Rethinking Being Sick

A few days ago, I realized that while I'm moving at a decent clip down my OCD hierarchy, there's one thing I haven't worked on changing yet: the underlying feeling that being sick with a cold or flu would be REALLY bad, and would cause something terrible to happen to me or, more likely, someone else.

So while I'm doing a lot of exposures, and sort of resigning myself to getting sick (although I haven't yet, interestingly enough), I still feel like when I do finally get sick, it'll be awful and lead to a catastrophe of some kind. Which frankly, makes it all the weirder that I'm doing some of these exposures. But it's also keeping me from doing some of the harder ones.

I guess I need to work on a parallel track of non-exposure CBT, retraining my brain to acknowledge that people get sick without it leading to a doomsday scenario. It's a tricky balance, because the goal is NOT to reassure myself that "it will be okay, nothing bad will happen," but instead to take a more realistic view of the risk, all the while knowing that nothing much is certain in this world.

My plate is full!