Online Mindfulness Therapy for OCD Health Anxiety

Online Mindfulness Therapy for OCD Health Anxiety via Skype

Contamination Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a subtype of OCD in which a person has obsessive worries about becoming contaminated, contaminating others, or contracting and spreading disease. These ideas are a major source of worry, and they are often accompanied by obsessive behaviors such as excessive hand washing or sanitizing surfaces repeatedly. 

Though everyone worries about a filthy surface at some time, those with contamination OCD experience excruciating anxiety as a result of these thoughts. The obsessive thoughts can linger for hours and won't stop unless the person does a compulsive activity to alleviate the tension.

Contamination OCD compulsions

The following are some of the most typical compulsions people use to cope with contamination OCD: 

• Handwashing or bathing frequently and excessively 

• Getting rid of things because they could be contaminated 

• Trying to keep clean by using harsh chemicals on your skin

• Excessive study of germs and diseases 

• Scraping off any skin that you suspect is infected 

• Changing clothes frequently 

• Avoiding certain locations or touching specified objects in case they are contaminated 

• Sterilizing objects around you excessively and repeatedly 

• Creating a tidy "off limits" or "safe place" in your home where no one else can enter

• Praying, knocking, reciting, or thinking certain thoughts are examples of rituals

• Keeping mental inventory of goods that are clean and those that are unclean

Contamination OCD treatment options

The good news is that those who suffer with contamination OCD can get help. Exposure and response prevention (ERP) therapy, a type of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), has been shown to be an effective treatment for contamination OCD as well as OCD in general. ERP is regarded the gold standard for OCD treatment because 80 percent of patients respond favourably to it, according to research.

The system of treatment that I recommend is called Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy (MBET). This approach contains many of the components of ERP, but with a greater emphasis on the “Resposnse Prevention” compnent. In MBET it is recognized that you have to neutralize the underlying fear that fuels the compulsive behaviors. We focus on healing this fear through developing inner compassion and friendliness towards the fear, rather than just trying to suppress it, which is rarely effective.

If you would like to get started with online mindfulness therapy for OCD and Health anxiety, visit: 

Online Treatment for Health Anxiety and Hypochondria via Skype

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Online Therapist for overcoming OCD

The principal teaching in Mindfulness Therapy for obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) is to learn how to meditate on your intrusive thoughts and on the impulses that lead to compulsive actions. The critical teaching here is that we must develop a conscious relationship with our thoughts and with our emotions. Mindfulness meditation provides one of the best and most direct ways of developing a conscious relationship with your mind.

The biggest problem that I come across when helping people manage OCD is that people fall into a habit of avoidance. You try to blot out or escape from those unpleasant intrusive thoughts and you react against those impulses to convert your intrusive thoughts into actions through willpower, through cultivating aversion to those compulsive impulses.

 This will not work. The more that you react either through avoidance or through aversion, the stronger the underlying emotional charge will be for those intrusive thoughts and compulsive impulses. 

So trying to overcome OCD through willpower or through rational thinking or some other cognitive process is not usually a very effective. 

One of my main criticisms of cognitive behavioral therapy for OCD is that it tries to convince people that the intrusive thoughts and impulses are irrational and not real, and that you can simply replace them with more rational or positive thoughts and behaviors. But, in my experience, this is not an effective approach. People already know that their OCD thoughts and impulses are irrational. That is not the issue for the vast majority of people. The problem is they can't stop themselves reacting. They can't stop those repetitive thoughts and behaviors. They are just too strong. 

What makes Intrusive thoughts and impulses strong is the emotional charge of those thoughts and impulses. The strength of the emotional charge is the issue, not irrational thinking, and this is the primary focus in Mindfulness Therapy. We work on those emotions. We work on neutralizing the underlying emotions, not the thoughts. 

The thoughts and the behaviors are secondary, they are the logical consequences of those very strong underlying emotions. The intrusive-obsessive thoughts are simply the byproducts of the underlying emotion.

So if you want to overcome OCD, you have to work with the underlying emotions that are giving power to your intrusive thoughts or memories, including traumatic memories, as in PTSD. You have to neutralize the emotion in order for those thoughts and memories and impulses to heal and to resolve and to stop being intrusive.

The thoughts are intrusive simply because they have a high emotional charge. So the mind is doing exactly what it's supposed to do. The mind brings into into our awareness, thoughts, memories, experiences that have a high emotional charge and those that don't have a high emotional charge resolve very quickly. 

So the mind is working perfectly. The problem is not the thoughts but rather the emotional charge underneath that has become fixed and has become stuck and unresolved.

Most thoughts and experiences arise and pass away quite quickly. But in the case of OCD thoughts and impulses, they don't pass away. They stay for a long period of time in the mind because of that strong emotional charge. That is what MUST heal in order for thoughts to stop being intrusive. 

So we work at the emotional level. And the primary way that we work with the emotional charge that's fueling intrusive thoughts and behaviors is by learning how to meditate on our emotions and thoughts. So instead of trying to avoid our thoughts and impulses, we actually do the opposite, we bring them into full conscious awareness, which is really quite different than how they usually arise, which is subconscious and habitual. OCD is basically formed around conditioned habits. These are subconscious, habitual reactions that keep those thoughts arising over and over again. It's a habit. Habits thrive when there is very little or no consciousness.

So we need to overcome that unconscious habit. And that's a central part of the teaching of mindfulness therapy as I have developed it for treating OCD. It's about developing full conscious awareness around those specific obsessive thoughts and compulsive emotional impulses.

During meditation you learn to be fully present with your thoughts and emotions. Developing this very special quality of conscious awareness that we call "objective consciousness", where you are able to see the thoughts and emotions, but as an observer, rather like watching a movie as the audience. 

The real issue here is that we become lost in the movie of our mind and that is what perpetuates OCD. So we learn to meditate on our mind. We learn to bring those intrusive thoughts deliberately into our awareness to develop this objective consciousness. We learn to be very present with those thoughts and the underlying emotion that are fueling the thoughts. This is what leads to healing. This is the necessary step for healing and recovery from OCD. 

So willpower, which is really cultivating aversion towards the impulses and thoughts, is actually taking conscious awareness away from those emotions and thoughts as we become ensnared in the conditioned awareness of aversion or dislike or hatred or criticism of those thoughts and impulses. 

So we need to learn to be present directly, without any reactivity at all, without any aversion, without any avoidance, without any cognitive reactivity. Trying to understand the emotion, trying to change our beliefs and things of that nature will be ineffective. Beliefs change themselves once the emotional impulse that fuels those particular beliefs changes.

 You have to change things at the emotional level in order for beliefs and obsessive thoughts to change. If that emotional charge remains strong, then the obsessive belief will remain active. For example, the belief that if I don't wash my hands 10 more times, then I will be carrying those germs to my family. So I must wash my hands 10 more times. That's a belief. And what keeps it strong and active is the emotional charge of that belief. The problem is not being irrational; the problem lies in the emotional charge that cause us to attach to the belief.

The most common emotional charge around OCD is fear. So we need to learn to heal that fear. 

The best way to heal fear is by developing a conscious, mindful relationship with that fear. We learn to see the fear as being like a child. It can't free itself from its own fear so it goes to its parent for comforting. We need to establish the same kind of inner relationship with our fear. The True Self-Little Self alliance is what I call it, and that is the most effective and necessary step for healing the fear that is keeping those obsessive thoughts active in the case of handwashing.

Once that fear is resolved you will no longer be dominated by those intrusive thoughts. They will cease to have any effect, any meaning. They will not convert into the impulse to wash your hands because there's no emotional charge behind them. They are neutralized and are now just empty thoughts and they just resolve to be replaced by more functional, positive thoughts quite naturally and without any effort. 

So we have to work at the emotional level of OCD. That's the primary teaching in Mindfulness Therapy. And this is what I will teach you during our sessions together as an online therapist. 

I will teach you these very specific mindfulness tools for overcoming your OCD. 

Online therapy is an excellent option for working with anxiety disorders and also for depression and PTSD and other forms of emotional suffering that are caused by these underlying subconscious habits.

The key requirement for successful online therapy is that you can see your therapist by a Skype or Zoom or FaceTime or other video platform. Being able to see each other makes communication effective and that's necessary for good psychotherapy. 

So if you're suffering from OCD and you would like to get help from an online therapist to treat that OCD using mindfulness, then do please contact me so we can schedule a Skype Therapy session.

You can expect to see very noticeable improvements in your obsessive, intrusive thoughts and compulsive actions in a relatively short time, once you start applying these mindfulness techniques that I'll be teaching you. 

So please contact me so we can schedule a Skype Therapy session to help you on your path of recovery from obsessive compulsive disorder. Thank you. 

Online Psychotherapy for help with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

Online Mindfulness Therapy for OCD

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.

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Best online therapy for managing OCD

How to get rid of obsessive compulsive OCD intrusive thoughts through Online Mindfulness Therapy for OCD

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.

VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE ONLINE THERAPY WITH ME

Treating OCD via Skype

Talk to an online therapist to treat OCD

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. 

Online Therapy for OCD is available throughout the USA, including:

Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming

This online therapy service is based in Colorado and available worldwide, serving USA, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Greece.

Online Mindfulness Therapy is not a medical treatment but an alternative system of psychotherapy that helps you change the underlying psychological cause rather than just treating the symptoms of anxiety & depression.

VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE ME TO LEARN HOW TO START SKYPE THERAPY WITH ME FOR HELP WITH OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE DISORDER AND ANXIETY

Online Mindfulness Therapy for OCD