Understand the cycle
We map triggers, predictions, physical alarm, avoidance, safety behaviors, compulsions, and short-term relief.
Exposure Therapy & ERP
Fear changes through experience, not reassurance alone.
Exposure Therapy helps people approach feared situations, sensations, memories, or thoughts in a planned and supported way. ERP applies exposure with response prevention specifically to the OCD cycle.
Exposure and ERP
Similar learning principles, different clinical applications.
For Panic, Phobias, and Social Anxiety, exposure helps the brain update fear predictions. For OCD, ERP also focuses on preventing the visible and mental compulsions that temporarily relieve distress and strengthen doubt.
Choose a meaningful target
Exposure practices are selected collaboratively and connected to what fear or OCD has limited.
Approach intentionally
Practice may involve real situations, images, thoughts, uncertainty, social behavior, or physical sensations.
Change the usual response
For OCD, response prevention means not completing the ritual or reassurance pattern. For Anxiety, it often means reducing escape and safety behaviors.
Repeat and vary
New learning becomes more flexible when practice occurs across different situations and imperfect conditions.
What Exposure Is and Is Not
From fear-driven restriction to experience-based confidence.
Flooding or forceBeing surprised, coerced, or pushed into an experience without collaboration.
Planned practiceChoosing meaningful steps with informed consent, preparation, and adjustment.
Proving nothing bad can happenSeeking absolute certainty that the feared outcome is impossible.
Learning you can respondBuilding flexibility around uncertainty, discomfort, and real-world choice.
Enduring distress for its own sakeUsing intensity as the measure of whether therapy is working.
Creating new informationDesigning practice around the learning the brain needs.
Explore the concerns Exposure Therapy & ERP may help address.
What could become available if fear or OCD made fewer decisions for you?
A free 15-minute consultation can help clarify whether Exposure Therapy or ERP fits the pattern you are navigating.
In Our Office in Portland • Online throughout Oregon
