I was doing exposure therapy on myself without realizing

My first ever inklings of mental illness in me was when I was a kid. I had really bad anxiety which manifested itself in an OCD way. Back then I obviously hadn’t gotten diagnosed, I didn’t even know it was a thing but looking back now it’s pretty obvious. I used to look up ways to deal with really bad generalized anxiety which is what I thought it was at the time. One of the best pieces of advice I ever read was actually confronting these fears and expose yourself to them so you yourself can realize it’s not true or it’s not logical. I’d make a list of logical fears and illogical fears and it got me to realize that my OCD was just my anxiety playing really harsh tricks on me. I’ve had a lot of phases. The harming others phase, the homosexual phase, the existential phase, etc. All of them were pretty tough on me, it caused pretty bad depression and I was actually later diagnosed with persistent depressive mood disorder during it. But this advice helped me through it everytime. So if anyone needs advice, this one really helped me.