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Healing Core Fears: The Power of Self-Compassion As Exposure

Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) is the gold standard of treatment for Anxiety, OCD, and Specific Phobias. At the root of these “doubt disorders” are core fears, which are understood as the drivers of the thought patterns, negative self-beliefs, and compulsions. People living with “doubt disorders” like Anxiety, OCD and Specific phobias can experience chronic invalidation, intense guilt, a heightened sense of responsibility, questioning of their reality/memory/symptoms, engage in self-punishment, feel intense shame, and are stigmatized. It can take an average of 17 years for individuals to receive therapy treatment from the onset of symptoms (Ziegler et al. 2021).

Self-compassion has been shown to increase therapy efficacies across modalities (Wetterneck et al. 2013). While it might seem logical that therapy outcomes are impacted by self-compassion abilities, it can be challenging to apply and live these practices! Self-compassion, like exposure and response prevention trials, creates new pathways for thoughts in the brain. However, for many people, especially those in the anxiety-based community, self-compassion does not come naturally and may even bring on discomfort. The practice of self-compassion is correlated with a reduction in symptoms like anxiety, rumination, and depression (Warren et al. 2016). There is much power and healing that compassion can provide. This workshop posits self-compassion work as a primary exposure for treatment of anxiety based diagnoses.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) positions thoughts, feels, and behaviors as simultaneously occurring factors in the human experience. Obsessions, intrusive thoughts, rumination, and negative self-beliefs can feel threatening to the human brain, which is why the urgency to avoid, control, prevent or “get rid of” distress exists and persists. Practicing self-compassion can feel equally dangerous to allow, especially if a person is having deeply troubling obsessions, core fears, and self-beliefs. It can be easy to confuse core fear for core self. OCD is known to attack a person’s values. The content of the obsessions, intrusive thoughts, and diagnosis itself may impact how a person feels about themselves. Classic ERP treatment involves two parts: response prevention and exposure. Response prevention is the active practice of reducing urges to respond to stress. Later in treatment comes the exposure component, which is a sensitive and thoughtful process involving both clinician and client working together to tolerate anxiety-inducing content to allow for new learning. In this course, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of “doubt disorders”; how symptoms, core fears, self-beliefs, and compassion interact; the tenets of self-compassion; the basics of ERP therapy; and be able to apply compassion as the center of ERP treatment. Understanding the nuances of diagnoses and how to implement compassion practices is vital to the healing journey. Drawing on the research and knowledge of Christian Germer, Jonathan Grayson, Russ Harris, Jon Hershfield, Marsha Linehan, Kirstin Neff, Kimberly Quinlan, and more.

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August 25

The Role of Art Therapy in Exposure & Response Prevention Treatment: Exploring Bravery, Fear & The Core Self