- Date posted
- 2y
erp by yourself
has anybody been working on doing ERP therapy alone without a therapist? has it worked for you? i’m attempting to do it alone but it is soooo hard. any tips would be wonderful as well :)
has anybody been working on doing ERP therapy alone without a therapist? has it worked for you? i’m attempting to do it alone but it is soooo hard. any tips would be wonderful as well :)
Yeah I have to do it alone in between sessions, it’s gets easier.
For the past year since I’ve learned about ERP I’ve been doing it on my own. Too scared to ask to see a therapist or get a diagnosis just yet. Some tips I can absolutely give are to keep going! There are some self help OCD books you can buy. I don’t have any but there are some :) just push yourself and remember after the bad there is always good. ERP doesn’t immediately make it better, it takes time and a want to keep going. Do not fall into the trap of “oh god I’m not worried about this!” That’s OCD about OCD. Keep ERP’ing it and don’t avoid things out of fears. I believe in you
I do one session every morning. Part of my routine. Def gets easier. :)
Yes, I have had therapy, but I still work on ERP everyday. LOL, it is really just my life. There are things that trigger me (the exposure) and then I practice the response prevention. I don't ruminate, check, reassurance seek etc. I allow time to pass, I am willing to be uncertain. So, at this point, it is not a specific time set aside for an ERP exercise, but, for example, I know later today I have to pick up a prescription from the pharmacy. There was a time where I would ruminate about this, and then after I picked it up there would be a lot of checking compulsions. So right now, I'm not ruminating, I'm doing things I value, I hopped on here to see if I could contribute anything, I am heading to the gym, etc. I allow and am willing to have uncertainty. A really great book that helped me was "Needing to Know for Sure" by Seif and Winston https://a.co/d/8Hi7oHs Hope this helps! Take care, and it's great that you are working on ERP!
Ye, I don’t have a therapist, or even a proper diagnoses yet, and so I’ve been trying to do ERP on my own but it’s so so hard
@Catinabox i believe in you, we can do this together. you have the potential to be so great and although i don’t know you, i know you are a kind and loving person who has good intentions. you are not your thoughts and i believe in you.
@formyfuture Thanks, that means a lot
At first I started doing it by myself, which did help and kept me afloat for a while. Now that I’ve been doing it with a therapist, I’ve made progress a lot faster - but mostly bc I had a specific structure to follow. Outside of my sessions I did ERP 5+ times a day for about 4 weeks which reduced my symptoms significantly. Then I decreased it to 1-3 times per day. Don’t go as hard as I did bc it can get extremely overwhelming, but the most important thing is to stay consistent. So doing it just once a day for 10 minutes can make all the difference. Don’t be discouraged if you have some setbacks along the way, it’s totally normal and you’ll gain more confidence in your abilities to get through it. Also check out the Mindfulness Workbook for OCD by Jon Hershfield, it gave me a new perspective and hopefully you’ll find it insightful too! You got this, keep going!
I had just posted a summary of ERP for a group member, and I thought it might be useful for everybody. Here it is below (with a little extra added)…. ERP therapy is researched-based. Most other therapies don’t work. There have been people who have been literally stuck in their houses (from their OCD) who gained their lives back through ERP therapy. NOCD does ERP therapy exclusively. You can find it in other places too, but you have to ask around. There are two tenants of ERP therapy: The first one has to do with the repetitive thoughts inside our heads. These thoughts are actually defined as “obsessions”. You are not supposed to do anything with the obsessions. You are supposed to let them run through your head freely, without trying to fix them or stop them. Imagine a tree planted by a river. The leaves fall off and float down the river. You can see the leaves falling, but you don’t try to stop them or pick them up. You don’t try to fix them. You just let them float away. This is really important to do with your obsessive thoughts. The more you try to fight them off, the worse they get. I used to have blasphemous sentences running in my head 24/7. I felt like I had to put a “not” next to each sentence in order to “fix” it. But this just took hours of my time every day, and it was very scary, because I was worried that if I messed up, that I would go to hell. It was very freeing to learn later that I could just let those sentences run freely through my head without trying to fix them. The second part of ERP therapy is all about “denying your compulsions.” Every time OCD tells you that if you don’t do things a certain way that something really bad will happen, that is a compulsion. Once you recognize what your compulsions are, ERP therapy will have you practice stopping doing all of those things. For some people, that will mean stopping washing their hands or touching lights switches or, in my case, putting “fixing” words in their head. Compulsions are safety behaviors. During ERP therapy, you will practice stopping engaging with safety behaviors. All this is very hard to do and scary, so during therapy you will be given tools to help you deal with the fear. Often ERP therapy will take people from being non-functional to functional. I highly recommend it. ————————————————- PITFALL #1: After you have been doing ERP for a while and become somewhat successful, the OCD will try subtle little tricks to bring you down again. The first one is to tell you that your thoughts are REAL and not OCD, and therefore you can’t apply ERP therapy. Don’t fall for this trick! All thoughts are just thoughts. They are all meaningless. Don’t try to figure out what is real and what is OCD. Just treat all thoughts with ERP therapy. PITFALL #2: The second pitfall is that OCD will tell you that you can’t move forward unless you have absolute certainty that you will be safe. Hate to tell you this, folks, but there is no certainty in life. You will never know for SURE that you or your loved ones will be “safe” from the OCD rules. Therefore, you have to move forward in the uncertainty. It’s hard, but it gets easier with time and practice. We got this, guys !!!!!!
Does anyone have any tips that helped them? Mine is due to a specific person and I work with them so it’s been really difficult. I’ve started ERP which has been reaaalllllly challenging and I would love to hear from anyone else that has gone through any type of contamination ocd and how they have overcome or are fighting their way through it. Thank you!l
It could be possible to treat a severe scrupulosity OCD without taking medication and asking guidance from the psychiatrist? I can't afford for professional consultation 🥹. Can anybody give me some advices on how to deal with these intrusive thoughts? 🙏
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