With the Passion of a Clown

a lot of my ritual behaviors are "checking"

self-guided ocd exposure therapy can be as simple as resisting the urge to check if your door is locked more than once and sitting with the discomfort until it passes without engaging in any reassurance rituals.

it can look like sending an email and resisting the urge to re-read it over and over again obsessing over your wording, sitting with the discomfort until it passes without engaging in any reassurance rituals.

some of my rituals are also "avoidance"

in which case it can look like checking your email inbox you've been obsessively avoiding because you're anxious about receiving a specific email you don't want to see.

and YEP! ☝️

!!!

it might be hard to believe, but learning distress tolerance for things like "checking" with emails and door locks actually prepared me for the Big Ones like harm and sexual OCD themes.

I think this article from 2007 is a good introduction to the basic concepts of exposures:

that SAID, a lot has changed since 2007! the idea that exposure therapy can (or even should) prevent fears from every happening has come into question!

now the conversation about OCD exposure has turned to training distress tolerance:

...rather than aiming for the decline of anxiety (habituation) during exposure, the inhibitory learning approach to ERP teaches people how to be open-minded toward experiencing anxiety and fear when these experiences inevitably show up. Indeed, fear and anxiety (and other emotions in OCD such as disgust or guilt) are universal and even adaptive experiences, not something that need to be “fixed” or gotten rid of. Most importantly, even if they can be unwanted, intense, and distressing, these emotions and thoughts are safe. From an inhibitory learning perspective, fear extinction (and long-term improvement in OCD) depends not only on learning that feared stimuli are safe, but that it is also safe to experience the emotional response that is triggered by these stimuli.

And remember at the end of the day I AM NOT a specialist. I am discussing my own OCD journey and referencing the available material on OCD exposures.

I'm not always right, and I can't know what's best for you.

Which is why I haven't recommended any of the old workbooks I've completed, because some of them are old enough that there are better ones to follow that I haven't gotten to trying yet!

I recommend doing your own reading from OCD-aware organizations:

i once saw a serial killer on the news wearing green and became fixated on the obsession that if i wore green it would like. hypnotize me into serial killing in my sleep (???) so i didn't wear the color green for an entire year. and of course being OCD i knew how "stupid" that was and that i wouldn't actually be effected by green clothes. i didn't actually believe that! but the fear didn't need to be real; the distress was real.

stenographer: well her bio says she/her...

me: better play it safe anyway [writes "it"]

the ghost of marie curie: [appears out of thin air] ivy... you're the first person to ever correctly gender me in a hundred and eighty-two years. from the bottom of my cold dead heart, thank you.

me: [dies of radiation poisoning]

"am i normal" is not as helpful question to ask as "are intrusive thoughts causing me frequent distress?" and "would my life be better if i could find a way to feel less distress/learn to tolerate the distress?"