Did you know that it takes between seven and 14 years for someone to be correctly diagnosed with OCD?

What? How is this even possible? But the truth is it's similar for a lot of other anxiety conditions.

Hello, my name is Kimberly Quinlan. I am on a mission to equip one million

people with evidence-based anxiety skills. And so today in this episode, we are going to talk

about how to build an exposure plan without a therapist and help you trouble the

common issues and concerns people have as they try to do this alone. Now, in no way am I saying

that you should do it alone. If you need a therapist and you have access to a therapist,

by all means, having an ERP trained therapist is going to be so helpful. But for those of you,

I know a lot of you either don't have the resources financially or access to someone who is

skilled in this area. So my mission, again, is to teach you as much as I can. All right. So let's get

going first. So what is an exposure plan? I want to be

really clear about something first. When we say the word exposure plan or exposure therapy,

that's technically not the right terminology. When we are building an exposure plan, we're

actually talking about something called exposure and response

prevention. So let's talk about what that looks like. The first step is exposures. This is where we

face our fears or we face our discomfort. That is the first step or concept. That's not all it is. It also must involve what we call response

prevention. And this is where we reduce the safety behaviors that you engage in that circle you

back and cycle you back into having anxiety. In the moment, they might feel like they're helpful,

but they're actually making your

anxiety worse. And then the last component is where we have to manage self-criticism. Now, this one

doesn't technically have to be involved with an exposure plan, but research does suggest that

those who manage self-criticism and all of the mean things they say

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