To do so, it is important to increase your mindful awareness that these intrusive thoughts and urges are symptoms of a medical disorder. You don't want to do this in a merely superficial way rather, you must work to gain a deep understanding that the feeling that is so bothersome at the moment is an obsessive feeling or a compulsive urge. The critical first step is to learn to recognize obsessive thoughts and compulsive urges. (The first three steps are especially important at the beginning of treatment.) Self-treatment is an essential part of this technique for learning to manage your responses to OCD on a day-to-day basis. The goal is to perform these steps daily. You will use biological knowledge and cognitive awareness to help you perform exposure and response prevention on your own. Managing your fear, in turn, will allow you to control your behavioral responses much more effectively. The basic principle is that by understanding what these thoughts and urges really are, you can learn to manage the fear and anxiety that OCD causes.
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Our treatment differs from classic exposure and response prevention in one important way: We have developed a four-step method that enhances your ability to do exposure and response prevention on your own without a therapist being present. We call our method "biobehavioral" because we use new knowledge about the biological basis of OCD to help you control your anxious responses and to increase your ability to resist the bothersome symptoms of OCD.
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The technique is called response prevention because you learn to prevent your habitual compulsive responses and to replace them with new, more constructive behaviors. We've made some modifications in this method to allow you to do it on your own. In traditional exposure and response prevention, people with OCD learn - under the continuing guidance of a professional therapist - to expose themselves to stimuli that intensify their obsessive thoughts and compulsive urges and then learn how to resist responding to those thoughts and urges in a compulsive manner.įor example, people who obsess irrationally about contamination from dirt may be instructed to hold something dirty in their hands and then not wash for at least three hours. Research has shown that exposure and response prevention are very effective behavior therapy techniques for treating OCD.
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By learning some basic facts about OCD, and recognizing that it is a medical condition that responds to treatment, you will be able to overcome the urges to do compulsive behaviors and will master new ways to cope with bothersome, obsessive thoughts.Īt UCLA, we call this approach "cognitive-biobehavioral self-treatment." The word cognitive is from the Latin word "to know" knowledge plays an important role in this approach to teaching basic behavior therapy techniques. In this manual, I will teach you how to become your own behavioral therapist. The concept of self-treatment as part of a behavioral therapy approach is a major advance. Over the past twenty years, behavior therapy has been shown to be extremely effective in treating obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). If you have obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors, you will be relieved to learn of significant advances in the treatment of this condition. Jeffrey Schwartz's Four Steps for OCD Principles from Brainlock Help Overcome OCD