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Body Focused Repetitive Behaviors (BFRBs) can often make us feel like we have no control over our behaviors and that we’re at the mercy of an endless cycle. Here are 6 ways you can set yourself up to combat your BRFB outside of your home.

Compulsive hair pulling (trichotillomania) and skin picking (excoriation) are Body Focused Repetitive Behavior Disorders (BFRBs). If you’re one of the 200+ million people who live with a BFRB, then you know how incredibly difficult these habits are to stop.

Fear is one of the six basic human emotions, with a clear evolutionary purpose: to help us respond to danger and survive. In Exposure Therapy, providers create a safe environment to intentionally “expose” their clients to objects, activities, or situations they fear.

The comprehensive behavioral treatment or the ComB model is a treatment protocol developed by (Mansueto 2019) that tackles the complexity of treating BFRBs. It begins with using a CBT assessment tool, a functional analysis.

Whether we hear the term from a client, another provider, or our own classification of someone’s symptoms, “compulsions” tend carry with them some level of assumption – that this might just be OCD.

According to the DSM 5, Body focused repetitive behaviors (BFRBs) are classified as obsessive–compulsive related disorders. But the question remains, how do we treat BFRBs?

Panic isn’t what you think it is. It’s not an attack at all, and that’s a misleading name for it. It’s you having an internal reaction of fear – your heart rate changes, your muscles tense up, your stomach feels bad, you have scary thoughts of calamities, and so on.

The headlines and the CDC report are indeed alarming, but they should serve as a wakeup call to all of us. Yes, we should think seriously about why we are seeing a steep decline in the mental health of teenage girls, but we have to come together now as parents, family, friends, educators, clinicians, providers, and as a society to support, enhance and establish more preventive measures for our youth.

A Q&A with ADAA Member Karen Cassiday, PhD, ACT answering community questions on overcoming agoraphobia.

Many mental health professionals are now conducting patient visits virtually. I am one of the only psychologists left in my building who has stayed behind to continue in-person work while abiding by COVID protocols. Since our practice specializes in refractory OCD spectrum disorders and anxiety disorders a lot of the work done at our outpatient clinic requires in-vivo exposures, which cannot be replicated on Zoom.