u/undiagnoseddude

So I have a feeling this could be contrroversial especially depending on how I say it. This is not to say to push people's boundaries when they have communicated it clearly and before people jump in with extreme examples, I'm not disagreeing that we should respect when people say no and take their no as an answer, this is not an excuse for entitlement.

I'm tired of the narrative that basic enthusiasm or expectations automatically equal "pressuring" someone or you have to be overly accommodating for it. Hear me out, to be very clear in most cases pressure and expectations are only a problem if your boundaries are weak, and I'm not talking about more extreme cases where people are being coerced and there's deep psychological stuff at play and people are guilt tripping you, although you can argue that even if people are guilt tripping you can still have strong boundaries, that doesn't frustrate me as much though and it's a lot more understandable.

The problem that I've seen time and time again is a lack of boundaries and lack of communications skills framed as "you're pressuring me." I've even seen dynamics where enthusiasm or excitement for something is taken as pressure and it's basically implied that you need to lower it, you need to be less expressive of your desires of your passion towards something, instead of people taking accountability for their lack of boundaries and being like "hey I get it you really want to do this X thing but it's not happening." And it doesn't have to be sexual it can be anything honestly. People often mistake the internal guilt of saying 'no' with external force from the person asking.

In these contexts that I've described, there's a level of victim mentality and deflection which I'm tired of, and if you've been around people pleasers you know exactly what I mean, it's very frustrating to be around people who you have no intention of pressuring, you're not attempting to get them to do anything and being told you're doing that because they percieve any repetition as pressure when there was no clear communication involved from their side. I think we often times fall into enabling such dynamics, such behaviors, because we take on the responsibility of guessing, making sure people are comfortable and what happens then? they don't learn anything, they don't learn to set boundaries because we keep them comfortable because we take on more of the responsibility.

Okay! I think I did it right, I've had this maladaptive habit for the longest time that seems to have become a compulsion, I cannot afford professional helpp at this time so I tried to look for practical steps for ERP found an article by the IODF and followed the steps.

I faced the trigger that was relatively mild, felt the anxiety come up it was definitely intense at first and honestly majority of the times I didn't even notice it until I decided to do ERP myself, I could also feel the urge, the compulsion was starting to kick in, but I reminded myself by asking myyself "do I have to take action? No, I don't, I don't have to act at all, I'll continue to do not respond to it until it's the right time."
I waited until the anxiety was noticeably lower, it wasn't absent but very much lower than initially and I wasn't even thinking about acting on it, and was instead noticing other things, like the shape of something or the color of it, so at that point I decided that it was good enough. I hadn't felt so much joy in awhile, I've been really struggling with this compulsion and this really felt like a step closer to breaaking the chains of the compulsion.

I feel like it's a W, but I also want feedback from other's who've done ERP and had success with it, did I do it right? bcz I need to know if i'm on the right path or need to correct anything to set myself up for success.

This is mostly hypothetical but i was wondering if anyone had tried IFS therapy for OCD, and wondering if they'd seen improvements from it?