It's worth dropping a comment here to say thank you for having the courage to start this channel. It's a wonderful resource and explains my OCD wonderfully... good to know I'm not the only one...

Chrissie I'm so grateful for the work you do. You're a true advocate for OCD. Great questions? Mannn he smacked me in the face, I totally make numerous mistakes with ERP. I ERP sometimes with compulsions unknowingly.

Again such a helpful video! It's like everything you discuss in your videos I can relate too! :)

Great advice thank you

Thank you so much for this video. Chrissie you rock!! I'm Shivani from India... I suffer from hyperawareness ocd.. Chrissie I watch your videos regularly.. keep up the great work!!

Great!!!

Chrissie could you please share how agressive was your treatment for Pure O? And what kind of exposures you did ? I found fascinating to know you could silent a Pure O theme in 2 months. Thank you for all that you do !

I think I may have ocd but sometimes I’m not sure whether my fear is true or if I’ve lost my mind... But I do the checking, internal narrative, get terrible intrusive thoughts that give me intense anxiety. The same thing happened to me about 3 years ago, and I was hit with multiple obsessions at once. I was scared of being a p.edo, scared of becoming a school shooter and scared of going insane. :(

Disclaimer: The following comment is my opinionated thoughts as an OCD sufferer. ERP has problems in it's logic & I'm hoping that with my voice & others, there will be a reform made to how it's administered to patients. Again, I can't speak for everyone who goes through it, but it really messed with my brain & not in a good way like therapists say it's supposed to. I know that sounds judgemental, but I'm going to try my best to justify my reason behind this, so hear me out. In short, exposure to physical items, like having a picture crooked, making grammatical errors on purpose in my writing, or asking silly questions in public, etc. turned into a confusing thing for my mental health. You see, I was told in therapy that you do exposures & then habituate to them by not doing compulsions. There's a huge problem here that I don't think researchers have picked up on. I'm hoping through more studies that the flaws with ERP will be pointed out. Put simply, people with OCD are still individuals. Well, duh, right? However, you tell a patient in ERP to sit with a crooked picture & habituate to that & things can get ugly. The "human/individualistic" part of therapy seems to be completely ignored in ERP. Here's why. Using the picture example (I could go into more problematic exposures, but I don't have the time) :alot of people hang their pictures straight on a wall, walk away & leave it alone. People with OCD are told that for an exposure, it's healthy to make a picture crooked, sit there & let your anxiety drop, which eventually is supposed to lead to habituation. The problem being is that exposure in a physical sense is irrational. Response prevention can work, but the physical exposure portion of this type of therapy, in my humble opinion should never be used for OCD. Why? Because it interferes with the natural process of letting the thoughts come & go/riding the wave of anxiety. If you deliberately create the obsession with a physical exposure, you're creating an artificial problem in reality that most likely didn't even exist in the first place, which in turn conflicts with the natural process of habituation. Going back to the crooked picture example, we can all agree that the thought of a picture being crooked is different from a physical picture being crooked in reality, correct? So, instead of just letting the thought be there, the therapist usually encourages the patient to take exposure further by physically exposing them to a crooked picture. A thought is different from something actually happening in reality. ERP doesn't seem to take this into account when exposures are put into practice for patients, therefore creating conflict how habituation should be naturally occurring in the brain. Artificial exposures should be taken away from this therapy, for it conflicts with what the brain should actually be habituating to & that's the original intrusive thought of "Oh no, my picture MIGHT be crooked." Emphasis needs to be put on response prevention. I've talked with friends of mine who experience this same issue when exiting ERP. I'm ending my comment with this: the exposure portion of ERP needs to be retracted from the therapy. Instead, let patients naturally be bombarded with thoughts & prevent the compulsions, otherwise, you're just going to make the fire worse by confusing the brain with what it needs to be practicing & that's ignoring the thoughts & preventing the compulsive response.

@ChrissieHodgesPureOCDAdvocate

6 жыл бұрын

OCD is a complex disorder and many people benefit or move toward recovery from different methods of treatment. However, ERP is the gold-standard, evidence based treatment for OCD. For me, I absolutely benefited from ERP in less than 2 months. I went from 24/7 obsessions and compulsions to the fear being completely eradicated. So, while ERP may not be the right therapy for you, that does not mean that everyone falls into that category.

@horrorpopfanatic1184

6 жыл бұрын

I believe ERP works for some people, but I don't believe accurate recovery percentages are being reported from administrating this type of therapy. My view on this comes from how many of my peers in this treatment program did not recover. Apparently it's an 80% recovery rate using ERP? I call bologna considering the majority of my friends from treatment are still suffering with OCD. It's time for medical professionals & sufferers alike to start looking for a more results worthy, well-known & less rigid gold-standard to treating OCD.

How do you know how often you should do E.R.P? is it every hour? Once a day?

@ChrissieHodgesPureOCDAdvocate

7 жыл бұрын

Hey Paul. Your therapist should be able to help you figure out that strategy. For me, I did it once or twice a day and I scheduled when it would occur so I could keep track of my progress.

Hi Chrissie, have you heard of false memory OCD? Like fearing if I had done something criminal. Mine is intertwined with harm OCD and it's my absolute worst nightmare.

@ChrissieHodgesPureOCDAdvocate

7 жыл бұрын

Hey there Shawn, yes false memory themes in OCD is definitely common for people. It is absolutely treatable with Exposure response prevention therapy!

@shawnleong3605

7 жыл бұрын

Thanks Chrissie. Mine are the combination topics of murder and false memory, and because of that I am always thinking I am the worst of the worst. That's when I compare my symptoms with other peoples' symptoms, which my therapist said it is not a healthy thing to do.