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Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a short-term concrete therapy that has repeatedly been shown to be the most effective at treating Anxiety, OCD, and OC Spectrum Disorders. CBT works to challenge thought patterns and behaviors which maintain anxiety by putting focus on problem-solving and skill-building. CBT differs from traditional psychotherapy in that both therapist and clients play active roles in identifying the problems and creating goals to alleviate them.
The therapist will work with clients to identify and create a list of their anxiety provoking symptoms. From here, the therapist will have clients face their fears through a form of CBT called Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP). Here clients are asked to expose themselves to their worries while learning to tolerate their heightened sense of anxiety. The therapist helps clients to recognize their worries as being out-of-proportion to the actual thought or object. ERP is done in the office during therapy sessions as well as weekly homework. It is important clients not only practice with the therapist, but to learn how to apply what they have learned on their own.
There are some instances in which ERP is not appropriate, thus a therapist may use Imaginal Exposure. This is when clients write a “worse case” scenario story about their fears and obsessions. Clients then experience exposure to their fear by reading the story a multitude of times. Again, through exposure clients learn to identify their thoughts as unrealistic and learn to tolerate their anxiety.
By engaging in CBT, clients can become de-sensitized to those thoughts, fears, and obsessions which they were once sensitized to, thus experiencing a decreased sense of anxiety.
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