Danielle Thornton, an anxiety and OCD recovery coach, explains why ERP reliably works when done right. The two biggest mistakes: performing compulsions during exposure and skipping practice. She's worked with people since 2018 and points to testimonials and courses for evidence.
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Welcome back. My name is Danielle Thornton. I'm an anxiety and OCD recovery coach who's recovered from anxiety, multiple subsets of ocd, even depression, and I help others do the same. So today I want to talk a little bit about some proof that ERP works. If you are afraid to try erp, don't be. It actually makes things better. If you've tried ERP and it didn't work for you, there are some very specific reasons, because it does always work when we do it properly and we stick with it. ERP is a way of life. It's not something we do and stop. Just like physical health, we have to continue to eat healthy and exercise if we want to stay healthy. The same is true for erp. But I want to talk a little bit about some proof that it does work, because sometimes we need that we need that encouragement. The first piece of proof that I have for you is it has gotten me to the recovery stage and by continuing to use ERP very quickly and automatically. Now I stay here. I also have been working with other people with OCD since 2018, and I've never seen ERP not work again when it's done properly and when it's done consistently. So I'm going to provide you with a link in the description below to my testimonial page. You're going to see a lot of different testimonials organized by subset that is going to show you that it does work. Now, I know you're going to have doubts. OCD is called the doubting disease for a reason, and that's okay. You're going to have doubts. Doubt is normal. Uncertainty is normal. It's just a matter of what we do with that. So I want to talk to you a little bit about through my coaching journey again, I've never had somebody do the things that I teach them and they come back to me and say it's not working. Ever. When somebody struggles and they're like, well, I'm doing the exposure, but it's not working. There's a very good reason. He always works unless compulsions are involved. So when I say properly and consistent consistently, first let's talk about the properly piece. You have to be doing exposure and response prevention, right? So if you're trying to do exposure, but you're doing compulsions, it's not going to work very well, right? If you're trying to do an imaginal exposure exercise, but you're ruminating and thinking you're actually not doing erp, if you're doing an in vivo exposure, but you're also doing other safety or avoidant techniques. Again, it's not going to work very well. So all you have to do is a quick shift. Again, this is why I always suggest learning ERP from myself, a program or a specialist. You can teach it to you thoroughly because learning it properly is so important. And having a course or a program or a coach or a therapist teach it to you properly is so important because again, you're going to use it for the rest of your life. And so being able to say, okay, this is working, this isn't, and it's a quick shift, it's just, you know, that person telling you, okay, here's what you're doing, here's what you need to do differently and you'll shift right back to it working. Now let's talk about the consistency piece. Again, if you are trying to practice ERP and you're practicing this much of the time, it's going to be effective this much of the time, right? But if your compulsions are really high, you're not going to start to feel a lot better because your compulsions are really high. The recovery stage is when your compulsions are at zero. And the way that you help bring those compulsions down is more exposure, actually. So that's it. Once you correct those two things, ERP is going to work very well for you. It's, it doesn't mean that it's going to go perfectly, that you're going to do it perfectly, or that you aren't going to have ups and downs. But this is how our brain learns, is through trial and error, through making mistakes and correcting ourselves. And this is why it's so important to have a coach or a therapist that can help you understand where you're going wrong and recorrect. And that's all you need to do, is learn how to recorrect, correct yourself. I'm not kidding here. ERP works every time. We just have to learn how to do it properly. So I want to provide you guys with, with some proof of this, of a lot of the people that have provided me feedback over the years. And I started to ask for more feedback to provide more of that to you guys. Because I hear it every day from the people I work with every day. People feeling better, doing better, going through the OCD recovery fundamentals course and really loving it, going through the heal your relationship OCD course and really loving it and getting better, learning things that they didn't know before. So check out the link in the description below and go to your OCD subset and and see what's there. Again, a lot of people are getting better little by little by little. And you can too. It is possible. It happens. I've been in the recovery stage for years now. And you can get there too. Don't get discouraged. Keep hope. Keep moving forward. That's all you need to do. We'll talk to you really soon.
