Exposure and Response Prevention
Exposure therapy is a beneficial tool for some who experience anxiety disorders and can be most helpful for those dealing with obsessive-compulsive disorder and phobias. While this treatment may have a bad rap thanks to media portrayal of submerging clients in pits of snakes and spiders, it is actually a very structured, slow, and deliberate approach to confronting a client’s fears and obsessions.
What is it?
Exposure therapy is a type of cognitive behavioral therapy. As stated earlier, our goal in therapy is often to challenge our misperceptions of the environment. Anxiety disorders are a good example of what happens when we see everyday situations as dangerous, uncomfortable, or scary. Sometimes those misperceptions are so severe that we develop unhealthy ways of reducing our fear or avoiding it all together. When this happens, we learn our behaviors are what keep us safe, not that the situation is actually safe. Exposure therapy is designed to correct this miseducation, helping you understand what is safe and unsafe.
How does it work?
Exposure therapy works by putting you in or around situations and thought patterns that cause increasingly severe anxiety. For example, if you had a phobia of dogs, before therapy a dog might cause you to run away or rub a necklace for luck, thinking these actions were keeping you safe. In exposure therapy, we would use these high anxiety situations to learn to sit with your anxiety and let it go away on its own without using avoidance or behaviors that make you feel safe. Doing this enough times will help you recognize what is safe and what isn’t, making your fear a more reliable indicator of safety.
But won’t I be uncomfortable?
Yes! But that’s the whole point of exposure therapy. Behaviors such as avoidance or good luck charms may help you feel better and less anxious, but they don’t take the fear away. They simply reduce the emotion to tolerable levels, while leaving the thought, phobia, or obsession in place and unchallenged. Exposure therapy encourages you to sit with the fear until it’s completely gone (yes, it’s uncomfortable!)