How Can Exposure and Response Prevention Help My OCD?

All mental health issues can impact peoples’ lives, but for the millions of Americans who are diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), life can be particularly challenging. 

OCD can be highly disruptive and often ends up controlling your life, making you a prisoner of your uncontrollable thoughts and behaviors.

The good news is that there are solutions for releasing the grip that OCD has on your life, and topping that list is exposure and response prevention (ERP). Here at Northern Virginia Psychiatric Group, our team has had great success using ERP to help our patients break from their OCD, giving them a new freedom in life.

So, if you feel like your OCD is controlling you, read on to learn how you take back control through exposure and response prevention.

Why OCD is so disruptive

If you have OCD, the following information is probably not news to you, but it might help confirm your own experiences.

About 1.2% of the adult population in the United States has OCD, and women outpace men by more than 300%. Though each person with OCD has their own characteristics and struggles, most people with OCD experience two things:

1. Obsession

This side of the OCD equation is defined by the American Psychiatric Association as, “Unwanted, intrusive, recurrent, and persistent thoughts, urges, or images that cause distressing emotions such as anxiety, fear, or disgust.”

1. Compulsion

These are the behaviors that are in response to the obsessions in an attempt to relieve the obsession.

The classic example of these two sides together is a fear of contamination and illness that drives a person to be obsessive about cleanliness, so they wash their hands repeatedly. 

We do want to point out that a person with OCD doesn’t always have the two sides — some people only have obsessions. 

That said, we see far more people who are struggling with both the obsessions and the compulsions, which can be highly disruptive together. For example, driving home several times to check and recheck that the door is locked or the stove is turned off can prevent you from getting to work or school.

How exposure and response prevention works

One of the go-to therapies for our clients with OCD is exposure and response prevention, which is a form of cognitive behavioral therapy.

As the name suggests, the concept behind ERP is fairly straightforward — we expose you to your OCD trigger, and then we work on preventing your usual response. 

Many people with OCD are forced to face their obsessions and fears on a daily basis, but with ERP, we’re doing it in a controlled and safe environment. In this therapeutic setting, our goals are to:

• Show you that the intrusive thoughts and fears aren’t real and that you’re safe
• Get you to stop fighting your OCD by practicing acceptance
• Habituate you into not responding or reacting

ERP is gradual, but highly rewarding, work that can help you manage your obsessions and fears in a way that’s far less disruptive as we work toward preventing distracting behaviors.

Not only can ERP change the way you face and react to your fear, it’s also been shown to manage co-occurring anxiety and depression. For example, a meta-analysis reported that ERP reduced depressive and anxiety symptoms in OCD patients by 44.2% and 47.8% respectively.

If you’d like to explore for yourself how exposure and response prevention can help you put your OCD in the backseat, we invite you to call our office in Fairfax, Virginia, at 571-748-4588, or contact us online to schedule an appointment today.