The Patterns blog
Notes from inside the loop.
Plain-language guides to how OCD works and how ERP treats it, alongside personal essays from the person building Patterns. Nothing here is medical advice - it is what the evidence says, and what it is like to live it.
Latest articles
Explore the full libraryJust Right OCD: Perfectionism, Repeating, and Incompleteness
Nothing specific has to be wrong. The unfinished feeling itself can be enough to make you repeat, arrange, rewrite, or restart until the moment finally clicks.
Read postResponsibility OCD: Feeling Responsible for Preventing Harm
If harm is remotely possible, OCD can make preventing it feel like your job. The result is not greater safety but an expanding system of checking, reassurance, and guilt.
Read postAn OCD App Can Become a Compulsion - Here Is How That Changed Patterns
A mental health app can have good intentions and still reward the exact loop it means to loosen. This is how that risk changed the way I build Patterns.
Read postHealth OCD vs Health Anxiety: What Is the Difference?
Health OCD and health anxiety can look identical from the outside. The useful distinction is the response pattern: a ritual that tries to settle an intrusive doubt, versus a more persistent conviction that you are already ill.
Read postSensorimotor OCD: When You Cannot Stop Noticing Your Body
Sensorimotor OCD is not usually a fear that the body is diseased. It is a fear that you will spend the rest of your life supervising a process that used to run itself.
Read postExistential OCD: When Life's Biggest Questions Become a Loop
Existential OCD is not a deeper interest in meaning. It is the OCD cycle attached to questions that cannot be answered, with rumination doing the job of a ritual.
Read postOCD Guilt and Shame: Why a Feeling Is Not Evidence
Guilt in OCD can arrive with the force of a verdict. The intensity is real. What it is not is proof that the feared meaning is true.
Read postWhat Happens During an OCD Assessment?
An OCD assessment is not an exam you pass by describing the thought correctly. It is a conversation about the pattern: what shows up, what you do next, and what it costs.
Read postOCD Avoidance: When Staying Away Becomes a Compulsion
Avoidance rarely looks like a compulsion. There is no counting, no washing, no visible ritual - just a situation you quietly stop entering. It can still do the same job a ritual does.
Read postDo I Have OCD or Just Intrusive Thoughts? Understanding the Difference
An unwanted thought by itself does not tell you whether you have OCD. The more useful question is what happens next: distress, rituals, temporary relief, and the same doubt returning.
Read postThe Recovery That Happens Between Therapy Sessions
My psychologist gave me the concepts and the homework. The difficult part was the Tuesday afternoon two days later, alone with an urge to check. Patterns came out of those hours, not out of a product plan.
Read postChecking OCD: Why One More Check Never Feels Like Enough
There is a specific and well-replicated finding here that is worth knowing: checking makes your memory feel less reliable, not more. That is why the tenth check is worse than the first.
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