ERP Therapy in Austin: What to Expect

I am a provider of ERP therapy in Austin and this blog post will give you an overview of the treatment and what to expect.

ERP Therapy in Austin is the gold standard for treating OCD.

Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) is the gold standard treatment for treating Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD.) This means it is considered the best available and most widely accepted treatment for OCD. Y’all, it works. It sucks. And it works.

ERP Therapy in Austin typically runs 17-20 sessions, and the sessions can be held once weekly, twice weekly, or daily, depending on what someone needs.

The first two sessions of ERP Therapy in Austin include:

• discussion that will help you better understand OCD and its causes

• an outline of the treatment start to finish

• collecting information about your specific situation:

  • how the OCD started and how it’s showing up now

  • your triggers (the obsessions) and how you respond to them (the compulsions)

  • any way you avoid your life so you won’t be triggered

You will start keeping a log of your obsessions and compulsions as they come up in your daily life. This is what I use to make your treatment plan.

You and I will build something called an exposure hierarchy from your logs. This is our roadmap. We start easy and work our way up.

ERP Therapy in Austin has a structured agenda. You’ll know what to expect from day one.

The rest of the sessions of ERP Therapy in Austin will include some combination of the following:

exposure in real life (in vivo) - this will help you confront your OCD triggers, be they objects, words, situations, or images

This is simple but not easy. The goal is to help you confront what you have been avoiding. You will engage with the thing that triggers your distress and your urge to do the thing that relieves the distress. Note: the thing you do doesn’t make you feel good. It just makes you feel less bad. And you are forever at it’s mercy.

Why do it? it sounds awful.

Well, something you encounter in your everyday life is making you so uncomfortable that you either avoid it avoid it altogether or feel so compelled to do something in response that it literally feels like you HAVE to even if you don’t WANT to. This does reduces your distress…temporarily. Until the next trigger. And so on. And so on. How much of your time is this eating up? And for what?

Through exposure, you learn that anxiety eventually decreases on its own, even without rituals and that the feared consequences don’t actually happen. As we go, you find that the thing that used to really bother you somehow doesn’t seem so distressing. You get your life back.

imaginal exposure - if it isn’t practical to do the exposure in real life, you’ll imagine it, including what you fear will happen if you don’t do a compulsion

Same idea as the in vivo exposures and you get to the same place of relief. We go all the way into your core fear and ask “how does it end?” Have you ever repeated a word so much it starts to lose its meaning? That’s what happens here.

response prevention/ritual prevention; ERP therapy= you face the fear and then don’t do the thing. Exposure is facing the fear. Response prevention is not doing the thing.

This is where the magic happens. We get in there and break up the relationship between your distressing thoughts and the thing you feel like you have to do. You eventually get to a “so what?” response to your thoughts and you go about your day. I’m serious. I’ve seen it. You get time back.

processing - we discuss what happens when you face the fear and don’t do the thing

We won’t be doing the things you might have had in other therapies. I won’t be challenging your thoughts because that doesn’t help OCD. I won’t be reassuring you because (as you may have noticed) that doesn’t help OCD either. We know what helps OCD. And it’s ERP. I provide the environment and guidance for you to ultimately learn that your anxiety goes away on its own, even if you don’t do anything.

ERP therapy in Austin is ultimately about learning to live with uncertainty.

You will have exposure homework in between sessions. We’ll do the exposure together in session first so you know exactly what to do, and you’ll then do the same exposure throughout the week on your own.

ERP Therapy in Austin is about learning to tolerate uncertainty.

Exposure sounds really scary. I know. That word carries negative connotations, like being exposed to a disease or a trauma. What we are doing is therapeutic exposure. Exposure can either result in a corrective experience or traumatization. We set it up intentionally so that you have a corrective experience.

Do you remember the TV show Nip/Tuck? It aired on FX during the 2000s. The show centered around two Miami-based plastic surgeons and their dysfunctional lives. There were a lot of graphic surgery scenes. My husband and I got hooked in to the show and watched it all the way through. Initially, we averted our eyes during the surgery scenes because those scenes squicked us both out. But we kept watching the show and eventually noticed that we habituated to the surgery scenes. They didn’t cause the same level of disgust merely through repeated exposure. That’s how it works.

The final sessions of ERP Therapy in Austin are about maintaining your progress and making a plan for the future.

Successful ERP therapy = willingness to tolerate distress in the short-term to reap long-term benefits

Want to give ERP therapy in Austin a shot? Go here to learn read my specialty page about OCD and go here to start the process of scheduling a free 15-minute phone consultation.