Exposure and Response Prevention
What Is Exposure And Response Prevention?
If you or your child are one of the many who struggle with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), it can be challenging to get through the day without intrusive thoughts and ritual-like behaviors derailing your plans. The anxiety you experience may be so overwhelming that you become consumed with compulsive behaviors to alleviate it.
This seemingly endless loop of thoughts and behaviors can overshadow your life, causing you to avoid anything you may perceive as anxiety-inducing. Sadly, OCD could be preventing you from being productive and focusing on what matters.
Despite it being the fourth most common mental health disorder globally, you might not realize that there’s an effective treatment for OCD. [1] Perhaps you’ve tried traditional therapy before only to find the results disappointing.
The good news is that Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) is an evidence-based therapy structured to target anxiety and OCD specifically. Considered the gold standard for treating OCD, ERP therapy “has the strongest evidence supporting its use in the treatment of OCD.” [2]
Who Can Benefit From Exposure And Response Prevention?
ERP therapy can be a highly effective treatment for children, adolescents, and adults who suffer from OCD, phobias, or severe anxiety. Studies have found that Exposure and Response Prevention treatment has led to significant improvements in approximately 75 percent of people with OCD. [3] Further, ERP is consistently shown to be more effective than other psychotherapies—such as supportive therapy or relaxation training—in reducing OCD symptoms and improving overall functioning. [4]
Working with a trained ERP therapist, most clients experience relief from their symptoms within approximately 17-25 sessions. Depending on your needs, we may also incorporate other helpful modalities into treatment, including Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Eye Movement Desensitization Therapy (EMDR), Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), and mindfulness.
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How Does Exposure And Response Prevention Therapy Work?
Before getting underway with ERP counseling, your therapist will provide you or your child with psychoeducation about OCD so you will better understand how it operates and what factors keep the continuous loop of obsessive thoughts and compulsive rituals in place. With this knowledge, you can set about dismantling the conditions that exacerbate OCD symptoms.
We will begin ERP therapy by assessing what intrusive thoughts and compulsive behaviors you or your child are dealing with. To gain comfort and competency in the mechanics of ERP, we will create a hierarchy of fears, initially targeting thoughts and compulsions that are the least anxiety-provoking and working our way up.
The next stage will focus on exposing you or your child to situations that trigger anxiety (exposure) while preventing the compulsive behaviors that are usually performed to reduce that anxiety (response prevention).
The key takeaways of ERP therapy are:
● Habituation: Gaining awareness that anxiety does not last forever and will decrease over time, thereby reducing the intensity of the urges to perform rituals;
● Disconfirmation: Realizing the unfavorable outcomes your intrusive thoughts convince you will happen unless you perform repetitive rituals or mental compulsions usually never actually happen; and
● Mastery: Learning that you can tolerate doubt, uncertainty, and unwanted thoughts without having to avoid, change, or suppress them. This way, you can feel in control rather than OCD always being in charge.
Exposure and Response Prevention can be conducted either in-person or online sessions. The process will be gradual and meet you where you are, ensuring that while you will be challenged to sit with discomfort, we will move at a gradual pace you can handle. Because we intentionally start with the obsessions that are the least anxiety-provoking, you’re able to gradually build confidence in the process. This allows you to move up to more challenging obsessions at a manageable pace without getting overwhelmed.
Why We Include ERP Therapy Into OCD Treatment
At Theory & Method, we noticed a lack of helpful resources for treating OCD in our community. Many of our new clients had resigned themselves to living with OCD because they’d received the wrong kind of treatment for it, sometimes for years. What they didn’t realize is that OCD and other anxiety-related disorders typically do not respond well to more traditional talk therapies, such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT).
Keeping this gap in effective care options in mind, we set out to train our therapists in Exposure and Response Prevention. With its straightforward, no-nonsense approach, ERP can help you learn how to sit with the distress of obsessive thoughts and gradually reduce engagement in compulsive behaviors. Because OCD is treatable with the right therapy, we’re passionate about sharing ERP with our clients. Having witnessed first-hand the life-changing results Exposure and Response Prevention can provide, we are eager to help you break free from the OCD trap once and for all.
Learn How Exposure And Response Prevention Can Help You
Exposure and Response Prevention holds the key to finding relief from OCD—all you need to get started is an openness to change. If you would like to find out more about ERP therapy with us, please click here to schedule a free 15-minute call.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010440X22000487
[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6343408/
[3] https://iocdf.org/about-ocd/treatment/
[4] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211364921000646
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