Danielle Jhiani explains that you don't need to hunt down your core fears separately. In OCD treatment, they surface naturally as you practice exposures to intrusive thoughts. A contamination example shows how the fear chain from hand washing to death emerges during therapy itself.
A lot of people come to me asking, do I need to identify my core fears in order to recover? I think I need to figure these out. And the answer is yes and no. If you're getting the right treatment, your therapist or your coach is helping you identify your intrusive thoughts, and they're teaching you what to do with those. Your core fears are already coming out in these intrusive thoughts. So let's talk about somebody with contamination ocd and they're washing their hands all the time, and they're making sure the kids don't bring their shoes in the house. And they are cleaning constantly as I'm asking them, what's going on in your brain when you want to wash something for 30 minutes? And they say, well, if I don't do that, then somebody might get sick. And we say, okay, let's work with that thought. Practice exposure with that thought. Maybe we start to delve into another thought, which is, well, if somebody gets sick, then they're going to die, right? So if you're getting the proper treatment, those core fears are very quickly coming out.
