Has anyone come to a point where ERP has been more harmful than helpful? I’ve been doing ERP with a therapist, but I have found that doing the exposures every day has kept my mind so focused on the fears that it feels like it is keeping me stuck. I decided to pause doing exposures for now, and it has been such a huge relief. I feel like I can actually set aside some of my fears and just live my life now, whereas before it felt like the exposures were keeping me from thinking of anything BUT the fears and intrusive thoughts. For example, many of my recent OCD themes have been centered on my relationship with my fiancé, fears about divorce, etc. So I was doing exposures around that, but the exposures just kept intensifying my fears and kept me from being excited about my upcoming wedding! Like, I’m trying to imagine any situation in which reading an article about the top 10 reasons people get divorced (one of my exposures) at least 5 times per day as someone is preparing for marriage could be helpful. It just made me even more scared and overwhelmed 😢 I’m wondering if any of you have had similar experiences

Is it possible for ERP to be too much for people? I am suffering with postpartum ocd among some harm and religious stuff... mostly always geared towards my son. I’m just wondering if there have been other modes of therapy that have been have been found effective and less anxiety inducing inducing. I’m doing ERP, but it’s very hard to just sit with my anxiety when I’m trying to take care of a baby. Thanks for any tips!

Just kind of an ERP vent. Anyone wanna talk about this experience? It’s bumming me out. So I’ve been doing ERP exercises daily to help myself get over this theme. I started out with ERP towards the gender I have had intrusive thoughts about (men), and it helped knock out a lot of the intrusive stuff and false attractions, but working on my ERP towards women has been rather difficult. I’m still getting mental blocks. I’m trying to expose myself to them and get over false anxiety and other negative false emotions. It’s worked, but it feels like I’m stuck right now. Anyone else getting frustrated? I know ERP is a process, but it feels like it’s taking absolutely forever. Anyone wanna talk / vent about ERP frustrations?

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?