when I was in the early stages of active ERP treatment. He essentially reiterates what I said in this video, people won't take the plunge or that leap of faith... in order for the exposures to work, we need to accept the uncertainty, the risk that our greatest fear(s) might come true. Treatment falls apart otherwise. It's a really transformative process at a core level and that is a very difficult transition for people to make.
More specifically, it helps to know what OCD really is. It's not just an intolerance of uncertainty, it's an intolerance of the emotions/feelings/sensations that accompany uncertainty. There's actually no such thing as OCD thoughts, non-OCD sufferers and OCD sufferers get the same kinds of thoughts, people with OCD have an atypical emotional response that accompanies the thought. This is where mindfulness serves as a nice complement to ERP in the sense that one of the attitudes that underpins the mindfulness practice is acceptance. We learn to accept the OCD emotions around these triggering thoughts or situations as they are.
But do know and expect exposures to be intense... some of my more challenging exposures left me feeling like I had a pit in my stomach for easily 10 hours one day during treatment. Worth it though... no different than running 10 x 400m intervals to get faster, one is for sport, the other for mental health.
In my case, commitment to treatment was easy. OCD had negatively impacted my life so much it was worth the risk to me to make such a transformative change. It helped spending time hearing clinicians and other OCD patients describe things I myself had felt and thought over, but thought I would be taking to the grave with me, never being able to tell anyone.