Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

A very well researched treatment for OCD is Exposure and Response Prevention (ExRP) therapy. The treatment combines a behavioral strategy that reduces over time an anxiety response to the obsessive thoughts, while preventing rituals so that real-life situations reduce their potential to trigger the anxiety. Sometimes the exposure is done through repeated thinking of a set of obsessive thoughts, while other times it is done with a recording of those thoughts played repeatedly. There is research that suggests that the best outcomes occur when 90 minutes of exposure to the thoughts is done once per day over several days. Contact us if you have OCD and want to consider ExRP: www.ccbtcolumbus.com

Barlow's Theory of Emotional Problems

Dr. Barlow, the well known psychologist who developed many evidenced based therapies for anxiety, argues in his theory that experiences, often very early ones, create problems with the neuro-physiologic mechanisms that help us all to manage our emotions. The outcomes are problems with managing, or regulating, our feelings When the feelings become overwhelmingly beyond our control, the theory argues that it causes us to avoid or escape situations that are coincidental to the feelings. Usually, something in the situation is a vague reminder of our earlier experiences when we learned to react so intensely. The theory also argues that the impact of the learning experiences on our thinking is excessive estimations of the risk of harm that we assign to situations, people, future events, and ourselves. These mistaken ideas are often called cognitive distortions in CBT.

At CCBT, we believe that Dr. Barlow's theory is evidence-based and we use it to inform the approach we take to treatment. The theory may appear simple, but its application is far from simple; however, it is probably on-target to a great degree.