Are you struggling with OCD & intrusive thoughts? CONTACT ME for details about session times & fees for Online Mindfulness Therapy via Skype
Welcome! I provide online counseling for OCD and intrusive thoughts via Skype. Contact me to learn more.
Mindfulness Therapy is highly effective for eliminating obsessive thoughts and addictive behaviors by teaching you how to work with OCD thoughts and impulses using mindfulness.
To break free from OCD and obsessive-intrusive thoughts you MUST learn how to neutralize the underlying emotion, usually fear, that fuels intrusive thoughts and compulsive behaviors.
This is the primary focus of Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy for overcoming OCD.
GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE ONLINE COUNSELING WITH ME FOR HELP WITH OCD AND INTRUSIVE THOUGHTS
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
Main LinkedIn article: Online Counseling for OCD
You might find this video informative. Contact me if you are looking for online counseling for OCD.
Welcome. I'm a professional psychotherapist and I provide online psychotherapy for OCD. So if you're interested in getting help from an online psychotherapist for the treatment of OCD and for work with intrusive thoughts and intrusive memories and other forms of intrusive thinking, then please reach out to me.
I offer all my sessions through Skype. Skype is really important for online therapy because it allows you to see each other and this greatly improves the effectiveness of communication, which clearly is needed for good quality psychotherapy.
During our online psychotherapy sessions for OCD we learn how to break free from the blind habitual reactivity in the mind where we become blindly identified with these intrusive thoughts or obsessive thoughts.
This is critical because if we become blindly identified with the thoughts, then they basically control us. And this leads to the proliferation of more intrusive thoughts, which in turn feeds the underlying emotion, whatever that may be, that's feeding the intrusive thoughts. So we need to stop this process of proliferation of reactive thinking in the mind.
The way we go about that in Mindfulness Therapy, which is what I teach for the treatment of obsessive compulsive disorder and intrusive thoughts is by learning how to meditate on those thoughts.
So we don't avoid the thoughts. That's the worst thing you can do, because if you try to avoid the thoughts, as painful as they may be, you will simply feed the underlying fear, the emotional charge that makes those thoughts intrusive. So we don't want to avoid our thoughts.
Instead, we want to meditate on them, which is a process of choosing to bring them into the mind, but to remain fully present as a conscious observer. This is what makes all the difference. So by meditating on our intrusive thoughts or memories or images we are training ourselves out of this habit of reactive identification and we start to see the thoughts more as objects in the mind. This helps us detach from them. They become objects and we become the observer of those objects.
This produces a very significant shift in the mind and starts to fundamentally resolve the emotional charge of the thought. When you stop feeding it, it starts to heal.
So we learn to meditate on our thoughts. We learn to develop that healthy distance from the intrusive-obsessive thoughts. Then we we can start to develop a response pattern that helps resolve the underlying fear, learning how to comfort the fear internally.
Finding a way of being with the fear that helps it heal. This is called the response of compassion, which is very much a part of mindfulness, and Mindfulness Therapy is about developing this internal consciousness and compassion towards those emotions that are in pain. This is what is needed for healing. And it's very effective.
Trying to stop thinking by willpower, trying to replace negative thoughts with positive thoughts, arguing with them and trying to convince yourself that those thoughts are irrational and you shouldn't be thinking them is not an effective way of overcoming OCD.
Those kind of cognitive processes don't really work. The reason they don't work is because they are at the wrong level. They are at this same level as the intrusive thoughts that you're trying to change. Thoughts cannot change thoughts very effectively.
If you want to achieve freedom from intrusive thoughts, you have to change and heal the underlying emotion that is feeding those thoughts. And that is the function of meditating on the thoughts so we can find that emotion, which is usually fear, and help it heal.
We can help it heal mostly by developing this internal relationship where you are the observer, which is your True Self, and that does not react out of fear to those fear-based intrusive thoughts. This is what is needed to heal intrusive thoughts. You have to bring your True Self into connection with the Little Self, the fear.
So if you'd like to learn more about working with an online psychotherapist for OCD and you like the idea of online psychotherapy via Skype, then do please contact me and schedule a therapy session via Skype.
If you wish to talk with a psychotherapist online, then visit my website to learn about Online Psychotherapy through Skype for the treatment of anxiety and depression, addictions, OCD, PTSD, Emotional Trauma and other forms of emotional suffering not requiring medical treatment.
Conventional talk therapy can be useful, but often common talk therapy does not transform the the underlying process that is the real cause of your emotional suffering.
The same can be said for medications - prescription medications may reduce symptoms for a while, but medications will not transform the underlying process that produces your anxiety or depression.
The type of psychotherapy that I offer is called Mindfulness Therapy, which can be quite powerful for managing chronic anxiety as well as for treating depression or other emotional issues caused by habitual reactive thinking. Most of my clients see dramatic reduction in the level of anxiety and depression after 3-4 sessions of Skype Therapy.
Welcome. My name is Peter Strong and I'm a professional mindfulness therapist using a system of mindfulness therapy that I developed many years ago now, that's extremely effective for treating obsessive-compulsive disorder or OCD.
So, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for OCD basically teaches you how to break free from the habit of reactive thinking, that is falling into the stream of reactive thinking, of rumination or worrying that might get triggered in the minds.
This is a very important step in cutting off the fuel that that fuels anxiety or depression. So, OCD is simply the result of a process where we become habitually identified with thoughts, and when we become trapped in our thinking. The result is that the thoughts tend to propagate more thoughts and this amplifies the reactive thinking, which in turn amplifies the underlying emotional obsession or anxiety or depression that feeds the OCD.
So, learning to break this habit of reactive identification is extremely important and is the principal focus of the mindfulness therapy that I teach online via Skype.
If you'd like to learn more about online mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for OCD, simply go to my websites and then email me. You can ask any questions you might have about mindfulness therapy for OCD and I'd be happy to explain to you how the mindfulness therapy approach can work for you.
When you feel ready you can schedule a Skype therapy session with me at a time that works for you, and then begin to teach you how to apply mindfulness for overcoming obsessive thinking and for overcoming the anxiety and depression that's associated with obsessive-compulsive thinking.
GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE ME TO LEARN HOW TO START SKYPE THERAPY WITH ME FOR HELP WITH OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE DISORDER AND INTRUSIVE THOUGHTS
The secret is to learn how to train with your intrusive thoughts or memories using mindfulness so that you can break out of the habit of emotional reactivity that creates the anxiety or depression. I will teach you how to do this.
My name is Peter Strong. I'm a professional psychotherapist specializing in mindfulness therapy which I offer online via Skype for the treatment of anxiety disorders including obsessive compulsive disorder, using mindfulness therapy, which is very effective for helping you manage the uncontrollable habitual thought reactions that characterize OCD.
So working with intrusive thoughts is very important for managing not only OCD but also other anxiety disorders and depression as well. This reactive thinking or rumination is what fuels anxiety and depression. And the problem that most people find is that they become a prisoner of these intrusive thoughts, that they keep coming back and stimulating and recreating the anxiety or depression.
So managing intrusive thoughts is very important for working with almost all forms of emotional suffering. Mindfulness Therapy is a way of training with these thoughts. So the biggest problem typically is that people avoid intrusive or negative or emotionally painful thoughts. When you avoid intrusive thoughts you prevent them changing. You prevent them healing or resolving.
So avoidance is the first thing that we must overcome. We must not fall into the trap of avoiding intrusive thoughts or trying to get away from them or trying to push them away or trying to replace them with positive thoughts. That may seem like a good idea, but it's just another form of avoidance, and avoidance feeds the problem of habitual reactive thinking.
So we must stop avoiding and instead we actually learn to develop a conscious relationship with those disturbing intrusive thoughts based on conscious awareness, based on mindfulness. I will teach you how to meditate on these disturbing thoughts. This is the way that leads to resolution that helps end those intrusive thoughts.
Learning to meditate on them means building that conscious and non-reactive relationship to the thoughts. That's what's needed to resolve them. And it's a process whereby we train, essentially train with the thoughts, learning to be non-reactive and not becoming identified with them.
This is something that is quite easy for you to do as long as you understand clearly what you're doing and you get a little guidance, and that's what I will teach you during these online therapy sessions for OCD.
I will teach you how to work with these intrusive thoughts, how to train with them so that you can overcome this pattern of habitual identification and reactivity that simply feeds the thoughts.
So if you like to learn more about how to work with intrusive thoughts using mindfulness therapy, and really get into the heart of the problem and changing those underlying habits, then please do email me and schedule a Skype Therapy session.
People see results quite quickly when they start applying this very mindfulness and consciousness focused approach to working with intrusive thoughts on other aspects of OCD such as intrusive memories. That's a very common feature for PTSD. Working with very emotionally charged and disturbing memories that become intrusive.
We use the same kind of principles in mindfulness therapy. We do not avoid them. Instead we learn how to train with them so that we can help those memories resolve naturally so they no longer become a problem.
So if you would like to learn more, simply email me and schedule a session. I see clients via Skype. I like Skype because it allows you to see each other and that is really important for psychotherapy, because you need to understand the principles that I will be teaching, and to do that you really need to see me and I need to see you so we can establish a really good level of communication.
If you do that then Skype Therapy is really no different than meeting in person.
GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE ONLINE COUNSELING VIA SKYPE FOR HELP OVERCOMING OCD AND INTRUSIVE THOUGHTS
Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I am a professional psychotherapist specializing in Mindfulness Therapy for the treatment of anxiety and depression and also obsessive-compulsive disorder including what is now becoming called Pure O, Pure Obsessive OCD. So this is basically the situation in which the mind is bombarded by intrusive thoughts.
The kind of cognitive material that invades the mind can be in the form of just repetitive thoughts; it could be in the form of repetitive intrusive beliefs; it could be in the form of an obsessive desire to hurt yourself or another person.
Very often the intrusive thoughts take the form of imagery, whether fantasy imagery or memory imagery as in the case of PTSD flashback memories. These thoughts and images become very intrusive, taking a great deal of our attention and cause a tremendous amount of emotional suffering in the form of anxiety and also depression, as well.
So it's really quite common. Pure O OCD, Pure O, is quite common. It's estimated probably at least 1 percent of the population in the USA and also in the UK and Europe suffer from some form of Pure OCD.
The best approach to deal with this is not to try and block those thoughts, because that reaction, that response of aversion, tends to feed the intrusive thoughts themselves. It feeds the emotional charge that keeps those thoughts recurring in the mind. So we don't try to argue with the thoughts, we don't try to remove them; we certainly don't try to avoid them, either.
What we find is most effective is some form of exposure therapy. So exposure response prevention therapy has become quite popular, ERP, and the type of therapy that I offer online is called Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy, which is very effective indeed.
So in the approach that I use, we deliberately bring those intrusive thoughts into the mind but we train ourselves to remain as the observer. The habit we are trying to combat here is the habit of reactive identification, whereby we become and thought. We lose our identity as the observer and we become the object that is observed, which in this case is the obsessive thought or image.
So that process of reactive identification is really what feeds Pure O and other forms of OCD, because the moment that you become captivated by the thoughts or the emotion and you start reacting then that will feed the emotion that is fueling that intrusive thought.
So we have to learn how to sit with the intrusive thoughts or images without reacting. And that takes some training and that's what I will teach you during the Online Mindfulness Therapy sessions that I offer.
We will learn to meditate on those thoughts, taking each thought and making it the primary object of our conscious attention. That's quite different than reactive awareness where it's just running the show. Now we are training and becoming detached from the thoughts and becoming the observer of the thoughts, and that's a very different quality of consciousness and that does not feed the emotional charge of the thoughts or images.
So that's the first stage in working with OCD intrusive thoughts. We learn to become the observer and cultivate that state of being the observer. The second part of working with Pure O thoughts is one of looking at the imagery of the emotion that is feeding the thoughts. So the thought itself is not actually the problem.
Now emotions work through imagery in the mind. The imagery of an emotion is what actually causes that emotion to take form, and then that emotion converts into thoughts and actions, and so on. So we examine the imagery of the emotion.
We work on changing that imagery, because when you change the imagery you change the intensity of the thought. When you change it enough, then the thought loses its emotional charge and then it will cease to be intrusive.
In the case of PTSD and emotional trauma the factor that really keeps those image-based thoughts active and intrusive in the mind is the intensity and size of the imagery itself. The qualities of the imagery are what keep the thoughts alive in the mind so we work on changing that imagery.
Contact me to learn more about how to work with your Pure O OCD using Mindfulness Therapy.
GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE ONLINE THERAPY WITH ME FOR HELP WITH OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE DISORDER AND ANXIETY
Online Counseling for OCD and intrusive thoughts