Danielle Thornton explains that phobias and OCD work the same way: both are fear-based and kept alive by avoidance. Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) treats both. You need repeated exposure to the thing you fear, without using compulsions to escape it.
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Welcome back. My name is Danielle Thornton. I'm an anxiety and OCD recovery coach who has gotten to the recovery stage for multiple subsets of OCD and who has been helping others do the same since 2018. So today I want to talk about phobias. And you may struggle with phobias, you may, you may struggle with ocd, or you may struggle with both. The reason why it's important to talk about phobias is because I have clients that come to me all the time for ocd, but also have other phobias like emetophobia, agoraphobia, or any other fears that greatly affect their life that they just kind of deal with. And I want you to know that phobias and OCD are the exact same thing, and here's why. OCD is intrusive thoughts, fear based thoughts, or thoughts that give you discomfort. Right? And in order to deal with those thoughts, someone would do compulsions like avoiding, comparing again, any way to try to get certainty, reassurance seeking, checking, ruminating, all of the compulsions. So they're trying to get some sort of certainty or relief from the discomfort, avoiding being one of those, to get away from it, to get rid of it. Okay. And the compulsions just make the ocd, the intrusive thoughts, the fear, the discomfort, worse. The way to eliminate the discomfort and quiet down these intrusive thoughts is actually to expose ourselves to that fear or discomfort, to understand that we can handle it. Uncertainty is part of life. And to quiet down those thoughts and let our brain know that we don't need it to be hypervigilant. We don't need the fear based thoughts because we can actually handle it just fine on our own. So now let's talk about agoraphobia. Agoraphobia is the fear of leaving your house, the fear of open spaces, crowds, things like that. So a phobia is essentially a fear where the compulsion is to avoid, to stay safe. And the more we avoid, the bigger that fear gets. And then it usually attaches to other behaviors and other fears because the coping mechanism is to avoid and stay away from that fear. It just reinforces the fear and shrinks your life. Okay. Emetophobia, the fear of throwing up. Okay. And so someone might do certain things, AKA compulsions, like getting medication to eliminate nausea, avoiding situations that might cause an upset stomach, looking for places like a bathroom to make sure that if you do have to throw up, you're not going to throw up in front of somebody, any sort of safety behavior to eliminate the discomfort or the possibility that that thing may happen. Okay. And the more you do that, the more it reinforces the fear. The fear gets bigger, other situation attaches to other situations, and there you go. So phobias and OCD are exactly the same thing. And the way that you eliminate these things from your life is the exact same solution. It's called ERP, or Exposure and Response Prevention. So let's use a couple real life examples. We all, I shouldn't say all of us, but a lot of us get uncomfortable when we're around new people going to a big party, maybe where we don't know a lot of people. Now this isn't true for everybody, but it's pretty common, right? And so the more we avoid doing something like that, the more it's going to reinforce that fear and we stay in this comfort zone, which again may feel comfortable, but you're reinforcing a pattern of avoiding discomfort and it's going to start attaching to other things. When we just go to that party and get to know people or just, you know, have a good time the best that we can, we're actually facing that fear and the fear doesn't get stronger. We usually build comfort if we do that over and over and over again. Okay, that's an example of exposure. And exposure has to be done consistently depending on how strong the fear is. The more consistently you do this, the more you're going to build comfort. Right? So there's all kinds of areas in life. Public speaking is a huge one. A lot of us are very nervous or fearful about public speaking. I used to hate to do these videos. I was always extremely nervous, self conscious, all of that, insecure about it, right? But the more I've done it, the more comfortable I get, the more confident I get. I'm no longer afraid to do it and that comfort builds. This is true for everything in our lives. When we avoid discomfort, the discomfort will grow. It reinforces that behavior, reaction and pattern and it will spread out to other areas of life. And the more we learn to move towards discomfort, the more we build our confidence and that thing no longer causes discomfort. You do exposure and response prevention every day already with a lot of things in your life. But you may have developed certain areas, phobias or OCD themes where this is a little bit more difficult. And I say it's more difficult, but it's not impossible. I have not seen ERP not work yet. When somebody sticks with it, learns it, and uses it consistently, and depending how big your fears are, it may take longer for some than others. But regardless, it works every single time. Now, there's some areas in our life where we're like, okay, I'm afraid of heights. I don't really have to face heights. That may be true, right? But I highly, highly encourage you to face every fear, even if it seems like it's not a big deal, because it is affecting your life. And the more you let fear dictate your behavior in one area, it's going to attach other to other areas and it's going to greatly impact your life over time. So I really want to encourage you to check out the link in the description below for help with any sort of phobias, ocd, anxiety. Again, this is all fear based and discomfort based. Sometimes that discomfort doesn't even feel like fear. It's just, you know, your brain telling you not interested in that thing or not attracted to that person or I'm not doing that. But I promise you this pattern will grow and it will get worse. And so it's important to know what to do with it so that you can build comfort, you can stop fear from affecting your life, your job, your relationships, your ability to travel and really grow and enjoy your life. So I hope this was helpful. Check out the link below if you want more help with this and we'll talk to you next time.
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