Reddit reviews Exposure Therapy for Anxiety: Principles and Practice

This is absolutely the right thing to do for unwanted intrusive thoughts. Exposing yourself to the thoughts will help to make them lose power over you. Also, when these thoughts are in your head deliberately (during exposure), it's a lot more difficult to perform mental compulsions or rituals that you'd otherwise use to try and get rid of the thought, this is exposure and response prevention for your thoughts with a little different rationale. The rationale sounds a little like ACT like others have said, which is related to CBT. Exposure and response prevention and ACT are pretty compatible, but I don't want to bore you with all of that.

Source: clinical psych grad student, studying anxiety disorders and their treatment for 4+ years now.

http://www.amazon.com/Exposure-Therapy-Anxiety-Principles-Practice/dp/146250969X

The above book (p. 193-194 to be exact) contains the rationale for what your therapist is doing. It is written by three of the most knowledgeable CBT for anxiety researchers on the planet. The 1st author, Jon Abramowitz, is the president elect of ABCT (the world organization for CBT) for 2014-2015.

tl;dr: This stuff is CBT exposure with a splash of an ACT-ey rationale given. This is legit as far as being scientifically-based treatment. Hope this helps!

What kind of background do you have with exposure therapy? Are you looking to learn about it in general? Are you curious about how to approach it with a specific person in mind? I ask, since that might help point you in some good direction.

"Traditional" exposure therapy relies heavily addressing negative reinforcement (operant conditioning), with an emphasis on habituation. Having a solid understanding of how negative reinforcement fuels anxiety disorders is a fundamental starting place in this line of work. Since exposure therapy works by attempting to extinguish a fear response through habituation, understanding this process becomes important not only for your own knowledge, but for psycheducation to help your clients/patients understand why you want them to do the things you'll ask them to do (e.g., face their fears).

It's worth noting that the habituation model isn't the only way to approach exposure therapy. Michelle Craske's article on inhibitory learning provides some additional context on enhancing exposure work and offers some useful insights that move beyond the habituation model. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) provides another school of thought involving exposure work, but as that's outside of my area of expertise I'm hesitant to recommend books there. However, anything by Steven Hayes is bound to be a good way to learn more about ACT


Within the habituation realm, Exposure Therapy for Anxiety Disorders would be a good place to start, as it gives a broad overview of the concepts and begins delving into specifics.

Beyond that, however, my suggestion would be to focus on learning about exposure and response prevention (ERP), particularly for OCD. The concepts here apply to every other anxiety disorder (although certain adjustments need to be made in certain situations, such as patients with BDD or PTSD). OCD is simultaneously simple and complex to treat with ERP. The principles are straightforward (i.e., response prevention aimed towards compulsions, exposure aimed to obsessions and avoidance), but building and designing the appropriate treatment plans takes a solid understanding of both the process of ERP and a patient's individual symptoms. Two great places to start are The "Treatments That Work" book on OCD, which is part of the reading list for the International OCD foundation's Behavior Therapy Training Institute (BTTI), as well as Johnathan Grayson's book, Freedom from OCD, which I recommend to all of my patients with OCD.

/edit - spelling