Are you struggling with OCD & intrusive thoughts? CONTACT ME for details about session times & fees for Online Mindfulness Therapy via Skype
Mindfulness Therapy is a good treatment option for managing obsessive thoughts and addictive behaviors by teaching you how to work with OCD thoughts and compulsions using 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 recovery from OCD.
GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION 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
You might find this video helpful and contact me if you are looking for online help for OCD and obsessive thinking.
If you are looking for an online therapist for help with OCD, then I invite you to contact me and tell me more about your particular struggles with obsessive compulsive disorder.
I offer online therapy through Skype for the treatment of OCD and also for help in reducing intrusive thoughts, intrusive memories and intrusive imagery, which can be very distressing for many people.
The approach that I use is called Mindfulness Therapy, which is extremely effective for working with reactive thoughts and memories and for reducing the frequency of obsessive, intrusive thoughts as well as reducing their intensity, until they no longer are a problem.
Normal thoughts go through a simple cycle of arising and passing and do so in a relatively short period of time, but OCD thoughts do not resolve but persist and often lead to the proliferation of even more thoughts. This stage of reactive proliferation feeds the underlying emotion, usually fear-based, that fuels OCD.
The key to breaking the cycle of reactive thinking, obsessive compulsive thinking, is to develop a different relationship to those intrusive thoughts or memories or images. We have to develop a mindfulness-based relationship, which means that it's a relationship based on opening to the experience and staying present with the experience of the thought or the image as an observer, we have to learn to be able to observe the thoughts or image without becoming lost in that intrusive thought. We have to learn to stay present with the obsessive thought, without becoming reactive and converting into some compulsive behavior or action.
The mindfulness approach is one of the most effective approaches available for working with OCD and intrusive thoughts. I will teach you during our Skype therapy sessions together, very precise methods of working with your thoughts using mindfulness that will allow you to develop this objective consciousness that is so essential for breaking the habit of reactive-obsessive thinking.
With the mindfulness approach, most people see dramatic improvements within a very short time, often within three or four sessions.
The mindfulness approach is about teaching you new methods to work practically with your intrusive thoughts, to neutralize them and heal the underlying emotional energy that's feeding those thoughts.
This cannot be done by just talking about your thoughts or emotions. And it cannot be done through willpower. It has to be done by changing your relationship to your thoughts. And when that relationship is right, then the healing process begins. But you must develop an open, mindful relationship with your thoughts and emotions.
Mindfulness is the combination of openness, non reactivity, friendliness and compassion. These are the qualities that promote healing. Just trying to understand why you are feeling the way you are reacting is not sufficient.
Most people with OCD fall into the habit of avoidance and aversion. They try to block out intrusive thoughts and feelings. This is not effective and will actually reinforce the underlying fear because avoidance and aversion are based on fear, themselves, which will simply feed the underlying emotional suffering that is feeding the intrusive, obsessive thoughts or memories.
So we need to learn to develop a different relationship with our emotions if they are to heal. And that's the central focus of Mindfulness Therapy.
And if you're interested in working with an online therapist to overcome your OCD, then I invite you to contact me.
Online therapy is an excellent choice and works just as well as in-person therapy, providing you use Skype or Zoom or FaceTime, because you need to see each other for effective communication.
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 - the 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 TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION FOR HELP WITH OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE DISORDER AND ANXIETY
Welcome! If you'd like to learn how to cure OCD intrusive thoughts then you might want to consider a few sessions of online Mindfulness Therapy with me.
Mindfulness Therapy is a very effective way of working with intrusive thoughts and obsessive thoughts in general. It helps you learn how to change the relationship that you have to thoughts in general, so that you don't become overwhelmed by them, that you don't become identified with thoughts.
That is the first key training in Mindfulness Therapy, is how to be with your thoughts without becoming reactive, without becoming identified with them, without allowing them to dominates the mind. It is possible to sit with your thoughts and see them as objects in the mind the same way that you could sit with a dangerous animal and watch it, without becoming overwhelmed with fear.
Let us imagine a trip to the zoo. We see animals in the zoo that could be very dangerous if we didn't have a good relationship with them. In that case we are separated by the cage that the animals are in. It is possible to put your thoughts into a cage too if necessary.
But the thing is, when you work with your thoughts using mindfulness you can basically create the right internal situation whereby you can be with that thought without becoming overwhelmed.
So the primary way we do this is by actually meditating on our thoughts. We deliberately choose to meditate on our intrusive thoughts but we do it under controlled circumstances. We make the choice to invite this thought into the mind for the purpose of training with it, so that's quite different.
The main problem with OCD intrusive thoughts is that they there's no consciousness involved. They just arise spontaneously in a habitual conditioned manner and then create emotional suffering. But we can change that by choosing to invite a scary thought into the mind, but on our terms, and that makes all the difference.
So building a real relationship with the thoughts in which we learn how to become less and less reactive is a primary function that we develop during mindfulness therapy sessions. Another thing that is quite interesting and that I will teach you and show you how to do during these therapy sessions, is how to work with the imagery of the thoughts.
So any thought that has an emotional charge to it will have associated emotional imagery. The most simple example of that is that the emotional charge of the thought appears very large and very close and usually above us.
That's why we say "I feel overwhelmed" by the thought, because literally we seem the thought above us. And it has to be big in order to be overwhelming. And it has to be very close to be overwhelming. So the imagery of the thought is really quite important. Actually, I would say it's vitally important.
When we meditate on our thoughts consciously we get to see this imagery and when we see the imagery then we can change that imagery because all emotional imagery is a product of habit, of conditioning, and habits can be changed when we develop a conscious relationship with the habit.
So we look at the imagery of our emotions, our emotionally charged thoughts, and we help change that imagery and diminish the emotional charge of the thoughts.
So this is working with the emotions underneath the thoughts in a very productive and positive way that leads to the resolution and basically the healing of the thoughts so it no longer has that emotional charge that makes it intrusive.
So this is a very effective way of working with obsessive thoughts, with intrusive thoughts, and for basically neutralizing them so that they don't catalyze compulsive behaviors which is the second stage of OCD.
After the intrusive thoughts comes compulsive behaviors. But those behaviors are powered by the emotional charge of the intrusive thoughts.
So if you would like to learn more about how to cure OCD, how to basically neutralize those intrusive thoughts and break out of the very scary place that OCD intrusive thoughts create, do please send me an email and let's schedule a trial therapy session via Skype, and I will show you how to work with your thoughts using mindfulness.
Mindfulness Therapy is by far the most effective method out there, besides CBT, and most people that I work with see quite dramatic changes within the first three to four sessions. So please contact me and let's schedule a session. Thank you.
VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE ONLINE THERAPY WITH ME FOR HELP WITH OCD AND ANXIETY
Welcome. My name is Peter Strong. I'm a professional psychotherapist based in Boulder, Colorado and I offer online therapy via Skype for the treatment of anxiety and depression and addictions and many other common psychological problems that respond well to mindfulness-based therapy.
Mindfulness Therapy is my preferred approach because I find it to be vastly superior to conventional talk therapy and certainly a great improvement over medications, which really do nothing to change the underlying cause of your emotional suffering.
So anxiety disorders are the most common condition that I work with and this includes obsessive-compulsive disorder, and I'm often asked how to stop OCD thoughts, how to break free from those intrusive thoughts that cause so much emotional suffering and anxiety for a lot of people.
So working with intrusive thoughts. First of all we have to ask what is it that makes them intrusive? How does this work? Well, there's four major factors that I have identified that really cause a thought to become intrusive.
The first is the emotional charge of the thoughts. So with all OCD thoughts it's not the content of the thought thought, it's not the narrative that's really that important. What is important is the emotional charge of that thought. When a thought has a very high emotional charge then it tends to stay in the mind longer and it tends to return more frequently than a thought with a low emotional charge.
So the emotional charge is what gives the stickiness to intrusive thoughts and leads to obsessive behaviors based on those intrusive thoughts. So working with that emotional charge and learning how to neutralize it is essential, and much more important than trying to change the narrative, or your beliefs, or trying to replace negative thoughts with positive thoughts, or any other cognitive manipulation like that, because it really won't work if that emotional charge is not first neutralized.
So working with the emotional charge of the thoughts is very important. The second factor that causes those thoughts to be intrusive is really just plain habit. That is, the lack of conscious awareness. We tend to simply identify with these thoughts when they arrive and we get caught up in them and we start trying to fight them or resist them in some way. So this process of pure habit operates when there is very little consciousness. Like any habit it operates unconsciously.
So developing much more consciousness around our OCD thoughts is very important, and in fact we learn how to meditate on those thoughts rather than trying to make them go away, which is not practical or trying to resist them in some other way or distract ourselves from those thoughts.
Any kind of effort to try and remove thoughts by distraction just won't work. We have to completely change our relationship to those thoughts. We have to, in fact, create more consciousness, not less.
The third factor that causes thoughts to become intrusive is really just the problem of what I call reactive identification, and that is where we really become consumed by that thought; we take on the identity of the thought. We take it to be who we are. We take it as the truth of things and we simply blindly fall into that thought.
The fourth factor that's closely related to reactive identification is general reactivity to those unpleasant emotionally charged thoughts. As I mentioned earlier we tend to try to escape or avoid unpleasant experiences, including thoughts. We try to avoid them or we react with self-hatred, aversion or extreme dislike for those thoughts, which is understandable because they cause so much pain for us. But unfortunately reactivity simply feeds the problem.
So if you would like to learn more about how to work with intrusive thoughts and OCD thoughts in general, please contact me.
Send me an email. Tell me more about yourself and how I can help you and then we can schedule a Skype Therapy session to help you overcome your OCD thoughts using the very effective and well tested methods of Mindfulness Therapy that I teach and have developed over the last ten or twelve years now.
So please contact me if you would like help overcoming your OCD. Thank you.
VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION FOR HELP WITH OCD AND ANXIETY
Online Therapy to overcome Obsessive Thinking