Alester Brown

How Exposure Therapy Can Help With Intrusive Thoughts

The inability to control your thoughts can be a challenging thing to face. Many people who experience intrusive thoughts feel as though they are out of control completely. This can lead to depression, anxiety, and a worsening of the original problem of intrusive thoughts and obsessive thinking.

For some people, intrusive thoughts are a component of OCD symptoms. OCD, or obsessive-compulsive disorder, is a medical condition that leads to feelings of being incomplete. This, in turn, causes individuals affected by OCD symptoms to repeat actions over and over, engage in obsessive thinking over mundane events, and act in compulsive ways that can generate abnormal or even harmful behavior.

What is Exposure Therapy?

Exposure therapy is a therapeutic approach that involves exposing someone to a thing or environment that elicits fear or other strong emotions. The goal is to condition the affected individual so that they become comfortable with the thing or environment. Exposure therapy is usually undertaken gradually with exposure levels slowly being ramped up as progress is made.

The Benefits of Exposure Therapy in Treating OCD

While exposure therapy is often utilized to overcome fears, it can also be beneficial in the treatment of OCD. By exposing someone to a thing or environment that is the focus of obsessive thoughts, the person may grow used to the thing or environment. In this way, the object of interest becomes mundane and obsessive thoughts cease.

This method can't be used in all scenarios simply due to physical and logistical barriers. For example, if a person is obsessing over the possibility of their house burning down, there's no way to expose the person to a burning house in a safe manner.

A therapist could, however, allow someone with OCD and fears of a burning house to visit with a firefighter, discuss safety measures provided by smoke detectors, and review objective safety statistics of house fires. In doing this, it may quiet the obsessive thinking, allowing the person with OCD to stop obsessing or acting compulsively in preparation for a perceived threat that may not exist.

Author Resource:-

Alester Brown writes about physiotherapy. She advises people on health care, online therapy, anxiety discussion groups & depression message boards. You can find her thoughts at online therapist blog.