A short YouTube talk by anxiety and OCD recovery coach Danielle Jhiani explaining why exposure (and response prevention, ERP) reduces compulsive behaviours in OCD. She defines compulsions as repetitive behaviours performed to relieve discomfort or seek certainty/perfection, contrasts compulsions with exposure (moving toward uncertainty/imperfect situations), and encourages practice and program enrollment for guided ERP.
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Foreign.
Welcome back. My name is Danielle Gianni. I'm an anxiety and OCD recovery coach, helping people reach lifetime recovery for anxiety and ocd, just like I have, so you can have a happy, healthy life and amazing relationships. Today I want to tell you more about why exposure helps you to stop doing compulsions. And remember, OCD is obsessive compulsive disorder. When you stop the obsessing and you stop the compulsions, you no longer experience symptoms of ocd. First, you need to know what compulsions are. Compulsions are any behavior you do in response to an uncomfortable thought, feeling or life situation that you do repetitively to get rid of the discomfort. Maybe you're trying to gain certainty or perfection in life. And when I say perfection, I mean for things to look a certain way. The reality is there is no such thing as certainty or perfection. It does not exist. When somebody thinks they're certain about something, there's no hundred percent certainty there. They just think they are. They're choosing not to doubt. Some people are just stronger in their choices and in their mindsets. Now, the reason why exposure is so beneficial is because it's the complete opposite of a compulsion. Remember, you're here and OCD is trying to suck you into getting certainty and perfection. And exposure is leaning into or moving towards the discomfort, the uncertainty or the imperfection. So you can't be doing both at the same time. You can be flip flopping back and forth between compulsions and exposure. So the more exposure that you do, the less compulsions you're doing. Not only that, exposure is pulling your brain into the uncertainty and the imperfection. So it's going to take OCD longer to pull you back into needing certainty and needing perfection because you're going in the opposite direction. Every time you do exposure, you're challenging ocd. It's just trying to protect you. It's a part of your brain that's trying to keep you safe, wanting you to move towards comfort and away from discomfort. But that's not always healthy. So every time you respond to an uncomfortable thought, feeling or situation with exposure and then response prevention, you're going to be retraining your brain that you don't need perfection and you don't need certainty. You don't need it to continue to give you these intrusive thoughts. You don't need it to continue to focus on this subject. And that's why ERP works so well. You're going to be teaching your brain that you don't need it to give you intrusive thoughts to hyper focus, to scan for danger. You can handle whatever happens in life. You're going to build comfort with all of these topics, but you're not going to get there by responding in the ways that you've been responding. It's not your fault you haven't known what to do. You're doing the best you can. You need to learn what to do differently and I can teach that to you through my programs and through this channel. It's a matter of learning and then a lot of practice. As you do this, you are training your brain what it needs to focus on and what it doesn't. And the great news about that is your brain's going to start doing and thinking in this new way more automatically. So remember, compulsions are a choice and instead of the compulsions you want to do a lot more exposure. If you've learned exposure, keep doing it. If you haven't, check the link in the description below and join one of my programs so you can learn it effectively. Exposure works every time. And if it's not working for you, there's a very good reason that I can help you figure out in just a couple minutes as to why it's not working. Essentially, there's some sort of compulsion getting in the way of it working because it works every time when we do exposure and response prevention. Now, the real method teaches some additional tools on top of this that has helped me get to and stay in the recovery stage. But the basis is still ERP and it's something that you're going to use for the rest of your life. So my recovery tip for today is to keep practicing exposure. Every time you get a thought, a feeling, or a real life situation that causes discomfort, notice how it works little by little. Maybe not huge major changes, but little changes that add up to big changes over time. Please comment, like and subscribe. Let me know what you thought about this video or what challenges you have with this and we will talk to you very soon.
