- Date posted
- 1y
Exposure Ideas for sexual taboo themes?
I initially started therapy on NOCD due to sexual intrusive thoughts revolving around many taboo themes. The scariest one being POCD. Today, I can say that thoughts around this theme rarely impact my ability to live life and enjoy life. I thought that once I got over this theme, everything else would be easier. However, that’s not exactly the case. My obsessions have now attached to something which my mind believes to be scarier than being a pedophile, it’s being a necrophile. I am taking many of the things I have learned from therapy up to this point and applying it to this new theme, which has helped tremendously. Also, I’m not doing a lot of the harmful compulsions (before I knew what compulsions even were) that I did when I was in the thick of POCD e.g. rumination, checking, testing. I am much better equipped to tackle this new theme knowing that in the end ERP can work for any theme since it’s all just OCD. My issue is that when I brought this up to my NOCD therapist she had never heard of what necrophilia was or had any past experience with it, which was a little disheartening to hear. However, we thought of some exposures I could implement and am currently working on those. One of them being looking at photos of family members who are now deceased since my original fear came from a sexual intrusive thought I had about a deceased family member. Does anyone here have any suggestions on exposure to combat this theme? I understand it’s not the exposures themselves but the response prevention that leads to healing. However, in order to do the response prevention portion a good set of exposures would be great!