Sam explains why performing compulsions keeps OCD going and how response prevention therapy breaks the cycle. Start by delaying compulsions for 1 to 5 minutes instead of stopping them cold. You have the control to choose not to do them, though it feels hard at first.
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Today I want to talk about compulsions and whether or not we have control over them and can stop doing them. So, as a lot of you know, if you've seen some of my prior videos, you've seen that doing our compulsions actually feeds the OCD cycle and gives us more intrusive thoughts. And so what we need to do, part of what we do with exposure and response prevention therapy is the response prevention. And that entails not doing the compulsions to stop the OCD cycle. So that's half of the battle. Now I get questions a lot about compulsions. Whether we can stop doing them, whether it's possible, whether we have control. And the answer is we actually do have full control over our compulsions, even though it feels like we don't. Sometimes they're so strong, it feels like you're not able to not do it. Whether that's mentally thinking about something or actually doing some sort of physical act, or even just being still and not going for a walk or pacing. Whatever the compulsions are, I could name thousands of them right now. Depending on the theme of OCD that you have, there's a lot of them. And almost anything that we do can become a compulsion. But we do have full control over our ability to do or not to do our compulsions. It is a choice. Now, just because we have the choice to not do them does not make this easy. Right. When we're in a big OCD cycle or we've been doing compulsions, it can be really difficult to just stop them. It's like a car that's driving down the street a hundred miles an hour isn't going to be able to stop in 5ft, but a car that's going 10 miles an hour might be able to. So depending on how much you've been doing the compulsion or compulsions and how much you're in that cycle depends on how quickly you're going to be able to slow it down. One of the keys to this is starting to delay the compulsion. If you're not able to stop it completely, just start by delaying. Whether that's one minute or five minutes. Delaying starts to slow it down, and eventually you can stop. Hopefully this answers your question on compulsions. Again, not always easy to do to slow it down or stop it, but it is 100% within your control and you can make that choice again. If you're continuing to struggle with your ocd, then exposure and response prevention treatment is what you want to do. And I help people every day get to the recovery stage of ocd. It is very, very possible. So please see the description below for more information on how to set up a free appointment with me. If you want to talk about working together to get to recovery for your OCD, no matter what.
Sam.
