A YouTube video transcript by Danielle Thornton (Danielle Jhiani) explaining why talk therapy and general psychotherapy often fail for OCD because they reinforce compulsive behaviors (reassurance-seeking, analyzing, ruminating). The speaker argues that ERP (Exposure and Response Prevention) is the effective treatment, describes how talk therapy can unintentionally reinforce OCD, and offers coaching and group programs for ERP-based recovery.
Chapters
Foreign.
Welcome back. My name is Danielle Thornton. I'm a certified coach and anxiety and OCD specialist. And I help people recover from any OCD subset long term, just like I have today. We're going to talk about why talk therapy and other modalities of therapy do not work for ocd. Now, it's very common to go seek therapy when you're struggling with something, with your mental health. And therapists are helpers. They want to help people. They've all got a certain toolbox and they're going to pull out those tools to try to help anybody that they can. But if you're not trained to recognize OCD number one, or even if you know somebody has OCD but you don't have the ERP skills to teach them, they're going to just try what they have. So talk therapy is a modality of therapy where you talk about the issue. The therapist makes the person comfortable, making them feel heard and able to process their emotions and sometimes even going into, back into the past to figure out the why. This is where psychotherapy comes in, trying to figure out where this came from in hopes that the understanding of that will help the person move forward. These do not work for ocd. Some common compulsions with OCD are to seek reassurance, right? To analyze the thoughts or feelings, try to figure out if they're true, try to figure out the why. Okay? And you're going to do all of these in therapy. The problem is, is when you do compulsions, you may get relief for answers in the short term, but you're engaging with the OCD and it's just going to give you more doubts and intrusive thoughts when you're engaging with it, because certainty and perfection do not exist. And so you might be getting reassurance from the therapist. They're probably giving you reassurance because in a lot of cases that's a good thing to do with ocd. It's not. And they're probably a lot. Again, you're going and talking about it for an hour. So you're giving it another hour, hours worth of attention. You're analyzing it, you're trying to figure it out, you're trying to figure out the root or the why. All, all of these behaviors become very compulsive when it comes to ocd. And you know it's a compulsion when it's hard not to do and it just sends you in a loop. You get the answer in one moment, but you're questioning in the next. The therapist doesn't understand that giving you reassurance is reinforcing the ocd. They don't understand that analyzing it just leads to compulsive ruminating. But they're doing the best they can. So if I give one piece of advice to any of you, it is you have to get ERP treatment. Okay? I've been stuck where you're at and ERP has gotten me to the recovery stage. And I stay here because ERP is something I do every day, meaning everybody uses ERP every day. When it comes to uncertainty and doubts that they have, it becomes very, very automatic. Whether you're working with me or somebody else, I want you to get the right help. There's a lot of modalities out there of therap. Some are effective for some things and some are not effective for some things. So knowing which direction to go into is going to help you save a lot of time, a lot of money and get to that recovery stage quicker. So if you want help with this, I have one on one coaching options and I have group membership options which are very cost effective. My goal is to help as many people get to and stay in that recovery stage. Right. Recovery is possible. I see it every day. We'll talk to you next time.
