And with uncertainty comes intrusive thoughts, poking their way right between your pillows. Like pumpkin and spice, OCD and uncertainty are quite the pair…minus the fall festivity. “We start there rather than going from washing twice with bleach to no washing.” Or if you’ve been requiring your partner to perform a 15-minute cleansing routine, you can begin to scale back that time frame steadily. “For example, maybe we decide that they’ll wash the sheets once without bleach instead of twice with bleach,” she says. How does that translate to sexual encounters? Depends on how far you’re willing to go (and we don’t mean base-wise)-it’s the question Rosen asks when she first starts working with a patient. “There are a lot of steps on the path toward completely cutting compulsions out,” says Lauren Rosen, LMFT, director of The Center for the Obsessive Mind in California, an outpatient treatment center specializing in OCD, anxiety disorders, and eating disorders. While the ultimate goal of treatment is to ix-nay compulsions, it’s not like you’ll be asked to kiss the frog in session one. You’ll need a good therapist to guide you, an understanding soul who’s trained in ERP (find such a human via the International OCD Foundation’s resource directory). But research shows that ERP therapy helps most people with OCD (about 7 out of 10), so the odds are ever in your favor. ![]() If you’re thinking um this will never work, we get it. So, say you’re scared of frogs first you’d look at pictures of the critters, then you might sit near one in a cage, next time maybe you’d touch it, then you’d hold it. Try to… Minimize Sanitizingīig picture, McIngvale recommends a type of therapy called exposure response therapy (ERP), which, as the name suggests, exposes you to the things you fear and helps you learn to resist them. “Sex isn’t that pleasurable for the person with OCD, or the person without, if they have to follow rules of rigidity,” says Dr. You may feel compelled to wash the sheets before and after, or insist that both parties shower beforehand. You may imagine germs all over the sheets or your partner, and natural sexual fluids might trigger disgust. When you’re regularly worried about physical contact with things you see as harmful, doing the dirty can makes you feel literally dirty. We set the scene with the common issues, then asked experts for advice that-while not easy-can hopefully, eventually, remove the bother from hot and bothered. While each person’s obsessive-compulsive disorder may present differently, any type can impact your sex life. “All of a sudden you’re so fixated on that thought that you no longer have the desire to be intimate,” says clinical therapist Elizabeth McIngvale, Ph.D., LCSW, director of the McLean OCD Institute in Houston and a lecturer at Harvard Medical School. Indeed, intrusive thoughts-a cornerstone of OCD-may be a common source of coitus interruptus. ![]() OCD-related intrusive thoughts burst into the bedroom like the threesome partner from hell. You’ve had a date night worthy of a (non-cringy) Bachelor episode.
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