I Need Some Advice

[Hermit7]

Greetings all,

I'm struggling greatly with this decision placed before me. As some of you already know I suffer from the fear of losing my salvation (my basic OCD thing).

And lately, I've been receiving some counselling from my church pastor.

Basically, he tends to be the "tough love" kind of guy. And in order to "help" me he told me to go damn myself. I assume this is a type of exposure therapy he's trying to get me to do.

But it's been hard. And the more I struggle and decide not to go this route, the more our friendship suffers.

What am I going to do?

_hermit

 

[OCD=Owie]

So he's trying to get you to just let your fears go by telling you to go damn yourself? Like saying, "just let your thoughts and fears be there"?

It sounds like he very well might be attempting to apply ERP methods, but I don't know the situation. As for your friendship, I think that there is going to be tension between you two since he's telling you to do something that you're terrified of doing. I didn't feel very hapy when people told me to stop performing compulsions. In fact, I would just get mad sometimes, even though they were trying to help.

 

[tripletiger1200]

I know a little bit how you feel. My dad tells me just to let go and let my thoughts go around in my head, and to give control to God. I like this advice until I put it into practice, and then things seem to spiral out of control if I'm not trying to focus on something else or to neutralize the thoughts.
It frustrates me because I'm hearing one thing, and once I put it into practice it ends up just terrifying me, and I just hear the same answer back.
I guess it's like peter stepping out of the boat and walking towards Jesus. It just takes faith that we don't have yet to let go and get the therapy type stuff done. I'll pray for you though.