Anxiety and OCD Recovery WITHOUT Exposure Therapy with Christina
On this episode I'm joined by Christina Ennabe, a licensed therapist and coach supporting people with anxiety and OCD. Christina shares a unique perspective, blending her professional expertise with personal lived experience of OCD.
Christina’s journey with anxiety and OCD began long before her professional career. Looking back on her childhood, she remembers being an anxious child, with traits that she now identifies as early signs of OCD. Despite this, Christina didn't receive an OCD diagnosis until adulthood. Christina now works with clients around the world supporting them with their OCD recovery!
OCD recovery is absolutely possible with the right treatment and support, and on this episode, we explore what recovery can look like without traditional exposure therapy.
Anxiety or OCD?
During our conversation we first touched on the difference between Anxiety and OCD. Anxiety and OCD present very similarly, so it can be tricky when trying to navigate between an Anxiety and OCD diagnosis.
While Anxiety is often centered around worries about current issues or the future, OCD is marked by intrusive, unwanted thoughts, images, or urges (obsessions). OCD leads to excessive and repetitive behaviors, also known as compulsions, that we do in response to our thoughts or our "What Ifs". They aren't just physical, but mental too.
While there is a lot of overlap between Anxiety and OCD, recognizing and treating these differences is so important to accessing the right treatment for you.
Therapies for OCD
Thankfully, there are many approaches and therapy types for treating OCD that can help people manage their symptoms and lead happier, more fulfilling lives.
One of the more well known therapies is Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) therapy, which involves a structured approach where individuals are gradually exposed to their feared thoughts, images, or situations while resisting the urge to perform their usual compulsive behaviors. While this type of therapy is hugely helpful to lots of people, Christina has often found that many of her clients have had a difficult experience with exposures.
Christina’s story and experience with her clients, shows that you can recover from OCD without just using ERP therapy. Although ERP is often seen as the gold standard , Christina found a lot of help through Inference-Based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (ICBT). This therapy helped her build confidence and trust in herself, offering a more well-rounded way to manage her symptoms.
ICBT helps with OCD by tackling the way people misinterpret doubtful situations as real threats. Instead of focusing on specific obsessive thoughts, this type of therapy looks at the reasoning behind those thoughts. It helps individuals learn to tell the difference between what's real and what's just in their imagination. This shift in perspective reduces the power of obsessive thoughts, empowering individuals to build confidence in themselves and significantly improve their ability to manage and overcome OCD symptoms.
Christina stresses the need to recognize and validate different treatment methods, as what works best can vary from person to person. Her experience has shown that with the right support and strategies, managing and recovering from OCD is possible without relying only on ERP.
So, if ERP is something you have struggled with, or if you would like to learn more about what Christina teaches, be sure to listen to the full episode, or you can connect with Christina below!
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