NOCD is an organization that provides online treatment for people with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.  They assign you to a therapist and begin working through fears and obsessions that are severely limiting your ability to live life to the fullest.  You work through these fears and obsessions by engaging in Exposure Response Prevention treatment.  With the help of a licensed professional, you are “exposed” to an anxiety-inducing situation or fear and must prevent yourself from doing the compulsion that has significantly reduced your anxiety surrounding this situation or fear, the “response prevention”.  

The idea is that the more times you expose yourself to this situation or fear intentionally and the longer you “sit with” the anxiety it produces the more your body learns to tolerate a certain level of anxiety.  After a while (which is defined differently for each person, each situation, each fear) you no longer feel the need to engage in the behavior that made the anxiety “go away” to begin with.  Your body learns that anxiety is not something to “flee” from and instead learns to just let it be.  

When I started with NOCD, my therapist and I identified core fears that were causing me to hold tightly to the control I thought I had and others that were causing me to completely avoid things that I should have been taking care of on a regular basis.

• Fear of doing things imperfectly.
  • Avoid doing household chores
• Fear of missing an event related to the girls
  • Excessively checking the shared calendar
• Fear of financial insecurity
  • Excessively checking our account
• Fear of being incapacitated while the girls are with me
  • Rehearsing turns and routes while driving
• Fear of physical security
  • Excessively checking locks/security system

We began to work down this list, one fear at a time, generating small instances that would generate anxiety so I could learn to sit and tolerate the feelings.  Over the course of 2 months, I leaned into the process and was able to successfully complete a number of exposures and reduce my compulsions to relieve anxiety.  I felt like I had my life back!

Over the course of the next 3 months, I decluttered our entire house, implemented a meal plan that allowed for us to eat at home more often, kept up with regular household chores (dishes and laundry) and participated in the lives of my husband and children.  I was no longer an innocent bystander watching the procession go by wishing I could just jump right in.  My friends and family called me “Mama 2.0” and I felt like a new and improved version of myself.  My husband would comment that this is the way I had been before children and I felt good about that.

Exposure Response Prevention (ERP) treatment via TeleHealth is hard.  In order to effectively get results from ERP you have to perform the exposures regularly.  I wasn’t very good at making and keeping appointments with my NOCD therapist for 2 reasons: 1 – she was booked solid most of the time and 2 – I tried to “fit her in” to my life and busy schedule.  I worked on exposures in between sessions and even pushed myself beyond what we had initially set.  I feel like this dedication to see “results” led to my success during this time at NOCD.

In June 2024, I entered the “maintenance” phase of treatment.  During this phase, I backed off the appointments with my therapists in order to learn how to maintain the progress we had made on my own.  I knew that going back to school in August was going to be a tough transition and we agreed to meet again during that time and work through some new fears and exposures if necessary.  One of the last, and most important, things my therapist said to me during this month was “OCD never goes away; it just changes directions.”

I found this to be true towards the end of the summer of 2024 and leads me to Part 3 of my journey to successfully living with OCD.  Stay tuned…