Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) therapy is a form of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) that was developed specifically to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) . ERP is a behavioral therapy that gradually exposes people to situations designed to provoke a person’s obsessions in a safe environment. The goal of ERP is to help individuals confront the stimuli that trigger distress related to their obsessions while also resisting the urge to perform compulsions in an attempt to reduce their distress. ERP therapy alters OCDs pattern by addressing both obsessions and compulsions. A hallmark of ERP is that it doesn’t completely remove distressing situations and thoughts, as distress cannot be eliminated from someone’s life altogether, and doing so would make it impossible for patients to cope during everyday situations.
ERP therapy encourages individuals to face their fears and let obsessive thoughts occur without ‘putting them right’ or ‘neutralizing’ them. For ERP to be successful, it's critical to start with the obsessions that cause the least relative distress, and the patient and therapist can work to make incremental progress, ensuring that the therapy member learns response prevention skills without exposing themselves to too much distress to start. ERP is the most commonly used therapy in many other parts of the world, but in the UK, the treatment recommended is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which includes elements of ERP but also offers the benefit of cognitive therapy, making it a more in-depth package than ERP alone.
ERP works by breaking the conditioned response between obsessions and compulsions, according to a behavioral perspective. Although ERP is a form of psychotherapy, it focuses on actions and “doing” rather than identifying and understanding feelings, which is the focus of traditional talk therapies. ERP can be more effective than traditional approaches because it is designed specifically for OCD, whereas CBT is an umbrella term that refers to a number of therapies used to treat a variety of disorders.
