I saw someone (a UK based supposed ‘expert’ in OCD) talk about rationalising your fears, sort of like ‘why would this be really that bad?’ And saying to truly get over your fear you’d have to say to yourself that even if your fear came true you’d be able to cope and you should realise it’s not that bad. But isn’t that counterproductive? As our fears are often quite distressing/taboo/or ego-dystonic.

Wow this is what I struggle with right now in regards to ERP. I don’t understand how I can have a bad thought and not want to tell myself that it’s bad lol

While that might make sense for a lot of obsessions, I am not too sure that would be helpful for someone challenged with Harm OCD, POCD, etc.

Actually this is something I have done for years in order to help give me the strength to obsess less. I asked my therapist about last week and she said it can help a lot. I read Buddhist and stoic philosophy and try to meditate on the end result of my fears being true (i.e. if everyone hated me or my family died or I went to prison or I could never have a relationship etc). The fears are indeed distressing and awful, but the point is that we make them feel much worse by flinching away from them and not applying reasonable analysis to whether we would be able to cope. In most of our disaster scenarios we fear, we would still have various things in our lives including stuff like support from family, perhaps even the truth is very little about our lives would change. Stoic philosophy (which is basically what this expert is proposing) isn't about not feeling bad from bad situations, it's about not making a bad situation worse than it is. Most of our suffering is voluntary, and if my fears happened, I would in fact find ways to cope. I fear judgment a lot but in truth I could survive a bunch of people I don't care about preferring to misunderstand or judge me than actually get to know me- why should their opinion be my problem? If everyone I currently know hated me for my flaws, I might be able to rebuild relationships and there's no guarantee at all that I wouldn't find compassionate people who don't hate me (I know they exist because I don't withhold love and support from anybody who isn't themselves a judgmental dick). If my family died (risk groups for Corona), I could get support from friends and live a good life for them, I'd still have my hobbies and my ability to do good, etc. I have even watched documentaries about jail and looked for the positives in it, like structure, opportunity to support others, a lot of free time etc, I even had a lecturer at university who got his degrees in prison for violent crime, so it doesn't mean the loss of a future, and time spent there (or sick, or in poverty) is real time, a part of life, which can be made the most of. Etc. The prison thing applies very well to harm or POCD. For me I actually fear being convicted of crimes I haven't done, which would be a double edged sword where I could choose to suffer extra because of the sheer injustice OR allow that knowledge of innocence to be an additional motivator and guiding light. It helps to have a philosophy that whatever happens is what is supposed to happen in your life, it's all opportunities for you to make a difference and you just need to take the opportunities. If you waver on the "would I be able to live with myself if I molested a child or harmed someone badly or was a pedophile/zoophile/etc?" part, then you need to do some serious work on self compassion. You don't need to be perfect to deserve to live. I'd be interested in seeing a link to this expert you're talking about. Personally, developing a personal philosophy and doing precisely what he says of looking where I don't want to look, have made me a stronger, kinder person and given me more faith that I can cope with whatever happens in my life, including feared scenarios. In the book Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, which is about how the Gautama Buddha found enlightenment, he learns from watching and listening to a river that suffering is a product of time: no individual moment is pure suffering, in fact very few individual moments even particularly suck. It's anticipation of the future and memory of the past, stringing moments together, which creates suffering. Like if you had a picture flip-book depicting somebody being tortured: if you stop on any individual page, there's no suffering there, it's just a still image. So can I survive any individual moment without suffering if I choose? Yes. Then what is time? And with stoic philosophy, I resolve that so long as I live within the illusion of time, I don't have to suffer more than any situation calls for, I just need to identify the things in my mind which are causing me suffering- my interpretations, my focus on negatives, my preconceived ideas that this situation should be miserable, my moralising that I ought to be suffering, etc. And then I can opt out. Idk, that combination of concluding that I can handle anything that happens, that I can live in individual moments, and that I don't have to suffer any more than is strictly necessary... That helps, really a lot. And I don't just have faith in it, I try to put it into practice every day including with small issues and other non OCD fears as well as my OCD and it always works. I try to share this view with other people who are suffering too. Once you have seen that the very worst possibilities needn't be so awful, they sort of... Lose their sting.