PART 5/11 At the beginning of the third meeting, after standard questions about well-being, L. notes the first improvements - obsessive thoughts began to frighten a little less. However, when doing homework, which required me to pronounce an obsessive thought every time a ritual occurred, my fear increased. This was due to the insufficiently precise instructions that I gave. This approach is called ERC (exposure and response control). It was necessary to pronounce this thought in order to understand that the ritual arises only in connection with it - “I perform the ritual only because I am afraid of this thought,” while L. simply spoke this thought, continuing to trust it. However, I decided not to do this task again because L. had demonstrated a high ability to engage with her fears and cope with tension. We immediately moved on to the next ERP (Exposure and Response Prevention) protocol, which involved systematically confronting the sources of fear and not responding to them with various rituals. We identified the rituals of “correctly” tying shoelaces and making the bed as targets. At the same time, what is important in the first steps is not immediate refusal, but rather the desire to minimize these manifestations as much as possible with subsequent additional efforts to abandon neurotic methods of defense. L. was helped in this by challenging obsessions and reducing their significance. As well as beliefs about rituals that we challenged next. We re-discussed the idea of ​​conditioning and how ritual has a conditioned benefit only in the short term - helping to reduce fear. However, in the long term, it deprives the psyche of the opportunity to verify the authenticity of fears in deeds and not in words. To continue reducing trust in obsessive thoughts and their significance, I proposed an experiment to L., in which I had to take a “risk”, because she needed to test the power of her own thoughts on me. This idea caused fear and a small protest, but thanks to the support and motivation of L., she decided to try to harm me with her thoughts, for starters, without saying them out loud. Because I didn’t know their essence, we outlined a gap within which truly prophetic and powerful thoughts can influence my destiny. Otherwise, any thought like “I wish to get sick” risked coming true, because this is inevitable. The deadline was set - exactly 1 week. Even at previous consultations, I noted on L.’s part the difficulty of speaking spontaneously and without constraint. I carefully asked an important diagnostic question: “You also sometimes don’t understand my abstruse formulations, my questions are clear, but it’s difficult to find an answer, or there is an answer, but you don’t know how best to formulate it?” The third option is characteristic of anxious people in general, and in the case of L. Behind it was self-demandingness - another intermediate belief that we challenged. Challenging PU - I always have to choose my words, otherwise they won’t understand me, and I won’t establish communication.- Why is it always clear to me what you say? - Are you always misunderstood without carefully thinking about your words? - Does your ability to be understood or the people who listen to you change? New PU - I may not always choose words, because... everything is fine with me, there are just people who are complex and not interested in complex topics. As homework, the exposition described above was proposed: continue to challenge obsessions, and also keep a self-observation diary, within which it was necessary to write down the ABC diagram described earlier when it occurs irrational (non-obsessive) thoughts. The next part will discuss in detail different ways of responding to obsessive and simply irrational thoughts, as well as the most important feature of effective treatment for OCD. If you have any questions or need to better understand your neurosis, you can always ask me a question on the website or in the VK group: Freedom from OCD