APTC Blog

If you have been reading my blog posts up to this point you should be aware that doing exposure therapy is a crucial part of overcoming almost any anxiety disorder and especially overcoming OCD. Exposure therapy has many aspects to it, and I have included a pdf file listing what I believe are some of the most important aspects to consider when doing exposures.

As a species we are programmed to scan our environment for danger and then carefully avoid it. When the danger is something physical such as a grizzly bear, avoiding makes perfect sense and is the right choice, but in our current time the dangers we face aren’t usually grizzly bears, but more often things such as giving a presentation at work, paying our taxes, retirement and worrying about who will win the presidential race.

I usually plan my blog posts weeks in advance and then try to follow my schedule, but this week, however, a particular comment made by one of my OCD clients struck me as something I should expand upon. I think it captured many of the challenges people face when dealing with a particular version of OCD.

Safety behaviors provide us with a false sense of security which reinforces the belief that they are actually working and perpetuates the idea that the elephants are real. When we “keep ringing the bell” and our feared consequences don’t happen, we attribute it to the fact that we did a safety behavior, instead of the fact that the elephants weren’t there in the first place.The more we believe the safety behaviors are working, the less likely we are to stop them.

"You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do."