How do you go about your life when ERP therapy is so stressful. I have harm ocd and by making me watch horror movies etc . is just making it worse. I'm really worried I'm being brainwashed into being what I dont want to be . Does this mean ERP is not for me? I also have no compulsions just pure O .
I think this means that you're walking through the mountain of fear instead of around it! I too struggle with this as I expose myself to my fears but I have to remind myself to hold onto the steering wheel and keep going even though it feels scary because living a life free of the constant demand of OCD is more important to me than the momentary relief it provides me
Pure O still has compulsions. They are just hidden. Over analyzing, asking for reassurance ( like your doing in this post) googling, fixating on something to solve it in your head, are ALL mental compulsions. ERP is supposed to make you feel uncomfortable, it means it’s working. When i finally started resisting my mental compulsions ( I asked for validation and reassurance ALLL THE TIME and lived on Reddit) my anxiety spiked! But then it started to slowly come down and the things I was afraid of starting not feeling so important or scary.
I’m checking in on this post and wanted to see how it’s going with the ERPs for pure O. I recently stopped doing physical compulsions, that wasn’t too bad, but then I realized a had mental compulsions and started working on them. My O is out of control. I had a rough day doing my homework exposures then had a really intense natural exposure. I went totally sideways and have been up all night doing both physical and mental compulsions, but mainly mental. It was too much too fast and way stressful. I feel humiliated and alone again.
@ZJT Im sorry ZJT I feel the same way pure O is evil . Expect the unexpected . I dont know havent done ERP yet but getting desperate to get this out of my head.
I’m worried about ERP. I don’t have any physical compulsions, and struggle to see any mental ones either. I don’t feel scared about anything and uncertainty doesn’t bother me (I’ve accepted that if my relationship ends it’ll suck but I’d be ok) so if ERP is the best treatment for this- how will I ever get better? Does that mean it’s not OCD? I feel like I’m literally going insane!!!!
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?
So, I do have OCD. That’s not a question (Pure O mainly. Compulsions are mental and emotional checking and ruminating and comparing). And my OCD was ramping up pretty bad a while back so I started ERP counseling through NOCD. I learned some basic skills and good ways to respond and not engage to thoughts. But now, I think the therapy just brings things up that didn’t need to be that big. It makes minor things bigger. It brings overwhelm thinking I have all this “work” to do, when I think what I need is to let go. Of course with OCD letting go is not a simple task, but hear me out. I didn’t do therapy for over a month and started feeling better. I used some of the tools I learned a few times and things just seemed more minor and less serious. I’m now postpartum with anxiety panic and ocd so I upped my therapy and I truly think it’s making things worse. Does anyone else share this opinion or experience? I also think back to when OCD was darn near nonexistent and I was not in ERP therapy. I know things come and go but I’m just realizing this.
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