Are you struggling with OCD & intrusive thoughts? CONTACT ME for details about session times & fees for Online Mindfulness Therapy via Skype
Online Mindfulness Therapy via Skype for Overcoming Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and Intrusive Overthinking without relying on drugs
Mindfulness Therapy provides an effective treatment option for managing obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors by teaching you how to work with your OCD thoughts and compulsions using mindfulness training and the methods of Mindfulness Therapy.
One of the primary problems that sustains OCD is the habit of becoming identified with your obsessive thoughts. We have to break free from this conditioned habitual reactivity.
This is the primary focus of Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy for treating OCD and is what I will be teaching you during our Skype Therapy sessions together.
"I had been stuck in another bout of intense generalized anxiety for several months when I found Peter. His website states that people experience significant results after 3-4 sessions. Well, after just 2 sessions I was 80% back to normal."
VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE ONLINE THERAPY WITH ME FOR HELP WITH OCD
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
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.
Talk to an online psychotherapist to overcome OCD
Welcome. My name is Peter Strong. I am a professional psychotherapist specializing in Online Mindfulness Therapy, which I offer via Skype for the treatment of anxiety disorders, including obsessive compulsive disorder or OCD.
If you're looking for online therapy for OCD, then I invite you to go to my website and contact me if you have any questions about the Mindfulness Therapy program that I teach online via Skype.
If you are looking for online therapy, and a lot of people prefer online therapy these days because it's so convenient and it also gives you greater access to therapists like myself who specialize in Mindfulness Therapy or cognitive behavioral therapy. Whenever you're selecting an online therapist, do make sure that the therapist offers therapy via Skype.
It's very important that you can see each other. If you can see each other, then there's no difference in the effectiveness of online therapy by Skype compared to therapy in-person. But you do need to be able to see each other.
So in the Mindfulness Therapy approach our focus is on helping you fundamentally change the way that you relate to those intrusive thoughts, those obsessive thoughts that trigger unwanted repetitive behaviors in the compulsive aspect of OCD, and that also cause a great deal of suffering, emotional suffering.
So we do that by developing a conscious relationship, first of all, in which we are able to observe the fear and its thoughts without becoming identified with the fear and its associated thoughts. When you become identified with the fear, then the fear controls you.
But when you are not identified with the fear, then the fear is reduced to what it actually is, which is an object, a mental object. So cultivating a mindful relationship with the fear means that we are learning to see the fear objectively as an object in the mind instead of becoming that fear.
So the only way to do that effectively is to meditate on the fear, because meditation is the process of cultivating a fully conscious and non-reactive relationship with whatever it is you're meditating on. In this case, we meditate on the fear because we want to break free from that habit of reactive identification, which feeds the fear. So that's a very important part of the mindfulness training that I will be teaching you during our therapy sessions together, if you choose to work with me.
There are other aspects, of course, that we have to look at in OCD. So working with the underlying emotions that are fueling the obsessive thinking and compulsive behaviors is central. But we also need to look at ways of managing the compulsive aspect.
That is where that fear is converted into repetitive behaviors like hand-washing. So there we need to learn how to manage that impulse itself. So we use mindfulness to develop an objective relationship with the impulse so that we can see it separately as an object and not become overwhelmed by it.
This is the same principle that we have to apply when we're working with addiction. We have to learn how to break free from becoming controlled by that impulse.
So if you'd like to learn more about Mindfulness Therapy for OCD and you like the idea of online therapy for the treatment of OCD, then do reach out to me and ask any questions you may have about this process and we can go ahead and schedule your first Skype Therapy session for your obsessive compulsive disorder or problem with intrusive thoughts.
The Mindfulness Therapy approach is very effective. Most people sees tremendous improvements in a relatively short time. I have worked with people who have suffered from intrusive thoughts for years, and it really affected the quality of their life, dramatically. Within three or four sessions, they begin to see a way out from this nightmare, which is how obsessive thoughts, intrusive thoughts are often experienced; it's like a nightmare, it is terrible, terribly painful.
So it is possible to change and really quite quickly once you learn how to work with your emotions, to fear primarily, and with thoughts and with emotional impulses using mindfulness.
When you develop a conscious relationship without fear, it will heal. If you feed it with reactivity, including acting out the particular compulsion, that will simply feed that underlying fear. But when you change your relationship to one that's based on mindfulness, and with mindfulness comes compassion, then you'll start to see rapid healing from OCD.
So if you'd like to learn more about how to recover from OCD using mindfulness. Then please contact me. Thank you.
GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION
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 ME TO LEARN HOW TO START SKYPE THERAPY WITH ME
Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I'm a professional mindfulness-based therapist, based in Colorado, USA and I offer online therapy for anxiety disorders, depression, addictions, and particularly for the treatment of OCD.
I get a lot of requests for help with obsessive-compulsive disorder and particularly with intrusive thoughts. Many people suffer quite severely from intrusive repetitive thoughts that just basically obsess the mind and cause a lot of suffering and lead to a lot of unwanted behaviors to try and avoid and get away from these intrusive thoughts.
So if you're looking for an online therapist for OCD and you would like help in working with intrusive thoughts then please go to my website and learn more about the online therapy service that I offer for treating OCD and anxiety disorders in general. And please send me an email if you have any questions.
Most people really enjoy the mindfulness approach because it's very practical. It teaches you how to neutralize those intrusive obsessive thoughts.
Trying to approach the problem of obsessive and intrusive thoughts by some sort of rational thinking approach is just not going to work. In fact you already know that these intrusive thoughts are not rational and not likely to occur, but it doesn't stop them.
This is because the intrusive thoughts have a very strong emotional charge and it's that emotional charge that causes them to stay in the mind and to repeat over and over again. It is the emotional charge that we have to work with and that's the primary focus in Mindfulness Therapy.
It doesn't matter whether the thought is rational or irrational. That's not the point. The point is that you have to neutralize that emotional charge to allow that thought to subside and heal.
If you really want to stop intrusive thoughts you must neutralize the emotional charge of those thoughts. So the way we do this in Mindfulness Therapy is by actually meditating on those intrusive thoughts.
We don't try to run away from them, we don't try to avoid them. We actually meditate on them, which means we hold them as a primary object in our meditation. We look at the thoughts and we start to change our relationship to them. That's the first and most important thing.
So typically, what happens with a highly charged emotional intrusive thoughts is that when ever they arise in the mind we become completely consumed by them, we become overwhelmed by the thoughts, we become identified with them.
So the first step in mindfulness training is learning to literally sit with those thoughts without becoming reactive, without reacting with fear, which is the primary energy in intrusive thoughts, or aversion, some form of hatred or resistance. We have to learn to sit with it and not react.
That is the first training and the only way to do that is to consciously and actively focus on that thought; on training in that way, to sit with the thought. You can't do it by some other indirect method. You must work directly with those intrusive thoughts.
The second part of our mindfulness work is becomes possible once you stop reacting or identifying with those obsessive thoughts. Then we work on neutralizing the emotional charge, and that really is mostly about working with the imagery of the thought, because emotions work through imagery and very highly emotional thoughts or images, for that matter, or memories or other intrusive type imagery.
The thing that makes it emotionally powerful is the properties of that imagery itself, how you see it and the mind is what creates the emotion itself. So we look at this imagery and then we start to change it, because when you have a non-reactive conscious, mindful relationship with the intrusive or obsessive thought, then you can begin to explore changing it, changing its properties. For example making it a lot smaller.
So an obsessive or compulsive thought, by its nature will be very large. The imagery is probably also going to be very close. And that is what creates the intense emotional charge of the thought: it's position, its size, and color. All of these details of the imagery are what actually cause the emotion.
So if you'd like to learn practical ways of working with your OCD and intrusive thoughts, then please reach out to me and schedule a Skype Therapy session.
VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE ONLINE THERAPY WITH ME FOR THE TREATMENT OF OCD
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Skype therapist for OCD