Helping You Find the Courage for OCD Treatment
Helping You Find the Courage for OCD Treatment
Exposure therapy often feels risky, scary, and uncomfortable. The logical part of your brain may tell you the risk is low, but that doesn’t always change how you feel. Before people come to therapy for OCD, they are usually doing a lot of avoidance. It’s human nature to pull away from anything that feels uncomfortable.
Yet in Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), we ask you to face those uncomfortable things on purpose. We’re asking you to do things that feel really hard and really scary.
“Courage is not the absence of fear; courage is fear walking.”
—Susan David, PhD (Emotional Agility, 2016)
Courage is essential to success in OCD treatment. ERP is hard, but OCD is hard too—and at least treatment offers the hope that things can get better (Manetta et al., 2025).
Learning to Live With Uncertainty
When you see me for help with OCD, you are agreeing to live with uncertainty.
Spoiler alert—you already are.
All compulsions and obsessions ultimately fail in their goal of preventing bad things. None of them is a guarantee. You can never do enough to guarantee safety.
You can spend your life performing compulsions and still have bad things happen.
What is possible is learning to cope with whatever happens.
If something happens, you respond.
You adapt.
You find a way forward.
I want you to live your life—and if bad things happen, at least you were having fun until then.
Why Risk It?
Ask yourself:
· What are the pros and cons of taking risks?
· Why would you risk doing something uncomfortable?
· Why haven’t you done it yet?
That third question, I am not asking in a shaming way, but out of curiosity. What about the exposure feels so scary that you haven’t tried it?
Are the things you fear actually avoidable?
Thoughts, Feelings, and the Skill of Coping
I used to tell clients, “A thought is just a thought.” But that phrase can feel dismissive. People have thoughts—some true, some not—and even when you know a thought is unlikely, it doesn’t always change how you feel.
People with OCD are incredibly smart, but logic does not change feelings.
Getting better doesn’t mean eliminating feelings—it means learning to live with them.
Hope, Courage, and Moving Forward
ERP asks you to take a risk.
To face discomfort.
To find the courage to cope with even the worst-case scenario.
Reference
Manetta, K., Grayson, J., & Pacha, Z. (2025, November 15). Why Take the Risk? Helping Clients Find Their Courage [Conference Presentation]. OCD So Cal.
