Exposure and ritual prevention is hard work. It means exposing yourself to what you greatly fear, then resisting the usual ritual or response. In my case, checking was my worst ritual. If I didn't check certain things before leaving the house, something bad might happen. Someone could break in and steal everything if the door wasn't locked. The house could burn down if the stove was left on. The coffee pot could blow up if it was left on.
I didn't fear the harm and hardship it would bring to me, but the harm it could bring to my family. I even obsessed that if the car was left unlocked a child could open the car and take one of my pills I kept in the glove box, even though it was in a child-proof container. Or a child could start the car and be injured. If I didn't put the brake on in the driveway, which was on a slight incline, it could spontaneously roll down and hit a child innocently walking by.
Full exposure to these fears would mean leaving the house without doing my usual checking. I didn't have formal cognitive behavior therapy. I applied the principles I learned about in books. Leave the house without checking? No way! That seemed much too difficult. Even visual checking, without touching the knobs of the stove was out of the question. But I felt I could handle a gradual approach.
I checked the stove, coffee pot, etc. once, in a "normal" sort of way (looking at the stove knobs and not touching, for example) then left the house for a few minutes. Then I would check and leave for longer periods of time. Then I left the house for a few minutes without checking and increased the time period as before. For me, if I was leaving for a short while, the obsessions and the compulsions to check were weaker, so this helped.
Another thing I did at first was this - I did my checking in a different order. Instead of checking the toilets, lights, computer, back door, appliances, stove, etc. in my usual order, back of the house to front, I changed the order and checked things in a random order. The checking didn't feel right so it was an exposure, but a weaker one and more tolerable.
But I didn't stop, I continued to make the exposure stronger and stronger until I was only checking things once. Now I check the coffee pot and stove, make sure the lights and computers are off, then leave the house. For me, checking compulsions are kind of difficult to stop because checking needs to be done in normal life. Like eating - we need to do it, but not excessively.
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