You followed the plan. You pushed yourself. And at the end of the week, you still did the thing you were trying not to do.

So it was a failure. Right?

Not so fast.

If your exposure therapy journey has taken an unexpected turn—maybe life threw you into a situation way beyond what you were "supposed" to be working on—there's something important you need to understand. What feels like going backwards might actually be evidence of something else entirely.

The Exposure Hierarchy Secret Nobody Talks About

Here's how exposure therapy is supposed to work: You build a hierarchy. You start with the easier stuff at the bottom. You work your way up gradually. Baby steps.

Maybe your plan was to touch surfaces at home without washing right away. Low to medium difficulty. Your space. Manageable.

Then life happened.

A new job. A public bathroom used by dozens of people. No chance to wipe down surfaces before use. No antibacterial wipes afterward. Eight hours in clothes that feel contaminated. No choice but to sit with it.

And at the end of each day? You still showered. Still did the cleaning routine. Every single day.

Feels like failure, doesn't it?

But here's the question that changes everything: Where does that public bathroom actually fall on your hierarchy?

Why Calling This Week a Failure Gets It Wrong

Touching surfaces at home—your space, where you know who's been there—that's probably low to medium anxiety. It's manageable.

A public bathroom at work, used by people you don't know, where you can't control anything, can't use your usual methods, and have to sit with the discomfort for hours?

That's high. Really high. Probably one of the hardest things on your entire hierarchy.

So let's be clear about what actually happened: You were planning to practice on low-to-medium difficulty exposures. Instead, you were forced into high-difficulty exposures, every single day, for an entire week.

And you're calling that failure?

Think about it like running. If you'd been training with 1-mile jogs and someone suddenly made you run a marathon, how would you feel at the end?

Exhausted. Wiped out. Like you'd been hit by a truck.

Would that mean the marathon was a failure? No. It would mean you did something much harder than you'd been training for. The exhaustion makes sense—it's proportional to the difficulty, not evidence of regression.

Sometimes when you switch to something harder, it feels like going backwards. But that's not what's happening. You're facing a bigger challenge. The struggle is proportional to the difficulty.

The Hidden Progress You're Not Counting

But what about the shower at the end? Doesn't that undo everything?

Before we answer that, let me ask you something: Between the moment you used that bathroom and the moment you showered at home—how long was that?

Hours. Sometimes eight or nine hours. The whole workday.

So for eight or nine hours, you sat with the discomfort. You tolerated the distress. You didn't leave work, didn't find excuses to go home, didn't sneak off to obsessively wash. You just... stayed with it.

That's not nothing. That might actually be everything.

Here's what most people get wrong about exposure therapy. They think the goal is to make the anxiety go away—to repeat the exposure until you stop feeling scared.

But research has found something different.

The goal isn't to eliminate distress. The goal is to learn that you can tolerate it—that anxiety is uncomfortable but not dangerous, that you can function even when you feel terrible.

Distress tolerance, not distress elimination.

Studies on exposure therapy mechanisms show that developing the ability to tolerate distress is itself a key pathway to improvement, separate from whether anxiety actually decreases in the moment.

So those eight hours of feeling contaminated and surviving? That was practicing the exact skill that matters most. You proved to yourself—and to your brain—that you could feel awful for an entire workday and still be okay.

The misery wasn't a sign of failure. It was the treatment working.

The Biggest Exposure Mistake (And It's Not the Shower)

Now here's where things get interesting.

If you're doing these high-intensity exposures and still not seeing the progress you want, there might be something else going on. And it's probably not what you think.

Most people assume the evening shower is the main problem. It "undoes" the exposure. It "erases" the progress.

But that's not quite right.

Think about what happens during the day, while you're in that bathroom and afterward. Are you:

• Using your elbow to open doors instead of your hand?
• Waiting for someone else to push the handle?
• Holding your arms a certain way so your hands don't touch your clothes?
• Being careful not to let anything contaminated spread?

These are what clinicians call safety behaviors—subtle avoidances during an exposure. And here's what research shows: safety behaviors during exposure can actually prevent the learning you're trying to achieve.

When you avoid the door handle, your brain doesn't learn "that handle wasn't dangerous." Instead, it concludes "I survived because I avoided the handle."

The safety behavior steals the credit.

Your brain is trying to form new safety associations—trying to learn that these situations aren't as dangerous as the OCD says. But when you avoid even small parts of the exposure, the threat beliefs stay intact. Clinical research identifies that these behaviors prevent the brain from learning that feared consequences are unlikely.

Which Safety Behaviors Actually Block Your Progress?

Here's something almost no one talks about: Not all safety behaviors are created equal.

Research distinguishes between two types:

Preventive behaviors are things you do to avoid contact with the threat in the first place—using your elbow on the handle, holding your arms away from your body, not letting the "contamination" spread.

Restorative behaviors are things you do to cope after the exposure has already happened—like showering at the end of the day.

And here's the finding that might surprise you: Preventive behaviors are significantly more harmful to the learning process than restorative ones.

Why? Because preventive behaviors stop the learning before it can happen. Your brain never gets the data it needs. But restorative behaviors happen after you've already sat with the discomfort—the exposure has already occurred.

The shower at night, after you've tolerated contamination for eight hours? That's restorative. Not ideal, but it doesn't erase what happened during the day.

The elbow on the door handle? That's preventive. And it might be doing more damage than the shower.

So all those little things you're doing to get through the day—they might be the actual barrier to progress. Not the evening ritual.

How to Make Your Next Exposure Count

Let's put this together.

Your week wasn't a failure. You were doing something much harder than you'd planned for. You tolerated extreme distress for hours every day. You practiced the exact skill that research shows matters most.

But here's what you can work on: dropping those safety behaviors during the exposure itself.

What would happen if tomorrow you touched the bathroom door handle with your actual hand? Just once?

Your anxiety would spike. But your brain would actually get to learn something from that. It would be a real exposure instead of a partial one.

And if you touched the handle and then—here's the hard part—let your hand touch your clothes afterward?

That would mean the contamination spreads. And then you'd actually have to sit with it all day for real. No escape routes.

Your eight hours of distress tolerance would really count. Your brain would have nowhere to hide.

The focus shifts: Not on eliminating the evening shower right away. But on dropping those preventive behaviors during the exposure itself. Touch the handle. Let it spread. Give your brain the data it needs to learn that you can handle this.

Research on exposure in varied, challenging contexts shows that these "desirable difficulties"—exposures that are harder in the moment—often lead to better long-term outcomes. Your workplace bathroom, as exhausting as it is, might be exactly the kind of challenging, real-world exposure that produces lasting change.

What Does Real Progress Look Like From Here?

If the shower at night doesn't erase everything—if what really matters is dropping those preventive behaviors during the day—then when do you work on reducing the evening ritual? How do you know when you're ready to push further?

And here's the deeper question: If the fear doesn't need to fully go away for progress to happen, what does recovery actually look like over time?

That's worth sitting with.

Because you're not going backwards. You're just facing something harder than planned.

And that changes everything about how you measure success.

What's Next

How do I know when I'm ready to drop the evening shower ritual, and will the fear ever fully go away?