How to ERP: Bringing Humor and Silliness into the Therapy Room

As a child, adolescent, and adult therapist, I am often code-switching methodologies to provide the best care possible.  However, with all ages, I bring silliness, humor, and vivacious energy to our work.  

The reason for that is simple: our OCD derives its strength from its terrifying seriousness.  

For an OCD voice, everything is catastrophic, incredibly important, urgent, and definitely not funny.

However, when we can step back and laugh at some of the requirements that our OCD places on us, we can truly see the absurdity in its rules!  OCD has some of my clients UV sanitizing their phones 4 times a day, praying for 1 hour every night to keep loved ones from dying, locking the car 9 times because 3 is the luckiest number and 3 multiplied by 3 is even safer.  When these thoughts pop into our head – things like, “my face has been deformed because I blew my nose too many times” – the ability to step back and laugh is the ultimate power realignment. 

Laughing at our OCD makes it smaller and weaker.  

Furthermore, Exposure Response Prevention, the gold star treatment for OCD, can be an excruciating long and sometimes boring process.  The entire point is to simply sit with distress and with no distractions.  Bringing humor into the room before or after an exposure can radically change the climate of the session.  

ERP is not about soothing a client, or validating their worry. Quite the opposite, ERP is about de-validating a client’s worry.  

Warm and supportive language can be counterproductive in ERP treatment.  While as a therapist, it is always important to bring kindness into every therapeutic relationship, the client and therapist must agree that, during ERP, it helps to move away from that dynamic.  Humor deflates the sense that the client needs rescuing from their pain. 

Instead, what an OCD individual is actually signing up for with this treatment modality is a radical reprogramming.  

If you would like to learn more about ERP, please contact us at Kairos Wellness Collective.