How To Do An Exposure For Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)

Exposure Therapy For OCD In Allen Texas

Most things I have read online try to explain exposure and response prevention therapy for OCD in a confusing way. My hope is to help as many individuals as I can with my videos.

​I have created this video to help those struggling with OCD understand what they can do to help with their obsessions and compulsions. 

How to do an exposure in Allen Texas

Therapist for OCD in Allen Texas

Raw transcription of the video

​hi my name is Nathan Peterson and today I wanted to give you an example of how to use exposure and response prevention as you can see here I am standing next to a bridge I thought it would be helpful to show you guys that exposures and OCD is not only about washing hands and organizing things but instead it can actually be so much more I find that many individuals that I work with have very intrusive thoughts that are sometimes completely random that they might be enjoying the time out here with their family and see a bridge and their thought their brain might say hey you know what if you cross that bridge something bad might happen and sometimes they don't know what that bad thing might be they just know that they had that intrusive thought and so the options are find another way around don't cross the bridge avoid these are all the compulsions that they might do if we were using exposure and response prevention what it might look like is hey REE actually maybe we don't even across the whole bridge just yet but we could we might sit there at the bridge and say I might stand there on the bridge and say hey you know what not something bad may or may not happen I'm not going to come up with a conclusion about it I'm not going to say it's not going to happen not gonna say it is gonna happen I could I'm more actually just looking at maybe maybe nots and my goal is to actually feel uncomfortable I want to feel anxiety on purpose and allow that anxious feeling to go down without trying to figure it out I'm not trying to convince myself that it's gonna be alright instead I you know how an explosion might be is I might just be standing next to this bridge and possibly touching it and saying yep something bad may or may not happen we'll see I guess I'll never know for sure something bad may you know that happened and I'm gonna sit there and I'm gonna pay attention to my distress or anxiety level and I'm gonna say you know I'm gonna sit here and tell that feeling has been reduced to a number or a level where I can actually handle a little a little bit better some people go to you know halfway points people just go until they are not really feeling much to stress and once that is good you can see hey can I go any further with this maybe I can actually cross the bridge at this point each person is so different in the way that they might do these exposures but that's a simple way to kind of explain exposure and response prevention you think about do some type of action allow yourself to sit there with that uncomfortableness without trying to fix it make sure you're not doing any compulsions during these moments don't fix it don't try to reason with yourself how nothing bad is ever gonna happen you're not trying to figure any of this out instead you're actually just saying you know I'm gonna live uncertain not gonna figure this out and just let it be and yes it's uncomfortable and yes it sounds weird sometimes and it doesn't sound natural and normal to do but that's the nature of exposure and response prevention that's why I love this treatment so much because it is different and when people use it we're actually teaching our brains that maybe we're not really in danger our brains say we're in danger but maybe we're not and that's the good part about exposure and response prevention is that you are essentially changing this alarm system in your head that says you are to say you know what I'm gonna test test my theory out and find out that most of the time the bad things might not actually happen but we're always willing to take that risk so thank you very much you