Really struggling with how to apply ERP to an intrusive thought I had today. When walking past my kitchen counter I saw my wallet and got the thought "What if you just grabbed cash and threw it in the trash can?" I checked the trash can once to see if I had thrown away money. I guess my question is what's a good ERP for this? Should I just let the thought be there? Should I do an overcorrection and throw money away? Having a hard time figuring out the most beneficial method here.

How much money should you throw away & how often to throw it away if this thought keeps happening?

@canigetawitness You have to be mindful here to not always react to a particular thought each time it appears. Save that exercise for when you’re doing a planned exposure. The rest of the time, you’re focusing on resisting compulsions. Your compulsion was to check that money was thrown away, resist that.

@NOCD Advocate - Carl Cornett I'm confused because if the work is to resist compulsions in response to an intrusive thought, how would intentionally throwing money away help as a planned exposure? I don't want to be throwing away a lot of money when I plan the exposures. Maybe throw the money away and leave it for a specific time frame, then get it back out of the trash? I don't know. I don't want to do this perfectly, but I also don't want to stray from a path that could help me get better.

@canigetawitness I’m saying that you don’t have to respond to a thought with an exposure exercise every time it occurs or causes distress. In this case you would’ve been served by just not doing the checking compulsion. No “exposure” activity was necessarily warranted. There might be an instance where as an exposure exercise you could choose to put a dollar or something in the trash and sit without the urge to check or remove it. You also don’t necessarily have to do that exposure, it could be enough to just sit your wallet near the garbage can, or have someone tell you they saw money in there recently, or to write a script about it. There’s a lot of way to do exposures.

@NOCD Advocate - Carl Cornett Oh okay, I'll keep working on resisting checking compulsions. And if I do a planned exposure, I'll attempt something that mimics the original intrusive thought. The planned exposures you listed could be some good options. Thanks.

@canigetawitness I agree with everything Carl said above. As a one off thought, the best thing to do was just to resist the intitial check. Not every intrusive thought requires a corresponding exposure exercise. If checking is a common compulsion of yours, there are plenty of ways to purposefully trigger that urge and resist it. You don’t necessarily have to recreate each individual checking scenario. But if this money thought becomes recurrent (as in every time you walk by the trash you’re now thinking about this) a targeted exposure could be helpful. And imaginal exposures could be enough. But throwing away a few dollars also won’t hurt you.