When you start facing your fears, there are three stages that you might have to go through with each compulsion before you learn to effectively handle them.
Awareness: In this stage, you begin to gain knowledge about and understand all your compulsive rituals. Avoidance of sharp objects that cause fear is a compulsion. If this is not identified, it may remain unresolved. In the second example, you are explained that the fear of arrest needs resolution too and not just the fear of hurting someone. If you don’t understand the core fear, you may keep working on the fear of hurting someone and struggle to deal with it when it doesn’t seem to seem to make you feel better. The fear of the arrest may appear through some other compulsive ritual and the cycle may keep repeating. Knowledge and understanding will help you identify what and how much needs to be dealt with. Along with it, the knowledge of how to handle the obsessions is also important.
Recall: Awareness is not always sufficient, particularly in OCD. Even with the knowledge and understanding of what needs to be handled and how, you may not be able to. When it is time to face the fear, that is when you are triggered, the obsession may be bad and the thought may seem real. You may not be able to remember what you know and have understood. So, you may not remember that avoiding sharp objects is incorrect, and that you need to take the risk of hurting someone if you are to get over your Harm OCD. But with repeated reminders and with the strengthening of your mindfulness muscle, you may finally begin to remember. Thus, the second stage in recovery is remembering the knowledge gained in the triggered state.
Action: When you gain knowledge and understanding, and begin to remember that the rituals are not to be performed when you are triggered, the third stage, which is action, becomes possible. In this stage you decide to either perform your rituals or stay away from them. Even though you may have gained knowledge and understanding, and even though you may remember what you are supposed to do, taking action to stop ritualistic behavior is not going to be easy. But with repeated reminders and with better acceptance of the need to not do the compulsions, you may begin to take action.
When you are triggered and want to cancel a social engagement with someone, you may remember that it is unhelpful and despite what your Harm OCD asks you to do you choose to meet the person. Similarly, when you wonder if you are evil, you may remember that you are supposed to risk causing harm and continue to act sociably right now, despite the fear. When you continue to do the difficult things, you are taking action.
Thus, in the beginning, you may not even be aware of where you are going wrong. With knowledge and understanding you become more aware. When you are triggered, with sufficient effort and mindfulness you may begin to remember more often not to act upon your compulsive urges. With practice and acceptance of the futility of doing the compulsions, you may begin to take action to resist the urges.
In the beginning, maybe out of the ten times you are likely to get triggered, you may recognize the pre-trigger signs only once. Out of the ten times you are triggered and get the urge to do your compulsions, you may mindfully remember only once to not do your compulsions. And out of the ten times you remember not to act upon your urges compulsively, you may accept the situation and succeed in not doing your compulsions only once. But slowly, with repeated practice the number of times you recognize, remember and resist the urges will increase and you will begin to inch your way towards recovery.
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