A Parent’s Guide to ERP: Helping Your Child Overcome Anxiety with Confidence
A hurdle to achieving confidence is often anxiety. In children, it can interfere with their daily functioning and wellbeing. Whether it be at home, on the playground, at school or elsewhere– it can affect the way they think, feel and behave. Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) is a form of treatment that may be effective for managing anxiety among children. The following blog will delve into what it is, the main steps, and how it can build confidence.
Understanding Anxiety in Your Child
Anxiety is an emotional response to stress. It’s often defined by feelings of nervousness, fear and worry in relation to the possibility of something happening. It can be overwhelming for a child because they might have a hard time expressing their feelings and not realize what they are experiencing. As a result, their unexplained feelings can perpetuate a cycle of avoidance behaviours that reinforce their anxiety. These behaviours may include tantrums, anger, and social withdrawal. A child may also describe feeling headaches or stomach aches.
What is ERP Therapy?
Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) therapy is a modality of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). The goal of the therapy is to reduce anxiety and develop confidence in combating stressful situations. It can prevent children from engaging in their usual response when exposed to anxiety evoking triggers through gradual exposure in a safe environment.
The Steps of ERP
Assessment: Our therapist will assess what is causing your child anxiety, the related triggers and their avoidance responses.
Hierarchy: Your child will collaborate with our therapist to come up with a list from least to most anxiety inducing situations or thoughts.
Gradual Exposure: Your child will gradually be exposed to each anxiety evoking event, beginning with the least distressing. This will happen in a controlled environment with the therapist and in a systematic manner either through imagined or real life exposure.
Response Prevention: During exposure, the therapist will help your child resist the urge to engage in their usual responses to anxiety.
Reinforcement: Through positive reinforcement, our therapist will reward your child with praise and encouragement for successfully confronting their fears.
How ERP Can Build Confidence
Increase in self-efficacy. ERP can enable your child’s ability to master and manage anxiety. Over time, they will transfer what they learned in therapy to their daily lives and cope independently.
Improvement in daily functioning: Your child will experience improvements in their personal and social lives as they learn to manage their anxiety. Therapy will equip them with the appropriate coping skills to feel more confident in their environment.
Decrease in distress and responses. Your child will learn anxiety can decrease naturally over time and their avoidance behaviours are unnecessary.
Increase in self-awareness and emotional resilience. Your child will learn to reflect on the triggers for their anxiety and how they were able to overcome it during therapy. This can lead to the realization that they have control over their feelings and actions.
Increased empowerment and motivation. The higher up in the hierarchy your child goes, the more motivation they might feel about facing challenging fears.
Reach Out Today
ERP therapy can effectively address the avoidance responses associated with fears and distress your child is experiencing. It can help them to develop the appropriate skills and abilities to cope with their emotions. If your child is struggling to build their confidence and experiencing anxiety, then you might want to consider this form of CBT.
At Healing Voices Psychotherapy, Dana D’Arville, RP, is well-versed with ERP and offers CBT for children. If you are interested, you can book a free 15-minute consultation with her.
