Skeptical about ERP? I found ERP really conflicts with some other theories, like the theories of Louise Hay (who wrote the book “you can heal your life). I will elaborate on my confusions. 1. ERP asks us to experience obsessions without thinking “no I won’t hurt myself” “no I won’t hurt others”. “No, I am safe and those thoughts are not real”. Thinking “i won’t do dangerous stuff and I am completely safe” is considered as compulsion to rid us of anxiety, but Louise Hay thinks it as positive affirmation. 2. Will ERP make us believe what we think even more? ERP asks you to write your fears into those stories and scripts and repeat them again and again until you habituate. But why would I say to myself “oh, maybe I will kill my parents and I will accept that and move on”? How does this make any sense? 3. I read the book of Shannon Shy who has recovered from OCD and he used his own strategies. I remembered that when he confronted his obsession of whether he left the pot on, he would say to himself that “do you think the pot will turn itself on”? to help him better move on to do things that he should do. But according to ERP, isn’t this a compulsion? Cuz ERP asks us to accept that ok the pot may be on and my house may be burned down and I accept that and I move on? I just find ERP theories weird.

I'm really confused about what ERP actually is. I've read that it's all about facing your intrusive thoughts & not doing the compulsions, but then I also hear it's about more than that, like eating off a toilet seat, or even licking a toilet seat. So I guess my question is if ERP is really about letting my intrusive thoughts be there and not reacting to them, whats the point of doing far-out-there exposures that would bother be OCD or no OCD. I could lick toilets, eat from them, roll around in dumpsters, make things opposite from the way I want them all day, but I'm still not going to like doing those things. It's weird because the description of ERP seems to contradict things when it's actually put into practice.

Please comment from or advise me from personal experience if you’re currently seeing a therapist and undergoing ERP to treat existential thought OCD. I don’t understand how ERP could work on thoughts like ‘what if my own family or kids aren’t real’ I know with contamination ocd they expose you to your fears by making touch objects or things and with harm ocd they might get you to hold a knife but low does the same principle apply to Existential thought OCD? I’ve been on the ocdf website and couldn’t get any answers …. Please comment

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?