"Decline the Invitation": A Metaphor for Response Prevention in OCD

Living with OCD often feels like being bombarded with urgent demands. But I have noticed that people find new ways of responding to their OCD when they view these demands as invitations, over which they have agency. These invitations come in many forms, such as, an intrusive thought, a spike of anxiety, a sudden compulsion to check, confess, analyze, or seek reassurance.

And for those with OCD, these invitations don’t feel optional. They feel like emergencies.

But here’s the truth: you are physically capable of and allowed to decline the invitation.

What Are You Being Invited To?

When OCD throws out an intrusive thought—What if I made a mistake? What if I harmed someone? What if I’m a bad person?—it’s not just offering a thought. It’s offering a whole story, and it’s inviting you to participate.

That invitation might include:

• Mentally reviewing every detail of an interaction

• Googling symptoms or moral definitions

• Asking a loved one for reassurance

• Avoiding something that feels risky

• Trying to “neutralize” the thought with a mental ritual

Each of these is a compulsion—a behavior (mental or physical) meant to reduce anxiety. And doing the compulsion is a way of saying: Yes, I accept the invitation. I’ll come along for the ride.

But what if, instead, you said: No, thank you. I’m not going to this one.

Response Prevention Is Declining the Invitation

In Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), we gradually teach the brain that it doesn’t have to RSVP “yes” to every anxiety spike. Exposure invites the obsession on purpose, and response prevention is the part where you decline the invitation to respond.

It might sound simple, but it’s deeply counterintuitive. Everything in your body says: Fix this. Solve it. Make the bad feeling go away. And yet, the work of healing is to feel the feeling and choose not to respond.

Imagine it like this:
Anxiety rings the doorbell. It pounds on the door. It keeps ringing and ringing and pounding and pounding until it has your heart beating fast and your natural conclusion is - there is an emergency on the other side of this door. Your head starts to hurt and your heart races, and you wonder, “If I don’t get the door, are they ever going to stop?” The risk of declining this invitation is clear. But what gets forgotten is, you don’t physically have to walk to the door and open it. This is your house. You don’t have to respond to whatever is on the other side. You can wait it out, go to the back of the house, and do something important to you.

I use this metaphor because I know it isn’t easy to ignore a threat or direct your attention to something else while an unknown demand sits waiting loudly for you. It can feel like a game of chicken with a mystery assailant.

Why the Invitation Feels So Convincing

In addition to the natural inclination to respond to our nervous system’s signals of threat, we tend to respond to the threat of deeply held values—safety, morality, identity, responsibility, love. That’s why obsessions don’t feel optional or like they’re “just thoughts”—they feel like an attack to your integrity.

One way to gain agency with invitations is to separate our values, and our enduring patterns of following them for the most part, from the story and threat that we might possibly abandon them. Without perspective on what is relevant and likely, we end up vulnerable to scary possibilities. It helps if we can externalize the voice of OCD. Think of OCD as a pushy salesperson or a fear-based campaigner. It knows exactly how to weave a compelling story, illustrate “pain points” and craft a solution—but it doesn’t actually know what’s true. It only knows what gets you to respond. We implement boundaries with people like this (albeit, not always easily or consistently if we are people pleasers!) - we can do it with OCD as well.

When you decline the invitation, you’re not saying “this doesn’t matter.” You’re saying, “I choose to stay in the present. I choose to live according to my values, not my fear.”

What Declining Might Look Like

• When the thought comes: Did I just offend that person?
  You decline the invitation to review the conversation again.

• When the anxiety says: What if that wasn’t a curb I hit, but a person?
  You decline the urge to check, and stay with the discomfort.

• When the urge arises: I need to confess something, just in case,
  You gently say to yourself: This is OCD. I’m choosing to decline.

You Can Change your rSVP

Like all strategies, this one isn’t easy at first, nor can we expect to perfectly implement it. Sometimes you’ll catch the invitation too late and realize you’ve already RSVP’d “yes.” That’s okay. You can notice where you are in the cycle and still choose a different path next time, or you can notice you are somewhere you don’t want to be, and go home.

You’re not failing if you feel anxious, or if the invitation still feels compelling. Healing doesn’t mean the invitations stop coming. It means they lose their power to drag you away from your life.

Final Thoughts

When we decline OCD’s invitations, we reclaim our attention, our energy, and our agency. It’s not easy work. But over time, the nervous system learns: I can survive the discomfort. I can let this go unanswered. I can stay here.

The next time OCD tries to send you an urgent RSVP, consider a new response:
Thanks for the invite. I’m not coming.