Exposure-Based CBT
Break free from anxiety and OCD with exposure-based CBT. This powerful therapy method, backed by extensive research, helps you gradually face your fears in a safe and supportive environment. By learning to tolerate anxiety without engaging in safety behaviors or compulsions, you can regain control of your thoughts and actions, leading to a more fulfilling life.
What is Exposure Therapy?
Exposure is a procedure in which you purposely confront objects or situations that prompt distress and stay in those situations long enough for your anxiety to decrease by itself. You may believe that your discomfort will last forever unless you avoid or escape such situations. You may feel as if you couldn’t handle such a situation. As you will find out, this is not true. At first, you can expect to feel anxiety or discomfort. After exposure practice, though, such situations will no longer make you feel as uncomfortable as they once did. This process is called habituation.
If habituation works, you may wonder why you haven’t relieved your distress already through many encounters with situations that provoked obsessions and anxiety. Simply provoking an obsession or anxious trigger is not enough. Exposure to the obsession or anxiety trigger and the resultant distress must be done for a long enough time for the distress to diminish on its own. In addition, exposure must be done repeatedly.
Other aspects of exposure treatment may include: ritual prevention, reducing safety behaviors, reducing accommodations made by others, minimizing or eliminating reassurance seeking, and cognitive restructuring.
Who is Exposure Therapy for?
Diagnoses/Clinical Issues:
- Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
- Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
- Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD)
- Panic Disorder
- Social Phobia/Anxiety
- Specific Phobias
- Separation Anxiety
- School Refusal/Anxiety
- Body Dysmorphia
- Trichoytillomania/Excoriation
- Hoarding Disorder
- Illness Anxiety
- ARFID
Ages:
At Apollo, we treat ages 6 and up.
We utilize special adaptations and protocols to better suite the needs of children and teens seeking treatment. Learn more about anxiety and OCD in kids here!
Protocols We Use
- Exposure Response Prevention (ExRP)
- Prolonged Exposure Therapy (PET)
- Unified Protocol for Transdiagnostic
- Treatment of Emotional Disorders
- S.P.A.C.E. (Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions)
Other exposure based manuals and protocols specific to various clinical issues.
Length of Treatment
Protocols and clinical issues/diagnoses vary regarding length of treatment. However, overall, exposure treatment is a fairly intensive, but short term approach to addressing these issues and seeing a clinically significant reduction in symptoms.
On average, treatment length is 2-4 months. Sessions are generally 60 minutes in length and may occur weekly or twice per week depending on the specific protocol and diagnosis being addressed.
Our staff will be able to help create an individualized treatment plan that meets your needs!
