Centering Self-Compassion work within the Exposure & Response Prevention (ERP) model to better the lives of people living with anxiety disorders and OCD.

Individual consultation and training hour for your needs as a clinician.

In this live synchronous CEU training through Cascadia CEU, Sarah offers insight into assessing and treating anxiety disorders and OCD using evidence-based practices.

Self-care can often feel inaccessible and expensive in the lives of health care providers. Reframing self-compassion practice as an act of self-care can improve your well-being and decrease burnout! Attend this one hour online training to learn about the components of self-compassion and learn some daily practices to live it!

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.

ERP therapy can be very intimidating for anxiety and OCD sufferers. Using art based interventions can be used effectively within exposure and response prevention therapy. Art therapy can provide many benefits to an individual’s therapy. CBT and ERP can be further strengthened in efficacy by using art-based exploration of cognitive strategies, experiences of symptoms, exposure material to fears, and motivations for engaging in therapy.

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. Self-compassion, like exposure and response prevention trials, creates new pathways for thoughts in the brain.