What Is ERP Therapy?
So, what is ERP Therapy? According to Surles, Exposure and Response therapy helps people to manage their obsessive triggers and stop completing compulsions for relief, which provides a sense of control.1
Overtime, ERP helps to stop the cycle of having obsessions, and following up with compulsions. ERP therapy helps to address the root cause of your obsessions, so you can understand why you have those obsessive thoughts. This understanding, makes dealing with obsessive thoughts so much easier. It can be scary to try ERP therapy, as you really have to reflect within. You have to practice thinking about or doing something, and not following up with a compulsion.
Incase you are still a bit confused about what ERP is, I want to share a personal example. When I was in therapy for my OCD, one of the first ERP practices we did, was geared towards overcoming my contamination OCD. The “Exposure” part of this practice was me touching a door handle. The “Response” part was that I had to sit back down afterwards, and not wash my hands, and reflect on how I was feeling in the moment. For me, ERP therapy got a little more complicated at times. This was because a lot of my other obsessive thoughts were not accompanied by a specific physical compulsion, just rumination and panic attacks. In this way, we changed how we approached ERP. Instead, for these thoughts, we started practicing what if scenarios. For example, what if I chop my finger off? What if I drive my car off the road? Applying these thoughts to a what if scenario, helped to find the underlying fear beneath all of these thoughts.
If you are struggling with OCD currently, you are not alone and it does get better. Please do not use this as a mental health guidance resource, as I am NOT a professional, just someone who has lived with OCD ever since I can remember. Please go to the Resources Page on my blog if you are facing a mental health crisis or need to speak with someone urgently, there are mental health resources there. If you have any questions, comments, or just want to contribute to the conversation, please comment down below. Thank you for reading!
Surles, Taneia. 2024. “What Happens in ERP Therapy? Exercises & Examples.” NOCD. November 9, 2024. https://www.treatmyocd.com/blog/erp-examples.
The truth is, is that for most people, regular talk therapy isn’t going to help deal with OCD. Instead, there is a specific type of behavioral therapy that was created specifically to treat OCD. That is ERP, or Exposure and Response Therapy.
I wanted to talk about my experience with ERP Therapy to start. Early on in life, many doctors didn’t realize that I was struggling with OCD. I displayed all signs of Generalized Anxiety Disorder, which is what they diagnosed me with. Almost immediately after my diagnosis, I attended Talk Therapy. I saw multiple specialists, on a regular basis, and none of the work we were doing in our sessions seemed to help. I thought something was wrong with me because this form of therapy wasn’t working. I practiced the breathing exercises, I practiced mindfulness, none of it worked. Eventually, I gave up on therapy. I continued to have the panic attacks that followed the rumination of an obsessive thought, I continued to carry out compulsions, and eventually, I learned to mask my struggles so well, that even I thought I was fine. I didn’t need therapy, right?
I was wrong. I was just being treated for the wrong thing, using the wrong kind of therapy for my needs. When I eventually couldn’t mask my struggles anymore, and my obsessive thoughts got bad at the beginning of high school, I went and saw a psychiatrist. That was when I was finally diagnosed with OCD. Although I was discouraged by my previous experiences with therapy, I began seeing a therapist again. Within a first couple of sessions, my therapist realized that the best treatment for me would most likely be ERP Therapy or Exposure and Response Therapy. This would end up being a successful treatment for me, and helped me to actually get to the root cause of the obsessive thoughts I was having.
