I won't to go back to who I was before I started ERP therapy. This therapy has made everything worse. I am not my intrusive thoughts, but ERP teaches you that the content of your intrusive thoughts is real. I can't do it anymore. This therapy makes me feel like I deserve to die.

Thank you annano & Carl. This does make sense. Maybe the intrusive thought is the exposure itself & not responding is the response prevention. I could look at pictures of soap, maybe put a soap bar beside the TV?

@canigetawitness1992 Yes, now you’re on to something!

@canigetawitness1992 Yes! You got this

This is correct.

But if my intrusive thoughts are "Go smear soap all over the place and your TV" , exposure would have you do that instead of just sit with the thought and not do the compulsion to check if you had.

@canigetawitness1992 Which would be validating the thought, right?"

@canigetawitness1992 There's a difference between it being a thought and it actually happening is what I'm trying to say.

@canigetawitness1992 What’s the reason behind smearing soap on your TV? Like what is the core concern or fear?

@NOCD Advocate - Carl Cornett I don't really know to be honest with you. All I know is that I got hit with the thought "You're going to smear soap across your TV on purpose." And now I don't know what to do with that thought.

@canigetawitness1992 Maybe the fear is that I'm doing weird things that are opposite to how I'd choose to do them & I don't even know if I'm doing them.

@canigetawitness1992 I've tried to find the core fear and all I feel is dread. I don't know why.

@canigetawitness1992 Sounds like a random intrusive thought. It appears your concern here is maybe you’re not doing treatment correctly, and you’re preoccupied with doing it wrong. So, in this case you could say to yourself, “Maybe I’m not doing treatment correctly. Maybe I’ll do it wrong and make myself worse. Maybe I’ll never get better. Moving on.” You don’t have to figure it out.

@canigetawitness1992 This happens to me as well, not knowing why I don’t like a thought. My main theme is PureO and sometimes I’ll just get “a bad feeling” about a thought or thing. To subside my anxiety, I ruminate on it. This is a conjecture, but it seems like you may just be ruminating and consequently finding more things to be confused and uncertain about which in turn causes you to ruminate more. It’s a cycle and you probably don’t even know why you’re there. I’m currently working on this myself so I can only offer the tools I have acquired thus far. I can offer you to try and sit with the uncertainty of it all. Try to sit with not knowing why the thought bothers you, why you keep thinking about it, why you had the thought. Your brain knows how to make it through this bout of anxiety and the less you feed it, the sooner it will dissipate.