Exposure and Response Prevention or ERP is an evidence based therapy that is the gold standard treatment for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and anxiety/panic based disorders. In short, you expose yourself to anxiety provoking stimuli/thoughts (obsession) and then prevent yourself from doing any behaviors (compulsions) that reduce the anxiety (response prevention). Our natural inclination is to try and decrease the anxiety, to get away from it and to try and gain a feeling of certainty. This only serves to reinforce the perceived threat in our brain, feeding the OCD and helping it to get stronger. The goal of ERP is not to get rid of the thoughts or the anxiety, but instead to lean into the discomfort and embrace the uncertainty (“maybe this will happen, maybe it won’t”). This breaks the cycle of reinforcing the threat and teaches our brain, with repetition, that we can handle the anxiety and the perceived threat.
A really simple way to demonstrate this is with the Chinese Finger Trap.
Our natural inclination to remove our fingers from the trap is to pull, but this leads to the trap tightening and our fingers getting stuck. If we lean/push into the trap, going against our natural inclination, we can release our fingers and gain freedom.