I had OCD my whole life, then four years ago I started to do a lot of research on it. I started looking up other people who had 'really' cured it and here are some of the things we did, and they really work! Let's talk about them now...

I remember, when I was afraid to put my finger prints on anything because I was afraid that if a crime was committed around where I left my finger print, that I may be wrongfully accused.

I remember someone had let me borrow some dvd's. I grabbed them without thinking and then I thought of my finger prints.

I got a lot of anxiety and then said to myself, "What a minute! I'm afraid that if I leave my finger prints on these dvd's that if a crime ever happens at my friends house, they're going to dust for prints on the dvd's and I'm going to go to jail for something I didn't do! Ha!

When I said it to myself, out loud is better, you hear how ridiculous it is and you can't help but laugh. Also telling someone else really helps your brain to look at it in a different way. So one secret to curing OCD is to cause your brain to see it in a different way by making it look ridiculous to you, which will make your brain naturally question your actions.

At this point you are then able to retrain your brain a different way, because you have opened your brain up to the possibility that what you are doing may be the wrong thing.

So when I looked back down at the dvd's I not only refused to do my ritual of using the end of my sleeves to handle the dvd's, I defied my ritual and put an excessive amount of prints on them.

This huge wave of anxiety came over me like, ya, this is fun, but I have to wipe those off later. Then I said, no, and I touched the inside of the case and the cd and everywhere so that I couldn't possibly remember where are the finger prints were, now I was past the point of no return. I could not control it and I had to "let it go."

So I just said to myself, "What's done is done!" and "I don't care, I know this is not productive and I'm tired of doing things I don't want to do and I refuse to give into rituals anymore, lol I don't care, do your worst fear!"

I then realized that I just feared fear itself and I got this feeling like, man this is going to bother me, but I find that whenever I said that to myself, It never bothered me as long as I thought it would and I would eventually forget and that's the key.

After I defied my ritual with the dvd's and did what was most uncomfortable to me, which was exposing myself to my fear and going through it, once I went through it, I came out on the other side a free man! I felt like I was free, that I could do anything!

It's the most exhilarating experience and now, if OCD ever tries to come up during high anxiety situations, I get excited because I get to use this at will and I have used it to overcome numerous fears with lasting success.

This is not some therapy you need to pay someone for, this is a technique that you can have in your toolbox that you can use anytime you may feel OCD come up.

At first it will be hard, but after a while it gets so easy, and then you may spend several months forgetting you even had OCD, it's crazy. I know this works, it's not theory, it worked for me, it's worked for my colleagues. This is the real deal.

Stop looking for the answer, this is it. If you skip this over, you have just skipped over the most vital part of the cure...

Derek J. Soto

you can find me at

http://www.ocd-gone-in-seven-days.com

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBGIQ7ZuuiU

I think that you might be my ex-boyfriend. He used to tell me the same thing.

I've got my fair share of such tendencies, though in an unusual fashion. I can't stand things that are perfect, my pictures must be askew, I don't like even numbers, I never buy new things, and if I do buy somthing new I'll carefully break it so it's not perfect anymore. I loosened the bolts on one half of my car's bumper so it would hang at an odd angle and rattle as I went over bumps. I loosen my lightbulbs so they'll flicker when I turn them on. I even cracked the crystal on my watch. And whereas I repair my own clothing I purposefully sew crooked, obvious stitches.

I'm well read on the topic and you are wrong. It's really not the place to have a debate about it. I've spoken publicly about my views on psychiatry a number of times. I'll save my steam for those occasions as those times are the most effective. And No, I'm not a scientologist.
Bye

While you may have read that on some anti-drug/psychiatry website, it's simply not true.
If you actually have access to a database of peer-reviewed journals, and you do a little research, you'll find that the overwhelming majority of studies (double blind)on SSRIs suggest that OCD patients who take SSRIs have a significantly greater reduction in symptoms than placebo control groups.
E.g., A meta-analysis of 12 studies which included the data from 1,044 individuals by Geller et al (2003) revealed that all types of SSRIs are significantly more effective than placebo controls in treating paediatric OCD.
Any drug which is potentially going to be prescribed by psychiatrists have to undergo rigorous testing to determine that a) they are unlikely to cause any major harm; and b) that their prescription can be justified – that is, that they are more effective than placebos.
If the literature suggested otherwise, psychiatrists would never be allowed to prescribe them.

"psychiatrists do indeed have every justification to pescribe drugs as there is a vast body of literature out there that indicates that on average, they do significantly improve OCD symptoms."

In double blind tests, drugs used to treat OCD are no more effective than placebo.

Oh, and I must raise my movie-nerd dragon head as well and say that Slingblade does indeed have Dwight Yoakam's character, Doyle, profess a fear of "retards and antique furniture." That movie rocks.

I gave up on psychiatry as quackery. Through a long process I just challenged the way I thought and my obsessive behavior and over 18 months, I cured myself. It seems fairly straight forward to me, just work on your thought process and change it. The only one who can control your mind is yourself.