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Can you perform exposure therapy on yourself?
But in general, it is possible to perform exposure therapy yourself. If you truly believe you can handle exposure therapy, it is one of the most powerful ways to reduce anxiety. During exposure therapy, a therapist would expose the person to these types of social settings to help them become comfortable in them. It’s thought that there are four primary ways that exposure therapy may help: Emotional processing. There are 4 major theories that attempt to explain the psychological mechanisms of exposure therapy: habituation, extinction, emotional processing, and self-efficacy (Table 2). Habituation theory purports that after repeated presentations of a stimulus, the response to that stimulus will decrease. A fear-inducing situation activates a small group of neurons in the amygdala. Exposure therapy silences these fear neurons, causing them to be less active. As a result of this reduced activity, fear responses are alleviated. In fact, it could backfire and make the patient even more frightened of that thing. This is particularly true of exposure therapy, which can backfire badly, but even the tape recordings or constant flow of images involved in flooding can be too much for some patients. Although exposure is safe, it may in fact place patients at more risk compared to traditional talk therapies. Patients are asked to do a variety of “uncomfortable” exercises such as touching toilets and animals, purposely inducing panic symptoms (hyperventilation, spinning, exercise, etc.)
Can you do exposure response therapy on your own?
It sounds difficult, but you don’t have to go through it alone. It’s best to do ERP with a licensed therapist who specializes in OCD and ERP. That person will have the knowledge and experience to help you understand your experiences, fears, and goals and teach you how to empower yourself. To do ERP effectively, you’ll need to have a custom therapy plan. Therapists that specialize in OCD have the training needed to design ERP exercises that will be most successful. A trained therapist will take the time to understand your symptoms and create a custom ERP therapy plan around them. ERP can be helpful for individuals with diagnoses of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), Social Anxiety Disorder, Panic Disorder, and other anxiety-related disorders. A concrete example of ERP Therapy in action would involve someone with OCD who has issues with germs. They might be asked to touch a toilet seat and then refrain from washing their hands. Treating OCD with ERP therapy has even been the topic of some reality shows over the past few years. ERPA exercises address each one of these events. First, you select a trigger for a particular obsession-compulsion combination and then practice exposure to this trigger. During the exposure, the next step is to refrain from rituals and instead practice awareness of the distress. Researchers found that mindfulness meditation had “a significant and large effect” on OCD symptoms, specifically on thought-action fusion (again, the belief that having a thought is the same as acting on the thought), and the ability to “let go” of unwanted thoughts.