Online psychotherapist for treating Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Talk to an online psychotherapist for help overcoming OCD and intrusive-obsessive thoughts and memories.

Online Mindfulness Psychotherapist via Skype for Stopping Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and Intrusive Overthinking without relying on medications

Mindfulness Therapy provides an excellent approach for overcoming intrusive thoughts and behaviors by teaching you how to work with OCD thoughts and impulses using the powerful methods of Mindfulness Therapy

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 THERAPY WITH ME FOR HELP WITH OCD AND ANXIETY

You might find this video informative. Contact me if you are looking for online help for OCD

Online Treatment for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) via Skype

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.

Skype-based Psychotherapy for OCD - Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder & Intrusive Thoughts

Through Mindfulness Therapy we learn how to neutralize obsessive and intrusive thoughts, images and memories as well as neutralizing the compulsive impulses of compulsive behaviors.

Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I'm a professional psychotherapist specializing in Mindfulness Therapy for the treatment of anxiety and depression and OCD and other emotional problems using mindfulness therapy and mindfulness-based techniques rather than medications or the conventional talking therapy that you may be familiar with.

Mindfulness Therapy really tries to address the underlying process that causes your anxiety or depression or problem with intrusive thoughts and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

So Skype Therapy for OCD is one of the services that I offer. All my online therapy is done via Skype. It's very important that you use Skype or FaceTime or similar video platform because it's important that you can see each other during these sessions. This makes the therapy sessions much more effective.

During the online Skype therapy sessions that I offer I'll be teaching you how to work with the two primary elements of OCD.

So excessively worrying about that and obsessing over hygiene is one kind of reactive thinking that greatly accentuates the underlying anxiety. The thinking fuels anxiety feeds anxiety and it intensifies the anxiety. So that's one kind of thinking process.

The other kind of problems that people run into with thinking is intrusive thoughts. Intrusive thoughts, intrusive images, intrusive memories. So this is sometimes called "Pure O" sort of a pure form of obsession that is caused by intrusive thoughts that really upsets the minds and cause considerable anxiety.

So that's one side of the work. We work with these obsessive or intrusive thoughts. On the other side of OCD is working with the compulsive behaviors.

So the thoughts convert into behaviors like hand washing or trying to clean every surface in the house multiple times over, or whatever it might be. The compulsive behavior is a response to the obsessive thinking.

We would typically imagine the obsessive-compulsive thought or activity, we would play it through in the mind and we would watch to see what kind of emotion is triggered. Typically, fear or anxiety, but it could be other emotions as I say. When we see that emotion we then start to build a relationship with the emotion itself based on consciousness, that's where the mindfulness comes in.

The second part of our work in mindfulness therapy is to see how those emotions work, to look at their structure. And it's become very clear to me through working with people over many years now, that the primary structure of the emotions, it is not thoughts, it is imagery.

So the thoughts are products of the emotion, but what causes the emotion is imagery, psychological imagery. The way that you see that fear or anxiety in the mind is what determines its intensity and that in turn leads to the propagation of thoughts and compulsive activities.

So we examine this imagery in great detail during mindfulness work on our OCD. We literally meditate on those thoughts and the emotions underneath the thoughts to see how they work, to look at their imagery, to see what it is about the imagery that causes them to be intense, that creates that intense emotional charge.

So if you would like to learn more about how to work with either obsessive thinking or intrusive thoughts, memories and images, and also to work with compulsive behaviors, then please contact me. Let's schedule an online psychotherapy session via Skype.

Skype Therapy for OCD is a very effective way of learning how to manage OCD. Most people see quite dramatic changes after the first three or four sessions. Once you learn how to apply mindfulness to work with your OCD you'll see very encouraging results.

So if you're interested in Skype Therapy for OCD then please reach out to me. Contact me. Tell me more about your particular situation. Tell me what times and days work for you and then we can go ahead and schedule the first Skype Therapy session to help you overcome your obsessive-compulsive disorder.

GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE ONLINE THERAPY VIA SKYPE WITH ME FOR HELP WITH OCD AND ANXIETY

Online cognitive behavioral therapy for OCD

How to treat OCD without medication - Online Mindfulness Therapy for OCD and intrusive thoughts

Welcome! My name is Peter Strong and I provide online therapy via Skype for the treatment of anxiety, for depression and also for working with obsessive-compulsive disorder or OCD.

So if you're interested in online treatment for OCD without using medications, then do please go to my website and learn more about this online therapy service.

Mindfulness Therapy is very good for treating all forms of anxiety disorders because it teaches you how to work with your thoughts in a very direct and practical way, and that is essential in working with OCD.

We have to basically change the way that we relate to our thoughts. Some people teach that we have to overcome irrational thoughts. I do not agree with that. Whether the thoughts are rational or irrational is of no particular importance. What matters is the emotional charge of those thoughts and the nature of your relationship to them.

So typically when we experience an obsessive thought or an intrusive thought we become immediately identified with that. This is called reactive identification, and then we tend to react even further to intrusive thoughts by creating more thoughts that feed the first intrusive thought, and that is called reactive proliferation of thoughts.

So this is what typically happens out of habit for most people with OCD. But with mindfulness training and the methods that I will teach you during our online therapy sessions, you will begin to be able to break free from the compulsive aspects of those intrusive thoughts.

You do not require medication to treat OCD. Medication simply masks the intensity of the emotion, but it doesn't do anything to change the underlying process that is causing those intrusive-obsessive thoughts to arise in the mind, and that's what we address with Mindfulness Therapy.

So the first step is learning to be with your intrusive thoughts without becoming overwhelmed by them. And then when you establish this relationship with them, then you can begin to change the emotional component of those intrusive obsessive thoughts, and I will explain in great detail how to do this.

If you want to work with me, if you would like to learn how to overcome OCD without resorting to medications, then please go to my website and send me an email so we can schedule a trial therapy session for you.

With the mindfulness approach, because it is so practical and so focused on overcoming the underlying cause of your OCD, most people will see significant changes after the first three to four sessions with me. It doesn't take that long to break out of these habitual patterns of reactive thinking and reactive identification with thoughts.

It just requires some skillful guidance and then practice of the methods that I will teach you. So please contact me if this interests you and let's get started. Thank you.

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

Online OCD Psychotherapy through Skype

How to treat OCD and intrusive thoughts with Mindfulness Therapy

You do not need medications to treat Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Instead you should learn how to work with the emotional part that makes intrusive thoughts intrusive. This is what we work on during online mindfulness therapy sessions.

So how to treat OCD without medication? So, OCD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, is a problem in which we become prisoners of intrusive thoughts. Essentially we become prisoners of highly emotionally charged thoughts whatever they might be. There can be many many different types of obsessive thoughts or beliefs that we're struggling with.

But the key component here is that the thoughts are emotionally charged. So in order to overcome OCD you have to neutralize this emotional charge that makes those thoughts so intrusive. And that's what we focus on during online Mindfulness Therapy sessions for treating OCD.

We actually learn how to meditate on those thoughts. We introduce those intrusive thoughts into the mind and then we learn how to change our relationship to those thoughts so that we can become the Observer observing the thought as an object in the mind instead of our usual habit which is to become identified with the thought and therefore become reactive and overcome by the thought.

When we become reactive and identified with intrusive thoughts that simply feeds those intrusive thoughts, it feeds the emotional energy behind the thoughts and that leads to proliferation of intrusive thoughts, which creates even more emotional suffering.

So when we are meditating on the same intrusive thoughts, we're learning to break that pattern of reactive identification, we learn to see the thoughts without reacting. And that's the first essential step in the treatment of OCD using mindfulness.

We have to completely break the habit of becoming overwhelmed by the thoughts, we have to be able to learn how to sit with those thoughts without becoming identified with them. That's an essential part of mindfulness training to overcome OCD.

A second part of working with the emotional content of the intrusive thoughts is to actually work with their imagery, and this is quite a novel concept to most people, but emotional imagery is very, very important. This is what actually creates the emotion that is triggered by the thoughts.

The imagery: how you see it in the mind. How big are the intrusive thoughts? What position does it have in your psychological space? Do you see it in the mind? Do you see it in the heart or the stomach? Do you see it in front of you or above you? The position of thoughts is part of their imagery and that's an extremely important part of what makes those thoughts emotionally charged.

So the imagery is what creates the emotion and the emotion is what causes the thoughts to become intrusive and repetitive and prevents the thoughts from simply resolving themselves like other thoughts.

So we work with this imagery and we work on changing this imagery and when we change the imagery you change that emotional charge. When you change the emotional charge of a thought, the thought begins to subside and lose power in the mind.

So those are two parts of what I will teach you during online therapy sessions for your OCD, and the mindfulness approach works extremely well and most people will see quite substantial changes after three to four sessions of practicing mindfulness meditation on thoughts.

If you'd like to learn more, go to my website and please email me if you'd like to schedule a therapy session with me via Skype to help you overcome your OCD. Thank you.

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

Online psychotherapist for treating Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder