ERP has been tremendously helpful for me, but I find it difficult to plan exposures to my obsessions, given that most of my intrusive thoughts are mostly about moral or conceptual issues, so it's hard to put them into smth "actionable". Do you guys have any advice?
You can do recordings on your phone and as you’re saying your intrusive thoughts you can make them worse than they actually are and then play it back to yourself, I am noooo therapist though and I’m not sure what stress level you’re at for certain things . Should be something to talk about with your therapist :)
Write as if your fears are true and you are that evil person you’re scared of being. Write about all the messed up shit you “love to do”
Hey! I’m a POCD sufferer and I was wondering if anyone who is doing ERP has any good suggestions for exposure heirarchies that I could take inspiration from? I’m starting CBT soon but I can only get it in a group and I don’t feel super comfortable talking about the details of POCD yet cos it feels really embarrassing. So far I’ve thought of going to the pool/park, or writing down my thoughts and looking at them, but my OCD really goes wild if I try to masturbate or if I feel aroused at all...at the moment I’m avoiding anything like that because it’s so distressing, but is that something I should do exposures for in the future?
How do you use ERP (exposure response prevention) to help “just right” OCD? I’ve never quite understood how to expose myself to anything to help me not do my compulsions since a lot of my feelings are just that it’s not right Like for germ/cleaning OCD they say to touch a trash can or something to expose yourself and not give in to your compulsions, but how would you do something like that with just right ocd?
How do you do ERP? I'm not asking generally, but rather how do you, the person reading this, do ERP? I'm at the point where I'm trying to work out how to do ERP for myself (largely self-directed as I don't see my psychologist more than once every few weeks), and I'm trying to get an idea of what it looks like on a practical level. Do you try and do ERP every day? Multiple times a day? How long do you spend on each exposure/session? Do you do ERP at the same time every day, or do you change it up? What do you do after you've done an exposure, do you do any self-care once the exposure is finished? I see things online saying that it can take upwards of an hour for distress to decrease when doing an exposure, and I'm wondering what are you allowed to do during that time? If the goal of ERP is to sit with the distress, do you literally just sit there for an hour doing nothing until the anxiety goes down? That's a long time to sit doing nothing but feel anxious, especially if the goal is to do this every day. Right now I'm struggling with implementing ERP into my routine. I currently do ERP sporadically, and not on any kind of schedule. I'm struggling to find exposures that distress me sufficiently, and when I do find something I'll still find myself feeling anxious hours later even after I thought I'd acclimatized. I'd really appreciate hearing from other people so that I can get an idea of what good ERP looks like in practice.
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