Skip to main content

My Unlikely Exposure & Response Prevention session

In my search for OCD treatment I’ve worked with a couple of therapists who emphasized ERP – a technique, from my understanding, intended to desensitize you to a “trigger.” The idea is to intentionally expose yourself to a situation that would trigger your OCD and then resist the compulsion that you would do to calm the anxiety.

I’ve had some success with it. But the most success I had was actually an inadvertent ERP I performed on myself before I even knew there was such a technique.

I used to have this OCD thing where I’d be driving along and out of nowhere think I hit someone. In my mind I was convinced I’d hit someone, never mind that I didn’t actually feel the car hit anything. At most, I went over a bump in the road. That was enough to convince me I’d killed someone.

So one day I was driving home from work on the 101 Freeway between Ventura and Santa Barbara in Southern California. The route goes by a large cross on top of the hill above the San Buenaventura Mission. Another OCD trait of mine is if I see a cross or other religious symbol, I must acknowledge it with my full attention, pay it respect or something terrible will happen.

On this evening, I looked over my right shoulder to acknowledge the cross, while I was driving about 65 mph, and I suddenly I felt my car slam into something. Part of me wanted to believe this was just like the other times I “knew” I’d hit something, but I just wasn’t sure. I recall my heart racing, my hands feeling clammy, my head spinning.

I drove to the next exit, got off the freeway, and got back on going the other direction. As I passed the spot where I thought I hit something, I saw cars pulled to the side of the freeway and people milling around.

Oh my God, this time I really had hit something and I killed someone. That’s what my OCD was telling me. And it was hard to deny it.

As terrified as I was, I got back off the freeway and got back on going the original direction. When I arrived at the spot on the freeway, I could see the lanes were covered in red. Blood?

I pulled off the road, got out of my car and soon realized that I and everyone else milling about all thought we had hit something. The fire department and police were called, they studied the red, I asked them to check under my car for a body because I thought I saw something hanging down below the bumper. They found nothing.

Then they scanned the hillside off the road and also found nothing.

In the end, they determined it was some kind of prank. A can of red paint maybe. Whatever it was, it was meant to horrify drivers as they hit it.

It worked.

And remarkably, in the 20 years since then, I haven’t once thought I hit someone while driving.
I’ve got to believe that’s ERP, or a version of ERP.

I exposed myself to one of my greatest triggers, to such an intense degree, and I survived. Now my brain knows the difference between really hitting something and not really hitting something.
It’s hard for me to even recount that incident – the emotions still seem fresh.

But I believe it helped me address my OCD.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Could I be clinging to OCD?: Part 2

In a recent post, I suggested that, as much as I fight the idea, I could be holding on to OCD rather than letting it go. That it's a safety net. I made the argument that having OCD around gives me something to blame if things go wrong. But I think I missed the point. The more I consider it, the more I feel that if I am clinging to OCD it's because the compulsive rituals give my brain a sense that I have control over things. Oh sure, in my clear mind I know touching something a certain number of times or counting to a number that feels "good" isn't going to keep every driver I see on the road from getting into an accident, but my OCD brain doesn't acknowledge that. So the OCD repetitions give me a sense that I can have a say in how things turn out in a world that, in reality, is extremely random. As psychologically painful as OCD is, the concept that I can control things just by doing some rituals offsets that -- at least in my OCD mind. Letting g...
Post a Comment
Read more

Could there really be benefits to having OCD?

It's not often, but sometimes to get a slight advantage on the bully that is OCD, I throw it a curve and think about the benefits of having OCD. Yeah, I know, there aren't many. And maybe it's stretching it to say there are any at all. But I came up with a few to throw in the bully's face. First, I believe having OCD has made me a compassionate person. There's no way to truly understand mental illness without experiencing it, in my opinion. I have empathy for others that I might not have if I didn't experience OCD first hand. I try hard to be non-judgmental. OK, I judge myself 90 percent of my waking hours -- but I do try hard to be non-judgmental of others. I give a lot of credit to my mother, who lived her life that way. But I also credit OCD. I have a better sense of what people may be going through because I know what I'm often going through. Speaking of my mother, she was excellent in a crisis. She was a nurse and a caretaker for her ill and a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Good letters, bad letters

I wrote previously about my OCD brain convincing me there are "good" numbers (9, 10, 17, 18, for instance) and "bad" numbers (4, 6, 8, 13, 14 and more). Similarly, OCD tells me there are good and bad letters. In the case of letters, it makes a little more sense. G and Y are good (G is the first letter in God, Y the first letter in Yahweh -- the Hebrew name for God -- so there's some logic to that). T is good (lowercase t is like the Christian cross, so again, it makes some sense). But OCD doesn't stop there: D is bad (devil starts with d, though it's sometimes good because God ends with d). H is bad (it's the first letter in hell, but then, it's also good, because it's the first letter in heaven). How I feel about these letters at any given moment, I suppose depends on how I'm doing in general. I don't really know why my perception changes. When I hand write "good" letters, OCD tells me they need to slant up and to the...
Post a Comment
Read more