Christians and ERP question: My OCD revolves around religion (Christian) and harm, often tying them together with arbitrary scriptures from the Old Testament. My compulsions are usually answering the questionable passages with things that help me resolve the uncertainty of the passage and how it relates to me. My therapist wants me to do exposures of reading these scriptures without finding the answers through research or even my own logic. Just let the question be there. This is so very hard because it threatens to pull my faith out from underneath me if I don’t answer it. Some of the questions are so anxiety-provoking because they are Old Testament laws of wrath and punishment. I know all the Christian answers to these, and I could easily answer it. Sometimes this will bring relief, other times it won’t. So, my challenge is simply not answering it, which then leaves me in a state of deep confusion. Anyways, since these are questions many people have and struggle with that don’t have OCD, I wonder how this can be OCD?? I’ve had OCD in other themes (HoCD, harm ocd), but this just seems so different because they are valid and legit questions and I just want to resolve them! Anybody have any insight into this?

I am having a really hard time figuring out how to address my obsessions and compulsions using ERP. It's actually turned into a main OCD theme of mine and it's terrifying. No reassurance please. I've never had an OCD theme so severe and last so long. This "theme" has been going on for 5 years now & has been the hardest to manage out of any OCD themes in the past and I've had many: Harm, Sexual, Just Right, Symmetry, False Memories, Scrupulosity, etc. I just wanted to put this out there because it's hard to function with these distressing, intrusive thoughts around therapy and how to do it racing inside me.

Please comment from or advise me from personal experience if you’re currently seeing a therapist and undergoing ERP to treat existential thought OCD. I don’t understand how ERP could work on thoughts like ‘what if my own family or kids aren’t real’ I know with contamination ocd they expose you to your fears by making touch objects or things and with harm ocd they might get you to hold a knife but low does the same principle apply to Existential thought OCD? I’ve been on the ocdf website and couldn’t get any answers …. Please comment

I got diagnosed in October (even tho I’ve had very obvious symptoms since I was a young kid in hindsight) and started ERP soon after. At first, ERP seemed to make sense to me. The whole idea of exposing yourself to your triggers and overtime learning that there’s no real threat there, and learning to tolerate anxiety. But during this holiday season my harm theme has come up a bit again, due to being home with my family and their playing violent shows on TV. And it occurred to me that there seems to be no winning with ERP. I would sit there watching the violent shows with my family, and try my hardest to resist any mental compulsions, but then just be left feeling horrible and anxious all day. And I realized that I actually DON’T WANT to be desensitized to violence. I don’t want to get to a point where violent thoughts don’t make me anxious, because I think that would make me a less empathetic and less pure-hearted person. To get even more specific, if I have an intrusive thought that says “what if I kill my family like I just saw in that tv show?” the ERP response would be “maybe I will kill my family, maybe I won’t”. BUT THAT’S AWFUL. That just sounds stupid to me. How is anyone supposed to say such a thing or “accept uncertainty” about that?? I would rather keep doing my mental compulsion of blocking out the thought than even entertaining the “uncertainty” that I could hurt my family. So it’s like, if I let the violent thoughts be there, my options are 1: feel horrible all the time (which I think is an appropriate response to having horrible thoughts, but it’s still not a fun way to live), or 2: if I try to push them out, that’s supposedly a compulsion which is supposedly making the OCD worse, so there no winning in either scenario for me. Can anyone relate? What am I missing here? There’s gotta be a better solution or something I’m not understanding about ERP, right?