Danielle Thornton explains that ERP, the gold-standard OCD treatment, is just how you already make decisions: consider options, decide, act, learn. The difference with OCD is compulsions like reassurance-seeking and checking trap you. Exposure to uncertainty and imperfection is what actually reduces fear and builds confidence.
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Hi, Danielle Thornton here, anxiety and OCD recovery coach. And today I'm going to give you a little hint that you actually might find very surprising, but that is that you are actually doing and know how to do erp. So what I want you to do is, is take a minute to think about a time where you had a decision to make and you had some uncertainty. You weren't 100% sure where to go with it, but there was some uncertainty. And essentially what you did is you may have thought about it for fairly short period of time, right? You made a decision and you moved forward with that decision, and then you learned something from that, right? So. So this is exactly what ERP is doing. ERP is not some magic solution that some doctor came up with. ERP is what you are already doing. Anytime there is anxiety or uncertainty in your life where you don't get stuck in it, instead of spending hours and days and weeks or months ruminating about it, or seeking a lot of reassurance from other people or. Or mentally being hypervigilant or checking things, right? You just put a little thought into it, you make a decision, you move forward, and you see what happens. With ocd, that's what we're teaching you to do with erp, instead of the compulsions. The compulsions is what's causing your suffering. We're teaching you exposure, which essentially is exposure to things that cause you fear. Because until you do that, they're going to cause fear. Once you expose yourself to it, you. The fear reduces and that thing becomes comfortable. Okay? So while it seems scary, it's actually the opposite. Exposure to uncertainty and imperfection in life. Because again, think about those other areas that you're already just making a decision and moving forward. And it's probably quite easy. Now, erp, with your particular OCD theme is not as easy, right?
But the same tactics work when you make decisions in life. Move forward, don't overthink it, and just see what happens. You are building trust and confidence in yourself. And that doesn't mean that we always make the perfect decision or we never look back and say, oh, I kind of wish I would have done something different. But every single one of our decisions leads to personal growth and it leads to lessons. And that is how we build confidence in ourselves. That is how we build self trust. When we allow the fear or the OCD to dictate our behavior. And we constantly do compulsions seeking certainty and perfection, neither of those exist. If you think about what you're looking for, there's no blood test, there's no person that can give you that answer. Right. The certainty and the perfection doesn't exist. So it's a rabbit hole. When you make a decision and you move forward, you Most of the time, we make pretty good decisions. Right. And every once in a while, if we're like, oh, I kind of wish I would have made a different decision, we learned a lesson from that. That helps us to move forward and get more of what we want in life. That's how we build confidence. That's how we build self trust. So the response prevention is when.
