Are you struggling with OCD & intrusive thoughts? CONTACT ME for details about session times & fees for Online Mindfulness Therapy via Skype
Mindfulness Therapy provides an effective therapeutic approach for reducing obsessive-intrusive thoughts and behaviors by teaching you how to work with your OCD thoughts and impulses using mindfulness training and the methods of Mindfulness Therapy.
To break free from OCD and obsessive-intrusive thoughts you MUST learn how to neutralize the underlying anxiety, that fuels intrusive thoughts and compulsive behaviors.
This is the primary focus of Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy for overcoming OCD and is what I will be teaching you during our online therapy sessions together.
VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE ONLINE PSYCHOTHERAPY WITH ME FOR HELP WITH OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE DISORDER AND ANXIETY
Online Therapy via Skype is available for the USA, Canada, UK & Western Europe.
Go to my main website to learn more and to schedule a Skype Therapy session: Online Mindfulness Therapy for OCD
Welcome. My name is Peter Strong and I provide online therapy via Skype for anxiety disorders, including obsessive compulsive disorder or OCD. Now, OCD is a very common anxiety disorder, and it's estimated that as many as 1 in 40 people in the US suffer from some form of OCD. It's also quite common in young children and children often experience an episode of OCD, but usually it doesn't last very long and most children completely overcome their OCD. When OCD occurs in adults, it can often last a lot longer and is harder to overcome, mainly because as adults, we tend to get more lost in thinking, and reactive thinking is one of the main mechanisms that feeds the underlying anxiety that is fueling your obsessive compulsive disorder.
There are various medications prescribed for treating OCD as an anxiety disorder. But they're often not very effective and sometimes those medications create additional problems.
Obsessive Checking
There are certain main categories of OCD that we can describe. The first is obsessive checking. For example, checking if you turned off all the lights or if you locked all the doors before going to bed.
There is this incessant impulse to recheck that is based on a reactive belief that things are not completed in some way, and that's based on the emotion of fear. So the fear motivates that belief that things need to be checked again, which then leads to the compulsive behavior or sometimes ritual of rechecking over and over again. Ritualized rechecking means checking things is a specific order.
Fear of Contamination
Another very common kind of OCD has to do with fear of germs and the fear of infection, which leads to compulsive and sometimes ritualized handwashing, where you have to wash your hands in a certain way to try to eliminate the fear that you haven't washed your hands completely. The fear of infection or contamination is often accompanied by other emotional reactions that also feed that underlying fear, fear of infecting family members, guilt, and so on.
Obsession with Symmetry
A third kind of OCD has to do with symmetry. And this is quite common with children, but also adults as well and it's that sense of having to put everything in the right place, with the right alignment and organized in the right way. For example, arranging all of the pens and pencils on your desk in a certain way, facing a certain direction and so on. That fear of things not being in the right position, in the right order is what feeds the obsessive compulsive behavior of arranging things in a specific way.
Fear of Aggresion
Another kind of OCD that is quite common in adults is the fear of doing harm to yourself or others. For example, the fear of suddenly driving your car off the road; the fear of throwing a cup of water at someone; the fear of hurting an animal. It can take many different forms and it's very distressing if you are plagued by such aggressive thoughts. And again, this gform of OCD is often exacerbated by a great deal of secondary emotional reactivity, guilt and shame, and so on. Now, it's very rare that people with OCD-based fear of doing harm actually act out that impulse, but it's very distressing.
Obsessive Beliefs
Another common form of OCD is based around obsessive beliefs. For example, the belief that I am going insane, or that I will be punished if I do something wrong. This obsessive belief can show itself in a religious context where I feel like I will be punished if I stopped praying or if I stop going to church. We become obsessed with a particular belief and that can lead to ritualized behaviors to counter that fear.
This can also show itself has an obsession around physical appearance.For example, having an obsessive belief that your nose is too big or that you are ugly. This can convert into compulsive behaviors such as constantly checking yourself, constantly putting on makeup or some other action to try and alleviate the underlying fear.
Of course, all these compulsive behaviors and rituals do not actually release the underlying fear. It doesn't actually heal the underlying emotion.
So how do we go about treating OCD? Well, the most common treatment involves medications and antidepressants. But as I have said, these typically are not very effective for the long term management of obsessive compulsive disorder.
A very popular form of psychotherapy is called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT. And this is a good choice because this approach starts to make you more aware of the reactive thoughts that are feeding your anxiety and lead to compulsive behaviors. And it is generally highly recommended that you look for a therapist who specializes in CBT or Mindfulness Therapy, which is what I teach.
These practical psychological approaches provide the best long term solutions for the treatment of OCD. If you would like to learn more about mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, Mindfulness Therapy, then do please contact me and we can schedule a therapy session through Skype.
Welcome! My name is Peter Strong, and I am a professional On line Therapist. I specialize in Mindfulness Therapy for treating a range of conditions, including anxiety, depression, stress, addictions and also for the online treatment of OCD, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.
So, how does Mindfulness Therapy work? Well, briefly, Mindfulness Therapy teaches you how to control the reactive thoughts that cause reactive-compulsive behaviors.
We learn how to establish what is called a Mindfulness-based Relationship with our compulsive thoughts, so that we can hold those thoughts in our awareness without becoming overwhelmed by them. When we can do this, then we can start to examine the underlying emotion that duels the obsessive thoughts - and this is essential for the treatment of OCD.
Working with that underlying emotion using mindfulness allows us to change the structure of how that emotion operates in the mind. So, once you can change the underlying emotions, then you take the fuel away from the obsessive thinking and this then stops that obsessive thinking converting into compulsive behaviors.
So, if you would like to learn more about Mindfulness Therapy for OCD, please contact me through my website. Send me an email and then we can discuss if Online Therapy for OCD is a good choice for you, and I will explain more detail about how this works, and then we can schedule a Skype Therapy Session for your OCD. So, please, if you are interested in Online Mindfulness Therapy for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, contact me now.
FOR HELP WITH OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE DISORDER AND ANXIETY
Welcome! My name is Peter Strong and I provide an online therapy for anxiety and depression and addictions and also for help with obsessive-compulsive disorder and intrusive thoughts.
So one of the best ways of overcoming intrusive thoughts and beating this problem of intrusive thoughts, and also images too, and memories is to learn how to work with these thoughts using mindfulness.
So I specialize in Mindfulness Therapy and I find it to be immensely effective for working with difficult intrusive thoughts.
So the best way to beat intrusive thoughts is not to fight them. If you fight those intrusive thoughts, if you try to get rid of them, that will end up feeding them and you will make them stronger and then they become even more intrusive.
So the best way to beat intrusive thoughts is to develop a friendly relationship with them. Now I know that may seem difficult because the intrusive thoughts cause so much pain and anxiety but it's only by making friends with those thoughts that you can ever hope to free yourself from intrusive thinking.
One of the best models, I think, for working with intrusive thoughts is to really examine why do those thoughts or images or memories keep coming back into the mind? Why are they intrusive?
And from a mindfulness perspective we see this intrusiveness as actually quite positive, in the sense that we recognize that those thoughts, those emotionally charged thoughts or images or memories are essentially trying to heal themselves. But in order to heal, they must have your conscious awareness, your conscious presence.
You need to have that conscious and friendly relationship with them in order to help them heal and make the changes that they need to make in order to heal.
So we must not under any circumstances avoid intrusive thoughts or memory images. Instead we must learn how to develop a conscious relationship with them, and developing a friendly relationship simply has the effect of increasing the quality of consciousness. This is what those thoughts need to change and heal.
So we develop a conscious and compassionate relationship with our intrusive thoughts. We then explore helping them heal. And this is technically called the response of compassion, which is a central and integral part of mindfulness.
We learn how to help them heal, how to help the thought or the emotion heal itself. We see that that thought is not you. It is an object in you, just like a child is not you; it is separate from you but it needs a relationship with you in order to heal. So we relate to our intrusive thoughts as being like objects, or even better being like that child that's coming to us for help.
You look at is structure. What does it actually need to heal? And one of the primary ways we can help it heal is to examine the emotional imagery of the intrusive thought or image or memory.
So the emotional part is what keeps it intrusive, it is what causes it to stay in the mind. It's the emotional charge of the thought or memory image that we must heal and change, and that emotional charge is primarily encoded in imagery.
So how we see the thought in the mind, how we see the memory in the mind, is what actually causes that memory or thought to have this emotional charge.
So we look at his imagery and then we explore changing that imagery, which we can do once we have a conscious relationship with the thoughts or memory images or other intrusive images. We look at the structure of the imagery and then we work on changing that imagery.
So this is a natural healing process. This is how emotions change. When the emotion changes then there is nothing to sustain the intrusive thoughts or belief or memory or anything else.
So it's by working with the imagery in this way that we can help intrusive thoughts heal, and when they heal they are no longer intrusive, they simply fall away like any other thoughts.
So please, if you would like to work on overcoming your intrusive thoughts please do send me an email and let's schedule a trial session. Most people see quite interesting changes even after the very first session and certainly after three or four sessions.
GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION FOR HELP WITH OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE DISORDER AND ANXIETY
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