Exposure therapy... Struggling

[Kieran123]

Hi all, 

Its been a hard couple of weeks I’ve recently started my new job and had problems on and off with my girlfriend for a few weeks now, I started my therapy again around January and I’ve had around 6/7 sessions upto now, I’ve been learning exposure & response prevention therapy, however I feel as though I’m really struggling to get to grips with it, if the exposure & response prevention involves deliberately thinking an obsessional thought then what do you do when the thought is constantly there on your mind, this is the problem I face and don’t understand about how it will help, I constantly have the same intrusive thought stuck on my mind repeating in my head so what do I do when it comes to exposure therapy? I’ve tried it when at home alone and my anxiety doesn’t seem to decrease it just stays the same and the thought still repeats on it’s own it’s like I can’t stop the thought it’s just involuntary and it’s making me struggle. Any help or advice would be much appreciated.

 

 

Edited April 9, 2018 by Kieran123

[PolarBear]

So if you have the same thought in your mind all the time, you are doing compulsions including ruminating. Compulsions sre the fuel that powers the OCD engine.

With ERP you are going to sit diwn and cinjure up the thought. Make it bad. Make it really bad. And then you are going to practice NOT doing compulsions. That is the hard part. It won't work for the first while. You keep trying. Eventually it will start to work and you'll see your anxiety start to go down after an exposure without resorting to compulsions. 

Once you get good at that, you can then apply the same principle to when your obsessions just pop into your head.