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FearCast Podcast
#229- How Can I Fight The Daily Fight Against SO-OCD?
00:39:26
Phil messaged me to ask a simple question; what can he do to fight the inner fight of SO-OCD? He comments that he is in a relationship but constantly gets unwanted, intrusive thoughts telling him to “come out” or otherwise twisting completely neutral t...
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Foreign. Everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Fear Cast. This is the podcast dedicated to OCD and anxiety and anxiety spectrum disorders and getting your life back. I'm your host, Kevin Foss and I'm a licensed therapist specializing in OCD and anxiety spectrum disorders. I think I've said that enough. Anyhow, thank you all so much for joining me for this episode. For those of you who are new this question and answer based podcast, you can send me questions and I will read them, consider them and likely put them up on a future episode as I am doing today. So if you have a question, go over to fearcastpodcast.com youm can send me a message over there by clicking on the submit a question link. Now of course, you can also go to Instagram and send me a question there. You can also send me a question, an audio question, which I think Instagram is the easiest way to get that to me. So go over to Instagram, send me a dm. I'm Fearcast Podcast, all one word over there and put in your question or send me a dm. Press the little microphone button, record your question, it gets to me, I will download it, I will upload it, and then I will answer it. So today is not an audio question, but by the way, audio questions go straight to the top of the list. This question that I'm going with today is coming from the archives, but is a text question and they will get answered eventually. So here we go with it. Well, I'm going to answer this question eventually, but Phil sent this one in a while ago about sexual orientation, ocd. I think it's a great question. It lends itself to a lot of, you know, a lot of. There are a lot of common similarities that I hear with some of my clients and some of the stories that I've heard about, you know, the experience of having sexual orientation, ocd. And he's also doing some great things to challenge these doubts and challenge these fears. So we'll address those as well. Man, I just came out of a session with a client and oh, I'm. I'm exhausted. I'm exhausted. This is the fun part about being an OCD and anxiety therapist is you get to kind of do fun things and get to think outside of the box and do weird, and do kind of weird things. It's, it's stuff that's not like, you know, sitting in the chair and just kind of talking about your feelings, which is important stuff. But like we get to get up and do things. I. So I got to set up a. An obstacle course full of various, like, clothing items. And we jumped over them. We kind of, like hopscotched, as it were, over each of them and then came back and then we took big steps over it, and then we came back and then we hopscotched again. And it was exhausting. Now, by the way, the person who I suggested this to, like, you could see the anxiety welling up in them. As I'm just describing this. They were like, no, I'm not going to do it. But they did it, which is huge. It was hard. But remember, we're trying to, like, do this separation between, like, what the feared story is telling you and, you know, what your rational mind is telling you, and you know that you can do it. You know, this thing is, quote, safe. You know, it's something that people can do, but there's this voice that says, it might be dangerous, it might be wrong, it might be inappropriate, it might be offensive, it might be sinful. Fill in the blank with whatever the thing is. And they did it anyways. And at the end of it, you know what we were saying, it was kind of fun. Actually wasn't that bad. But, man, I didn't realize I was so out of shape. You do all those, like, bunny hops, like just hopping over stuff. You do that for about 20 minutes, you're tired. So, man. So I did get some silly looks from some of my suite mates. The folks in the office kind of just walking out of their office and seeing, like, a trail of shoes and shirts and jackets and stuff and going, Kevin does weird stuff. So either way, it was a fun day, but, man, it is exhausting. So anyways, with that out of the way, I think my breath is coming back. But either way, anyways, I hope everybody's gearing up for Chicago this summer. I'm about to book my flight and book my hotel, so I'm going to be there as a civilian. I'm not talking this year, so I'm just going to walk around wearing T shirt and jeans and not have to look professional. Hopefully I'll be on my best behavior, but I hope I will see some of you there. If. If I do, awesome. If I don't, that's okay. There are other people to see. But why don't we just jump right into this question from Phil and then I'll go into my answer to it. So Phil says, hi. I struggle with severe anxiety in what I believe to be sexual orientation, ocd. I've been in a relationship with girls for a total of nine of my 27 years. And suddenly in 2020, I got a panic attack and completely changed my life. Started having scary, unwanted thoughts that I couldn't handle. At first they were about suicide, and after that, thoughts of killing people in my family, really scary thoughts. And later they turned into sexual orientation thoughts. And they're causing a ton of anxiety every day and I can't get out of it. I hear regularly words that I connect to being homosexual. It could be, are you coming out to the party tonight where coming out connects to being gay? It could be more stretching my inner voice. Yes, stretching. And my inner voice saying, you're bending over. Huh? Right. That accusational statement that anxiety sometimes does. It could be me making vegetables and in my inner voice saying, you'd like this to be somewhere else, wouldn't you? It's a daily fight against the inner voice. And I have daily anxiety that makes me feel like. Makes me feel very low on life. Any chance you could help me get out of this? Then you go on to say, for your information, I've tried to expose myself to more gay people. I've always been a little uncomfortable around men that are homosexual. And as soon as I see someone that looks good, my mind screams, you want him, wouldn't you? So they say. It's almost fascinating, but it's also so annoying it makes me not want to be on this planet anymore. Thanks for your help. Best, Phil. So, Phil, thank you so much for this question. So sorry that you are having to go through that again. These thoughts can be such, this is, I'm preaching to the choir here. These thoughts can be such a pain and overwhelming and scary. I know you're, you know, as you're kind of explaining it, it feels light hearted or it feels, you know, there are parts where you're going, you know, where it's almost sounds where it could be silly, but it's, it's, it's terrifying and it's overwhelming and it takes, so it takes control over your life. So I appreciate you taking the risk being so generous to share this story with all of us and hopefully my answer will help. But yeah, so let's just kind of go through this. There are a couple of things that you said that I want to kind of jump onto. And let's just start with this. I mean, first off, sexual orientation OCD is a taboo obsession. Meaning that it's a thought, it's an obsession that feels dangerous somehow. Like we're not supposed to have these thoughts, talk about these thoughts, experience these thoughts. Right. These Aren't things that we have in polite society. We certainly don't talk about it, right? So the fact that you're having them makes it even worse, Right? Because now you've got these thoughts. Now you can't talk about these thoughts, and you go, oh, these thoughts aren't ones I'm supposed to have. So we shove them down. But what happens when we try to shove down a thought or a thought feels uniquely dangerous to us? It gets amplified, Right. It's the exact effect of the don't think about the white elephant or pink elephant or whichever one you want to think about. Don't think about it. Whatever it is, it just amplifies it. Right. So taboo obsessions are certainly amplified or motivated by cultural, social, religious, or just kind of like personally dangerous messaging, Right. These topics are somehow bad. And if I have them, if I engage with them, I experience them. If I even. And much less if I even do them, there's going to be all these terrible consequences. Now, before I get into this, what I also want to say, so when it comes to sexual orientation obsessions, you know, one of the side effects or one of the problems with being a therapist is that I'm not psychic. I don't know your story, Phil. I don't know you. Right. I really would encourage anybody who's having these thoughts. And while I do appreciate the questions and it gives us stuff to talk about here on the podcast, if you have these questions and these doubts, I'd encourage you to go see a therapist, have an assessment, talk about what's going on so they can get to know you and the fullness of your life and the fullness of your experience, because they're going to have a better idea about what's going on. Phil, all I know about you is what you sent me, and so I don't know what's going on in your life. Right. There can be a lot of folks who will say. Who will come in and say, here's my story. And they'll say, am I gay or am I straight? I think I'm straight. What do you think? You tell me. I don't know. What I do know is that you have an obsession about your sexuality. That is what I know. And that's the best I can go with, right. OCD has latched itself onto this story and has said something, and it feels as if it says something about you. My job in this isn't to decide whether or not you are straight, gay, bisexual, or otherwise. Just to say, here's an obsession that is overwhelming. That is taking time out of your life, that is making you uncomfortable and scared and destroying things that you love about your life. I want to help remove that as best I possibly can. After which maybe you can have a clearer idea about who it is that you are and where you want to go in life. But for right now, here's his obsession. We're going to tackle this obsession and whether or not that is someone who has sexual orientation obsessions, whether or not they have a health issue or health obsessions, or whether or not they have harm obsessions. Right. I can't guarantee, I can't know for sure whether or not someone who has a harm obsession is or isn't going to kill someone in the future. And I don't know whether or not someone who has a health obsession will or will not develop cancer in the future. But I do know they have an obsession about it that causes rumination, causes avoidance, causes reassurance seeking, causes all sorts of other compulsive behaviors that they just don't want in their life. So my job is to help remove those, help find different ways to live and work around those thoughts, to then live their life in the present and to pursue their life as they so choose. And that is what our job is. So please don't go into this or anybody else thinking that I'm going to somehow have the answer and be like, you know what? I read this thing. Yeah, it feels totally gay. Just so you know. Just so you know, I can't do that. No therapist can. And nor can I say, or nor should I say you are straight. Because I don't know, I know you have an obsession about your sexuality. The vast majority of people who have sexual, sexual orientation obsessions are who they say that they are. Meaning, like we've talked about this before. Trust your compulsive conclusion, right? Trust that you are who you say you are. And the obsession is coming in and saying, you sure about that? Are you sure about that? I think you should rethink that. And it's terrifying and it causes you to doubt yourself, doubt what you believe to be true about yourself. What we're saying is we're going to trust that as best we can and we're going to move forward with it again. It's like, I trust that I don't have cancer. I might, I might. We'll have to see. Okay, now, I know it's more complicated and I know it's, you know, this is going to. There's a ton that is open ended in that and that's part of the uncertainty component. We are working on naming the obsession and pulling back from it and spending less time on an obsession that you've ruminated and checked and thought about and worried about and asked reassurance about and have not gotten any closer to an answer than you had in the first place. So we're practicing letting go with it. All right? So that's one element. So let's keep going. You also said that you're uncomfortable around gay men. Now, if you were in my office, I'd ask a lot more questions about that. Like, where does that come from? What's that motivated by? What do you suppose that's related to? Now, it could just simp. Simply be, well, I have sexual orientation obsessions, and it makes me think about gay stuff. And I don't like thinking about gay stuff because it makes me worry about if I am gay and what that might mean for me in my life. It could be that, right? But, you know, some of this is around the messaging that we hear about being gay, homosexuality in general, whatever it might be. And sometimes it's just like this belief that, like, just simply being around gay men is like this slippery slope somehow to being gay. Or that, like, being friends with or friendly with gay men is this slippery slope right? Now, that's not true, by the way. I've been around plenty of gay men, and I am not, as far as I know, gay. But sometimes there can be this messaging that either comes from all these, like, weird places, again, culturally, religiously, socially familial, or just from nowhere. And it just makes the suggestion that, like, you know, if you're around gay men, you could, like, you could, like, be gay. That's like me saying, if I hang around a bunch of basketball players, like, I could be a pro basketball player. Like, it doesn't work that way, but it somehow works for this, right? Or if I hang out with a bunch of oncologists, I either will become a doctor or I will develop cancer. Either way, I'm not quite sure how that one would work, but it's this kind of magical thinking component. Now, I'm wondering if also if this fear about kind of this, like, feared messaging is like, that the gay community somehow, again, is dangerous, right? Or like, that the taboo thoughts suggesting, like, you want something that, like, doesn't reflect who you are deep down. So the anxiety is there to alert you to the thought, alert you to this potential danger. So when you're around gay men, gay women, lesbians, I suppose, or however anybody is identifying to say, this is dangerous. And the alert goes off. Now, that's that feeling that we're trying to tackle and that we're trying to practice being in and letting the sirens go off and showing our body and our brain that this is still safe, that you are still safe, that the process of being around gay people is safe, even though there's this voice in your head that it's not. Okay? Now, to that end, I really want to commend you. You said, let me go back to it. You said, I've tried to expose myself to more gay people. First of all, okay, I'll just stick with that. Because then you go on into how you're somehow afraid of being around homosexual men. Gay men. All right? Simply being around the gay community is a great exposure, okay? So not just being around them and, like, using them as props, but, like, getting to know people who are gay, asking them about their life, talking to them about stuff they're interested in, what's their job? What do they like about nature? I don't know. Questions, right? What research has shown is that stigma reduces when you approach the person or item or object or situation that is stigmatized, right? This fear or this worry or this judgment starts to reduce when you surround yourself by that person or people or places, et cetera, right? When we get to know people who are in the gay community, we start to learn that. But they're just people. They're just like everybody else. And all those questions or preconceived notions or anxieties can sometimes start to reduce when you do that. And that's a great way, great, simple way to do an exposure, right? They're not these wild out there exposures of having to write these deep and crazy scripts. You're not out there watching gay porn for hours, right? Which are some of the crazy exposures that we talked about and we've sometimes done. But it's a simple way to practice just showing yourself that this is safe and that you can do this. So, Phil, great work on that. Keep doing that. Keep. And to that end, you know, keep supporting the gay community. If that's something that. If that's something that is, you know, what am I even trying to say? If that's something that you're able to do in a reasonable way in your life without having to, you know, know, put on hold or stop your life or kind of go crazy with things, but get to know people in the gay community. It's a great way to work on this. All right, so here we Go. I'm going to get emails about that. I'm confident about that. But you know what? I'm not going to. I'm not going to go back on that. We're just going to let it go. Oh, yeah, here we go. So I also want to note that I've already kind of mentioned this. So we're trying to go with what we believe to be true about our life. Right. When we talk about, like, we've talked about acceptance and commitment therapy. Right. It's another one of those therapy approaches that really dovetails well with CBT and exposure and response prevention. It kind of goes like, there's acceptance, which is accepting just the reality of the thought, the reality of the life that we're in right now. I have thoughts about being gay. I have images in my mind. I've got this feeling in my body. Yes, you do. Now what? Instead of judging it or fighting it or suppressing it or rejecting it or arguing against it, we're going to say, yeah, that is there. Now what? Now what do you do with your life? That's the commitment piece. It's moving forward into the life that you want. You've said, I'm assuming within what you've said. You said you've been in a relationship with girls for nine of the 27 years. Okay, so ostensibly you're saying, I identify as a straight man. Okay, keep doing that if that's what you so choose to. Right. What sexual orientation tends to do is it causes that to be in question. Right? It says you think you're straight, you identify as straight, but what if you're not? And now it causes you to then go outside of what you believe to be true and engage with the fantasy of what maybe could be true, might be. And the more that we play with that imagination, the more anxiety can be produced and the more fear we have about it. Okay? So trust who it is that you are and act as if that's true. Right. While you pursue accepting the presence of the thoughts, resisting getting into rumination about it, resisting asking for reassurance about it. Accepting like, yeah, there are those thoughts that are in mind. Yeah, there is that feeling that you have. Yeah, there is that. That, that, like, association and connection that sometimes your brain makes between objects and people and statements. And we go, yep, they're there. Right? So let's. All right, so as. As we kind of go through this, there's a whole section that I. This section, my notes that I was reading, that I misread. So I read it again and realized that it was just. It's irrelevant. It was something to the effect of daily you have the thought I connect with being a homosexual, but instead it was daily I have thoughts that I connect with being a homosexual. Slightly different, but it's kind of like sometimes we're going to be living our life. And I've heard this with a lot of folks where there's this comparison distortion that exists, right? Where there might be these things that you notice about yourself that are common with someone that you know who is gay or something that is common within a stereotype of the gay community, and that there is this association then between. Between that and saying, well, I have this like. Or this appreciation or this affinity for something that is similar with them, therefore we must be the same. Therefore I must have all the characteristics of that other person, including the thing that I don't want, and especially the thing I don't want, which in this case would be that I'm gay, right? So it's as if to say, well, if you happen to, like, I don't know, Hamilton, well, that's musical theater. Don't you know, that's something that the gays like, don't you know, however offensive that is. I mean, it's similar to saying, like, you know, I drive a Subaru, but I'm hardly a lesbian. So these stereotypes don't work, and this association doesn't work. Now, these are broad and probably offensive stereotypes, but it's not going to stop anxiety from grabbing onto simple little things out there. And I want to bring that up for either you, Phil, or for another listener to take that into account. So the other thing about that is that, Phil, you have a very active imagination. I'm going through a lot of this in terms of trying to challenge the legitimacy of the connection, the legitimacy of the story that's going on in your brain. Now, this isn't exactly how we would go about it if you were in therapy or if you were here in my office, but it's, you know, one way to start thinking differently about the thoughts that you're having, right? So one thing that I want to point out is you have a very active imagination. Here's the cool thing about humans. We have this awesome ability to make connections and associations with almost anything, right? We see patterns in things. We see patterns in, you know, in shapes, in places and in people. And that's amazing. It's super cool. But the problem is, is that you also become uniquely. You can also become, in addition to that, uniquely primed to start noticing things, right? A simple example might be, we've talked about it on the podcast before, the Tetris effect, which is the, which is the process. Like if you play the game Tetris a lot, you start to see how objects fit together really well, or you start to see the broad shapes from Tetris in life and you can start to imagine that or have different dreams about that. I remember when I was playing chess a bunch as a kid, to no surprise, I was a big old dork when I was playing chess as a kid. I would start to see patterns of pieces moving or how things in real life that weren't chess that would, my brain would overlay onto it some chess move or pieces or something like that. It's what happens if you're looking into. Anyways, I don't need to keep going with those examples. What you're noticing though, is that, that you're, you're seeing these objects that have these maybe connections. You might be seeing rainbow flags and be uniquely primed to see them. Seeing phallic shaped objects. You kind of talked about like the, the vegetable sort of things. So you're seeing them and your brain is making this immediate connection to it and telling you this story about what that means. And this can happen for, you know, seeing people, you know, wearing leather clothes or, you know, whatever it might be that is going to grab onto you. Now, again, these can be very stereotyped things, but your brain will grab onto that, notice them, and that's going to be fodder to pull you back into this narrative, Right? To that end, noticing attractive men can be one pattern that people have. Now, again, this is going to be different for if I was talking to a woman who is worried that they might be gay, we'd be having a different conversation. You get the idea. All right. Point is, if you're going to notice attractive men, guess what, There are some attractive dudes out there. Boy, there really are. And just because you notice an attractive man doesn't mean anything. You notice that they are attractive. You will. It's kind of like, you know, I'll give this. Recently, you know, myself and a couple colleagues gave another presentation on Taboo Obsession. Like we're talking here. And we also acknowledge, like, we're going to notice family members who are attractive. We may have attractive family members. We do. And if your brain goes to a place that you don't want it to, okay, we acknowledge that it goes there. We roll our eyes at our brain and we decide how much attention, how much energy do I really want to Give this particular thought right now and I'm going to wager probably not a lot. So in that case, we acknowledge the thought and we gently shift back to our life to whatever degree we're doing, to whatever degree that we can. And that's a continual process of doing that. Right. Okay. So as we move on into treatment, so we'll talk about acceptance pieces and I also want to talk about kind of active exposures and more like maybe more passive exposures. So the first is acceptance, right? So you've got all these thoughts that are showing up throughout your day. So one of the most important things that you can do is accept the reality that those thoughts are indeed there. We don't need to accept the fact of them, but we need to accept the presence of those thoughts. Once we accept them without judgment, without rejection and without ownership of the story, we accept that it's just a thought, it's just a situation. And then you and I get to decide what we want to do about it. And what we can do about it can be nothing. You're not required to do anything about those thoughts unless you want to. You can take those thoughts that you acknowledge and you could make a full on story about them and have fun with it. You could take that thought, acknowledge it. You could say, well, maybe for another time, I've got work to get to, or I've got, you know, I'm Christmas shopping for the missus. I don't know, whatever you're doing, say that's what I'm doing right now. But yes, I have this thought in my mind similar to if you're going throughout your day and let's say you want to go to a concert at night and all of a sudden you got this thought about work. It's an intrusive thought about work. Right? And understandable because for someone who has a full time job, you're going to think about work a lot. You spend maybe 40, a little bit more, a little bit less hours per week at that job. You spend a lot of your time doing that job. So it would make sense that some of the worries and stressors and problems and stuff about that job is going to show up later. So when it does, we don't go, I got to leave this concert because I had this thought about work. I guess I better go fix it. No, what do we do? We acknowledge it. We go, ugh, work. Well, I'll get to that later. And we try to shift our attention. Some days it's stickier than others and we go, oh, I can't stop thinking about work. And we go, yeah, it's frustrating, but we still keep doing what we're doing as best we can. We stay at the party, we keep watching the movie, we stay on the date, we keep playing with our kids. We're doing what we do, and we keep bringing it back as best that we can. Right. So it's the same concept, it's the same general process that you already do. I'm willing to bet we're just reapplying that in this situation. Right. So now, in the process of acceptance as well, we're not trying to convince ourselves not to emotionally feel anxious. Right. The acceptance process is not to prove that you're not anxious or prove the thought or accept it to the point where it doesn't bother you. It may still bother you, and that's okay. We're allowed to have that anxious feeling, but we're not giving it credence, credit, conversation, energy. We're acknowledging it, and we're moving on as best we possibly can onto something else. So if the expectation is, if I accept this just the right way, then I'll feel better. That's a compulsion. So we have this acknowledgement, and we re engage with life as best we possibly can. Now, you can also practice some acceptance statements. I have an example here. And it may not be perfect, and there might be things that you could tweak about it because some stuff may be. Be compulsive for you, but that's the purpose of going through therapy and talking with your therapist about what's a compulsion for you, what's going to be problematic for you. Okay? So you could say something like this, as you kind of live your day and you pull stuff out of this that may be helpful, that may help you have space for the presence of these thoughts. So I wrote down this as an idea. It says, right now I have a fixation on my sexuality, men, sexually charged content in the gay community at large. I'm afraid that it says something about me, but the fear is the product of my ocd. The feeling of anxiety does not make something true or false. I do not believe that it is or I do not believe this to be true about me. And I have to accept that right now, for whatever reason this thought is in my head, I will accept, without judgment or conclusion, the presence of the content of the thought, but I do not have to accept the truth of the thought. I will continue to live my life as desired, knowing that the thoughts will come and go and that I am Free to pursue my expressed desires, attractions, and goals despite the thoughts and anxiety. So to whatever degree that sort of mindset can help to help kind of give permission to have those thoughts. Because if you can be in this place where you can say, I'm allowed to have anything pop into my head, anything good, good, bad, or otherwise, and that it doesn't have to reflect, doesn't have to mean anything about you, but that you get to decide if that's something that does reflect you or not, then we're free to have a thought and to move on however you want to. So that's what's really important about acceptance and what's freeing about acceptance, too. Because if you can accept the reality that we're allowed to have thoughts, whatever we want them to be, but they don't have to be dangerous or they don't have to be. They don't have to reflect this trueness of us, then who cares, right? Then there's no reason to beat ourselves up or to judge it or to fight it or to shut it down. Because if it's neutral, it's neutral. It's not bad. It's also not good. It's neutral. Okay, so some more passive things that you can practice. We've talked about the maybe I will, maybe I won't phrase right? Maybe I will want to do that. Maybe I do want to come out tonight, maybe I don't. But I'm not going to give it any thought or attention or energy. Maybe I do. It says, oh, well, you're making those vegetables. Maybe you want those in certain places. Maybe I do, but maybe I don't. But it doesn't matter. I'm going to keep making these vegetables as I want to, as they're vegetables. Maybe I will, maybe I won't. So you can practice that now. You can also lean into that a little bit further if you want to, and you can kind of play with it. You can say yes to that and make up a fun story about it. Yes, I do. And we've talked about the yes and concept that's often found in improvisational theater, Right? We say yes to it and then we build on it. Yes, I do. Yes, I am going to come out tonight and it's going to be fantastic. It might be fabulous, even. It's going to be awesome. There's going to be glitter and there's going to be fireworks, and all my friends are going to be there. And it's going to be this just huge connection with everybody that I. Everybody around me. And it's going to be wonderful. You could say that. And it tends to defuse the situation because now you're not fighting against it. You're having fun with it, even you're playing with it. And it can be anything, as silly as you want, as big as you want. Have fun, go nuts with it. Right? So now those are two kind of things, right? Maybe I will, maybe I won't. That's kind of a neutral stance. I'm not going to engage with it. Right? The yes. And is kind of in that moment when the anxiety naturally arises. Well, we're going to say, fine, sure. This is true, right? I talked about this in terms of, like, if my kid comes up to me, this is my Cookie Monster example. My kid comes up to me and says, dad, you're Cookie Monster. I'm not gonna go like, no, I'm dad, you're grounded. Right? I'm gonna go like, yep, I am Cookie Monster. Right? That's how we would play with kids, right? So. And I wouldn't take what my kid says seriously. In that sense. He's not coming up to me, like, definitively saying, father Kevin Foss, you are the Cookie Monster. You are no longer who you thought you were. You are now Cookie Monster. I don't go, oh, my gosh, maybe I am. This is a big existential crisis. I need to call my parents. Have they been lying to me the whole time? I am indeed Cookie Monster. The Jim Henson Company is going to have some questions about me, right? I'm not going to do that. I'm going to say, yep, I am Cookie Monster and be a ridiculous human as I sometimes am. All right, so lastly, so you know the active exposures you can do. So I've already addressed it. I'm really excited for you to try to get to know more people in the gay community. Right? So. So keep doing that. You can also lean into it by writing scripts. Now, the scripts that you can write, the purpose of them, again, is to write this story that sounds really scary, that amps up the anxiety, and you do them not when you're already anxious. You do them when you're calm. So you step into the anxiety, right? That's when you're choosing to say, I'm going to do and think this thing that feels really scary in order to practice not doing compulsions. So the idea is to write this story that would include elements that make you feel anxious, components that amp it up, and then you're going to do nothing about it other than to say, yep, I have that Feeling, it feels bad. But I know this feeling will pass. And I can be okay with this feeling too. So the stories can be whatever you want them to be. Now, oftentimes you'll hear us talk about scripting by saying we're going to write the worst case scenario. It's going to be awful. Awful, right? It's going to be, you know, you're going to. You are indeed. You realize that you're gay. You come out, everybody in your life rejects you and you get kicked out of your house and you get kicked out of your job and you have to move to San Francisco and you have to be and do and all sorts of stuff that you just hate and you live the rest of your life as this gay man. Oh my gosh, how terrible, right? We talk about that. You can also simply write a script that you say, you come out and everything's great, right? Your family accepts you, Nothing happens at your job. You now get a parade for yourself, you get a whole festival, you get a whole month for you. Great. Right? Now you get rainbows. Rainbows are great. Who doesn't love that? Then you find someone, you fall in love, you create this whole life for yourself. It could be that story too. Now that story in and of itself might be more anxiety provoking for you because sometimes we expect there to be this rejection because internally you might be worried, rejecting this thought too. But what if it actually worked? What if it was good? Ah, now again, this is going to be different for different people. So this is the creative component of it. So you can do whatever you want, but I'm just throwing out some ideas. Feel free to give a try. So I hope today hasn't been too offensive of a 2 stereotype. But you know what? OC didn't care. And sometimes we have suggestions or thoughts or need to go into this to disprove the thought, right? We're going in and we're trying to disconfigure, confirm the fear. We're doing the thing, engaging with the thought, doing the action that triggers the worry. Because think about this. There's one way to think about this is putting it to the test, right? So whatever your compulsion is, is the safety mechanism. It's to prove that you're not. It's to make you into, it's put you in a safe place. If we were to disconfirm that association, right? That this thought is dangerous and if you don't do anything about this thought, the danger will occur, right? So we're pulling out the safety behaviors, the compulsions and then we're letting the story play out. So ostensibly then, if you don't do something about the obsessions, you're going to turn gay. You're going to discover that you are. You're going to learn this new thing about yourself. Well, let's do it. Let's give it a try. We're going to pull back on those compulsions and we're going to see, we're going to wait, we're going to see how long it takes, right? Is it just one kind of gay thought without a compulsion? And then like tomorrow morning you realize you wake up and you're like, I'm super gay. Or is it five years from now? Well, then I guess you can have a lot of thoughts. But five years from now, I guess we're going to have to wait. And the exposure then is to the feeling of uncertainty about that future, about when it's going to happen. But we don't know when it's going to happen. And we're sitting with making space for that uncomfortable, uncertain, unsettled what if feeling. And that's what we're trying to do, but in that we're trying to prove that you can handle that feeling. You can have your life and date and marry and do whatever you want and have that uncertainty. And we're going to see what happens. We're going to see how things shake out, but we're going to prove that you can handle that and that that feeling is survivable and that the worst case scenario is really unlikely to happen. It really is. So, Phil, I hope this was helpful to anybody else out there listening. I hope this has been helpful for you. So until next time, everybody, take a risk, challenge yourself, and don't take your brain too seriously. Bye. Thank you for listening to the Fearcast. If you would like your question answered on a future episode, please click on the Submit a Question link at Fearcast. If you would like your question answered sooner, please send me a recording of your question to questionsearchercastpodcast.com or by sending me an audio message through Instagram, by dming me @fearcastpodcast on Instagram. If you like the Fearcast, please write a review on your podcast platform of choice. Please remember that the Fearcast is not substitute for psychotherapy. If you need a little bit help in your recovery, please go over to fearcastpodcast.com and click on the Find Help link and there's going to be some information for you there. So until next time, take a risk, challenge yourself, and don't take your brain too seriously. Bye.