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

The First Signs

It wasn’t until I was in my 20s that I even had a hint I had OCD – or what OCD even was. But then, just by chance, I came across Judith L. Rapoport’s groundbreaking OCD book “The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing.” Even the title resonated with me. It sounded like my story. Up until then I just thought I was quirky, maybe weird. But looking back, the signs were there at least dating back to my early teens. My first memory of an OCD compulsion was when I used to line up my shoes on the floor. To my OCD brain, they couldn’t be crooked, one couldn’t point right and the other left. They had to be parallel or it just didn’t feel right, something would be off. Truth is, that compulsion stuck with me until I was probably well into my 30s, when I forced myself to just toss my shoes into my closet and whatever happened, happened. I guess I’ve drifted back toward keeping them parallel, now that I think of it. Next, I recall picking up clumps of dust in the hallway leading ...
Post a Comment
Read more

What's that noise?

Working most of my adult life in a newsroom, it makes sense that I would hear a lot of fingers tapping away at keyboards. When I started, I enjoyed the sound -- it was the sound of important work getting done. Then one day the click, click, clicking of a room full of fingers on keyboards sounded much louder than usual. It was all I could hear. Suddenly, a sound that I had come to look forward to hearing was making my skin crawl. What was happening? A little research and I found that what was happening probably falls into the category of misophonia, a heightened sensitivity to certain sounds that has been linked to OCD and other forms of anxiety. Give me a barking dog any day. But someone chewing food? It unnerves me. Want to crack your knuckles? Go for it, I'll do it too. But a lip-smacking sound -- even a very quiet one -- can cause my anxiety to skyrocket. None of this makes much sense to me. And I certainly would never ask someone not to chew food. It's...
Post a Comment
Read more