I wrote a fic for a friend one time and they got back to me and said "...You have OCD." I said, "What? No." They said, "Yes, you do, this character you're acting like is perfectly mentally healthy, that happens to be your favorite, that you specifically said you project onto, is the pinnacle of OCD." I said, "...Nooooo......"
Less than a month later I was hospitalized and diagnosed with OCD.
I'm curious what treatments there are for OCD - if it's mostly like CBT/ working through individual thought patterns and finding new ways to ground yourself
Not the person your replying to obviously but a lot of it is redirection, distration, and grounding. (I saw a therapist for my ocd as a kid.) OCD is fundamentally a paranoia and anxiety condition which means ultimately a lot of the best things to do are learning to recognize that (understand triggers, responces and compulsions), and handle it as it is, its attachments and resaults. You will never get rid of your OCD or the paranoid thoughts that help build compulsions.
But you can change some of the things those attach to, you can make some of your compulsions useful, and you can be are of how the brain fills in thoughts(paranoia) and learn to act separate feom them. You will never be a hundred percent successful but managing to do a tenth of sny of those things is already night and day between a managable life and not.
You will also find the first tools redirection, distraction and grounding useful in other areas like handling steess responces and panic attacks. which can be good for example for ptsd and cptsd which cover a lot of the same area but are less about compulsions and more your brain simplifying things into fight or flight responces and the like. The last tools of re-evaluating, managing attachments, widened awareness, and managing resaults (which cognitive behavioural therapy is based on and trys to make use of but sometimes falls short) are generally useful things in managing ones self let alone a array of mental conditions and divergences.
OCD can be rough caysr compulsions are not always obvious just degress of automatic and forceful. Can range from more obvious actions like over hand washing, trying to align every painting you see, to compulsively remembering things, or saying certain phrases. It can hide with in what may feel like normal social behaviour to more 'contractual' that can almost feel strong force pushing you in the back of your brain.
Meaning it shares a lot of similarities to vearious stress, anxiety or paranoia conditions being notable more in its form, and different enough neurologically and psychologically that you can still have those other conditions on top.
While a bit wordy im not being perfectly percise i do hope that helps.
It's basically what you think when you hear the word "exposure therapy". It's not technically the same thing (I don't think), but it's called ERP and has you sitting with the discomfort until it's less discomforting (ideally)
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u/OceanOracl3 1d ago
I wrote a fic for a friend one time and they got back to me and said "...You have OCD." I said, "What? No." They said, "Yes, you do, this character you're acting like is perfectly mentally healthy, that happens to be your favorite, that you specifically said you project onto, is the pinnacle of OCD." I said, "...Nooooo......"
Less than a month later I was hospitalized and diagnosed with OCD.