Avoid Theses Common ERP Mistakes

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Welcome. My name is Danielle Thornton. I am an OCD and anxiety recovery coach. And today I want to talk about ERP and common mistakes that people make when actually practicing erp. So for those of you that do not know ERP or Exposure and Response prevention is the only evidence based treatment for OCD and the most effective long term treatment for ocd. And a lot of people will try to do ERP on their own without seeking the proper guidance. And even though I'm going to give you some tips here today, I highly suggest finding somebody like myself or another specialist who can guide you through ERP properly. Because there are ways that you can do it properly, ways that you can do it wrong, it can be ineffective or, or partially effective. And there's ways to improperly use erp. So we're going to talk about some of this today. If you're already working with a specialist or you already been through it, this might help you give you some tips. But if you're wanting help with this, please feel free to look at the details below. I help people recover from OCD every day and ERP is definitely the way to go. Now, for those of you who are already in ERP treatment and just want a few more tips on how to do it effectively, I am going to give you some common mistakes that people make when they are doing erp. So the top mistake that I see is that ERP turns into a compulsion, okay? And pretty much anything can turn into a compulsion. Which again is why it's really important to be working with a specialist that can help recognize this. But the number one mistake is that people use ERP to get rid of the anxiety or somehow push it away or respond to the anxiety, maybe even neutralize it, okay? And that is not what ERP is supposed to do. Even though by doing ERP your anxiety is actually going to decrease. The intention behind this is really important. So the intention behind ERP or exposure and response prevention is to actually get comfortable with the uncertainty. So you're going into the uncertainty of that particular thought or fear. When you're using it to get rid of the anxiety, you're actually doing the opposite of what it's meant to do, but you're also turning it into a compulsion. The second mistake is that your expectations are unrealistic. So everybody's OCD looks different. Everybody has different themes. Some people have one theme, some people have more than one theme. But the expectation behind this is really crucial because a lot of us with OCD really struggle with perfectionism and high expectations. Of ourselves. Right. The brain can only change and rewire so fast, which is actually what ERP is going to do. So it's really important that you take your time with it. So having really high expectations that it's going to get rid of the anxiety completely very quickly, or having the expectation that it's never going to come back and you only have to do it one time, those are unrealistic. So we have to have realistic expectations when it comes to to ERP and rewiring the brain, because that's actually what ERP does. It does rewire the brain. Your brain scan after doing proper ERP can look like that of somebody without ocd, if you're doing it correctly and if you're being guided correctly to doing zero compulsions. Now, the third mistake that people make with ERP is when they're doing the exposure exercise, they quit too soon. And hopefully, if you have done ERP before, your specialist is helping you to understand where your anxiety is at. At the start of the exercise, you're doing the exercise until your anxiety is dropped in half. You're doing a little bit longer to set it in, and then you can be done with it. But one of the mistakes that people make is they either start doing compulsions or the thoughts keep coming and they give up too early. And when this happens, you're not actually able to see the decrease in the anxiety, so you lose the confidence in the exercise. Some people can shift and their anxiety drops within a minute or two. For some people, it takes a lot longer. When I was first doing erp, I had one exercise that took me an hour and 20 minutes. That's really rare. That doesn't happen very often. For most people, it's much quicker, usually. But it is important to go through it fully until the anxiety has dropped fully and not doing the compulsions. And that leads me to number four, which is letting your compulsions get in the way. So a lot of times when we sit down to do an ERP exercise or any sort of exposure, OCD doesn't want to give up that easy, and our brains want to start to give us more thoughts. The OCD wants us to engage, our body wants to move and do things. And so every time we are participating in a compulsion during an exposure exercise, OCD is taken back over. So it's very important during the exposure exercise to not do any compulsions and not let those get in the way. And some people don't have too much of an issue with this. And other people have to bring themselves back to the current moment over and over and over again and retrain their brain to stay there. But you can do this. You have 100% control over all of your compulsions. The next mistake is understanding that not all of our fears are going to get to zero, right? So a lot of times when we have ocd, we want this all to go away. We want the anxiety to go away, we want the fear to go away. We want to get it to zero and be perfectly happy, right? And the reality is, sometimes some of our fears and our intrusive thoughts are going to go away completely, and sometimes they're going to definitely decrease, but they're not going to go away fully. So let me give you an example here. I was doing some exposure on will I ever find somebody? Will I ever have a family? Right? And that's a tough one to do, causing a lot of anxiety. And I was doing the exposure exercise, and I couldn't get it down below kind of about a 3 out of 10. And as I was doing this exercise, I was frustrated because I wanted it to get lower than that. But what I learned from my particular OCD specialist is some things are not going to completely go away, right? There's a lot of fears and thoughts and situations that are going to make us a little bit uncomfortable that aren't going to be easy to think about or accept. So we have to understand that some of these things are going to go away. Some of our intrusive thoughts are never going to come back, and others with ERP are going to get a lot better. Okay? So don't get me wrong, they'll get a lot better, but they may not completely go away. It may not cause you anxiety anymore, but it may not be easy to think about, if that makes any sense. The next mistake that people make is not practicing exposure enough. Okay. I did another video on sitting with the anxiety and why that's not enough. And a lot of people try to just do a little bit of exposure here and there, and then they go about their day, right? Thinking that they did enough. But it's really important, depending on how bad your OCD is, that you're doing enough exposure to counteract all the compulsions that you're doing, which is why it's really important that the specialist that you're working with is helping you to bring those compulsions to zero at the same time that you're actually doing the exposure. So you should be doing at least 30 minutes to an hour of exposure work every day. And I talk to my clients about this all the time, especially at the beginning of the treatment. Now, later on in the treatment, you don't have to do quite the that much. But between all of the different exposure exercises and exposure techniques that I teach my clients, 30 minutes to an hour is a definitely a really good range to be doing at the beginning, probably in the first couple months of your treatment. And the next mistake that people make is using exposure exercises on non OCD thoughts. And your OCD thoughts are the ones that cause that anxiety spike, right? That make you feel anxious or even uncomfortable as you go through treatment, the anxiety is going to go away, but you might still feel a little bit of that discomfort or uneasiness. So those are the techniques. I'm sorry, Those are the feelings that we want to use exposure exercises on. But if there's a thought, and we get a lot of thoughts every day that is causing you sadness or causing you hopelessness, more in the depression category, then these are not thoughts that you want to actually do exposure on. Doing exposure on depressive thoughts is actually going to make that worse. So when I work with clients, we talk about this carefully to determine what feelings are attached to the thoughts so they know how to actually treat them. Because thoughts that make us sad or hopeless are actually treated very differently than thoughts that cause us anxiety. And they're both pretty simple techniques. But it is important to understand which is which and how to treat each of them individually. The last mistake that people make, I touched on this a little bit earlier, is trying to do ERP on your own. It is possible to get some relief to learn about ERP and use some of the techniques that come along with it that you can learn online or in groups on how to do erp. But there's so much more to it that you will never be able to learn online, because ERP needs to be done with your specific theme and your specific thoughts. And the actual exercises that you're going to do should vary. Okay? And so finding someone to help you with this is really, really crucial. And it's actually the reason why I started as an OCD recovery coach is because I recovered from ocd. I found that there were some good specialists out there and then some excellent ones. And for a lot of people, it can be hard to even find somebody effective, but it is really crucial to get help with this and get guidance. And for those of you who cannot find somebody, for those of you who struggle with knowing how to pay somebody, because a lot of ERP specialists are out of pocket, please reach out to me. Let's just talk and see how I can help you either myself or point you in the right direction. I do offer payment plans because I just hate to see people struggle because they can't afford treatment. So I make things very affordable. But whether it's myself or somebody else and you're struggling with ocd, please get help with erp. There is such a night and day difference when you're able to have somebody walk you through it, guide you through it and support you through it versus trying to do it on your own.

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