ERP??

Cant agreeing with your intrusive thoughts make them worse? Or make you believe it?? Like if my ROCD questions whether I love my bf, and I answer with “well maybe I don’t”, won’t I start believing it??? Or if I have negative self talk like “you’re so lazy”, and I agree, isn’t that harming my mental health? How can agreeing with intrusive thoughts actually be better? Or am I doing something wrong? Cause now I’m panicking that I’m doing it all wrong and getting worse.

JB1020

Date posted: 2y

Take a step back, take a few deep breaths. You're going to get through this! With ERP we don't "agree" with the thoughts. What we do is we learn to tolerate & dismiss them, let them pass us by without stoking anxiety. For that to happen, we need to become comfortable with uncertainty. Intrusive thoughts that really freak us out make us crave certainty - "proof" that those thoughts aren't really us, or that we don't believe them or would never act on them. But it's *impossible* to have 100% proof for such an intangible concept for the rest of our lives. So they continue to torment us. An analogy: I think of the intrusive thoughts as like a maze. It feels like we have to go through that maze to get to our more "normal"/stable mental states. My thought tells me I want to harm people and that freaks me out so I go off on this never-ending maze looking for definitive proof. It's a fool's errand. Instead, ERP teaches us to skip the maze by getting to the point where the thoughts don't bother us. I don't "agree" with them and say yes I want to murder people. I say things like "thoughts are just thoughts", "maybe, maybe not", "seems awfully unlikely", "actions are more important than thoughts", "I can tolerate intrusive thoughts", "well I haven't hurt anyone yet, and I don't have time for this". We aren't agreeing with the thoughts, we are agreeing that uncertainty exists. Rather than leading us to believe the thoughts, this method allows us to dismiss them b/c they bother us much less - we skip the maze!

User type: Therapist

Date posted: 2y

You said this so well! Have you ever considered writing an article about it, or participating in peer support? Or even becoming an OCD therapist?

Anonymous

User type: Staff

Date posted: 2y

I know that it may sound counterintuitive, but when you allow the thoughts, feelings, etc. to be present and don't engage with them (interact/try to solve) you are teaching your brain that these are just thoughts, feelings, etc. and that they don't have to "mean" anything. I really like this article about this:https://www.sheppardpratt.org/news-views/story/how-to-respond-to-unwanted-obsessive-thoughts/ I personally prefer the idea of agreeing with the "uncertain potential". This basically means that for anything that certainty is a myth, it is reasonable to say that if we can think it, imagine it, and picture it, the likelihood of it also being true about reality is something greater than 0%. It may not be much greater (for example, a herd of wild buffalo could come traipsing through my home at any given moment but probably won’t), but it is nonetheless something other than an impossibility. In other words, the possibility doesn't equal probability. Now it is also important that "doing ERP correctly or responding correctly" doesn't become a compulsion. The anxiety and distress should get worse before it gets better when you are doing ERP- but remember we are working towards long-term relief and management of OCD versus the short-term relief we feel when we complete a compulsion.

TrustGod24

Date posted: 18w

ERP

I’m thinking about doing erp but my ocd is so severe the thought of accepting my fears happening to me makes me sick to my stomach. I also believe in the power of my words and saying I accept this Bad thing will attract it into my life. I’m not sure what I should do🥲

hbocd

Date posted: 17w

ERP Therapy

I read about ERP and have seen information about it on here. One of the goals is to say, "maybe I am this or that...ect." That terrified me. The thoughts and images that go in my head are disturbing and upsetting. I don't want to even think about saying, "maybe this or that." It's devasting to have these thoughts and question why you're having these thoughts. Doesn't the "maybe" make it worse? The one thing that helps me is that is to remind myself that these are just thoughts and I know I'm not a monster, even if I feel like one. Is ERP not for everyone? Has anyone else had a problem with the techniques used in this kind of therapy? I had cognitive therapy for years with an OCD specialist and that seemed to help a lot. Writing out the worst case scenarios would make me suicidal. Im having a difficult time not obsessing over the "maybe" after intrusive thoughts now. It doesn't make it better.

starr_panic

Date posted: 10w

how can I heal from my rocd ?

[ vent ] At times, I'll be doing fine, and I won't be thinking about anything, and then boom. I have thoughts like, you don't love your partner, you only say I love you to convince yourself you love him, you don't actually like him. It makes me really upset because I genuinely do like my partner, I genuinely do want to be with my partner, I wouldn't do anything to hurt him, and I love him so much. But I always tend to talk to AI, and AI is always telling me my symptoms are just ROCD. And I just want to get rid of it because I didn't have these problems before, and now I do, and I just want them to go away. Yesterday, I was literally crying because of how bad I felt. My partner does me amazing, he treats me amazing, but my thoughts always lead me to wonder, what if this isn't ROCD and I just genuinely don't like my partner? Even though, as much as I want to, what if I don't, but I really do, and I want to be with him, and I do love him. Recently, I've talked to him about these feelings, and he told me that he's felt like this before as well, but the way he comes with it, he doesn't think about it as much. But me, it goes in my head over and over and over and over and over and over, it's like a loop or a cycle that never ends. And I always look up, how can I heal from ROCD, and it just says to settle with the thoughts, don't look for reassurance, and it's hard not to do that because like, what else am I supposed to do? It's hard for me not to do that because it's so heavy, and to me, for my ROCD, it never shows up as what if questions, it always shows up as statements like, you don't, you don't love him, you don't want to be with him, you're only saying that you love him to convince yourself you do, stuff like that. It's hard

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