If the thought stays with you, you might add meat to the initial thought by thinking, “am I a bad person? Do I not love my partner? Am I capable of hurting someone?” You might question where the idea originated. However, if you started analysing the thought while cooking, you could become more aware of the knife and begin to feel bad. Let’s say you were cooking dinner with your partner and holding a knife, and you had the thought, “I could stab him.” Undoubtedly, this will not make you feel good, but the idea would lessen if you could carry on cooking dinner. Instead of avoiding your thoughts, ERP is facing your thoughts without undertaking any compulsion. We want to eliminate the compulsion, which is what ERP does. We do not want to maintain the compulsion. You get rid of the uncomfortable and negative emotions you experience, which primes you to carry out the compulsion next time you get the intrusive thought. Next time the person has a similar uncomfortable thought, they repeat the compulsion and remove anything rope-like from their home, as this helped last time and strengthened the compulsion. The compulsion to remove the ties made them feel they were preventing something negative from occurring. They immediately remove all curtain ties and similar items from their home. This strategy only helps short-term because, according to classical conditioning, the compulsion is maintained through negative reinforcement.įor example, someone has the intrusive thoughts that they could hurt someone with a curtain tie. Still, I want to say that it only helps short-term otherwise, your intrusive thought would be gone, and you would never experience it again. Then ask yourself, does that help? Your answer might be yes it helps. This could be mentally reviewing events or seeking reassurance. Before reading any further, take a moment and think of things you do to reduce the anxiety that your intrusive thought triggers. The compulsion is the mental review of the past to ensure you did nothing wrong. To reduce the fear and anxiety, they feel compelled to check their history to ensure they did nothing wrong repeatedly. This thought makes them experience worry and anxiety. If you did not feel an uncomfortable emotion, the thought would not have bothered you as much. Your obsession triggers an uncomfortable emotion, and you do something to make yourself feel better you perform a compulsion.įor example, someone might have the intrusive thought that they have done something terrible in the past. If your thoughts could not trigger such pleasant emotions, you would not have felt the need to read this article.įor example, if you think you will shout something obscene in Church, you may feel anxiety or shame. Your thoughts are problematic because they are associated with something unpleasant such as anxiety, disgust, repulsion or shame. This article is helpful for all types of intrusive thoughts.īefore going any further, I think it is helpful to mention classical conditioning 1 briefly. I want to focus on how ERP treats intrusive thoughts in this article. ERP – Exposure Response Prevention as a therapy model is described in detail in this post.
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