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 medications.
Mindfulness Therapy provides a very good treatment plan for reducing intrusive thoughts and addictive behaviors by teaching you how to work with your OCD thoughts and compulsions using mindfulness training and the very effective 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 obsessive-intrusive thoughts and compulsive behaviors.
This is the primary focus of Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy for treating OCD and is what I will be teaching you during our sessions together.
VISIT 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
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.
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 ONLINE THERAPY VIA SKYPE
Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I'm a professional psychotherapist and I offer online therapy for anxiety and depression, addictions and also for the treatment of OCD and intrusive thoughts.
So obsessive-compulsive disorder really describes a problem of reactive intrusive thoughts; thoughts that just keep appearing in the mind and that trigger compulsive behaviors.
Now how do we manage these intrusive thoughts? Well there are certain things we must understand. The first is that you cannot remove intrusive thoughts by willpower. If you try to stop those intrusive thoughts you will actually end up making them stronger.
So we must take a different approach, and the approach that I teach involves mindfulness training. So mindfulness therapy teaches you how to change your relationship to those intrusive thoughts from one of fear and anger, which is also fear-based, to one of equanimity, of allowing the thought to be there without reacting to it.
And also friendliness. This is an essential part of mindfulness training. You learn to make friends with those intrusive thoughts, even if they are negative thoughts or painful thoughts.
The most important thing is to develop a non-reactive relationship with those thoughts and that will involve developing a friendliness-based relationship with the thoughts. Friendliness is non-reactive and it is not fear-based. So this will essentially take away the fuel that feeds those intrusive thoughts.
Intrusive thoughts become intrusive because of the emotional charge that they have. It's not the thought itself that's the problem, it's the emotional charge that the thought has, and this is what keeps it coming back.
We need to find a way to defuse that emotional charge, and the first way is not to feed the emotion. So that's the reason why we focus on developing a friendly non-reactive relationship with those intrusive thoughts and memories also.
And one of the best ways to do this is to look at the imagery of these thoughts and then change that imagery. This imagery is what keeps that emotional charge alive and that's what keeps the thoughts in an intrusive and repetitive manner in the mind.
But when you bring mindfulness to it you see the imagery clearly and then you can begin to help it change. So this is really helping the thought resolve itself. And when it changes his imagery it loses that emotional charge and then it will disappear.
From my experience with working with people who suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder and intrusive memories; thoughts including traumatic memories, I find that this Mindfulness Therapy approach to be the best approach that I have ever explored with people. It Is very, very effective.
So if you'd like to learn more about the mindfulness approach for treating Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and intrusive thoughts, then please email me.
So medications are often prescribed for OCD to reduce the intensity of the anxiety. But I think you'll understand that's just treating the symptoms and not treating the underlying process that creates those intrusive thoughts.
So if you would like to learn more about how to treat OCD without using medications, but through through this mindfulness-based approach, do please contact me.
Most people see quite dramatic changes within a matter of a few weeks once you start applying these mindfulness methods. And this will include meditation, but a different kind of meditation than you may be familiar with.
Because, when I talk about mindfulness meditation I'm talking about meditating on the mind.
So in this case we would actually learn to meditate on those intrusive thoughts. We would deliberately bring them into the mind and start building this non-reactive relationship and start exploring how to change the imagery of those thoughts.
So this is training, active focused training, to help those thoughts resolve themselves and lose their emotional charge so they no longer become a problem.
Generally, when you can do that with thoughts then the compulsive behaviors will also subside because there is nothing that is connected to the behaviors. There's nothing that can feed the compulsive behaviors.
So if you would like to learn more and you would like to schedule some online therapy sessions with me, then please contact me. Thank you.
VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION
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 that matters, it's not the narrative that's 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 ley me explain 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.
GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE ME TO LEARN HOW TO START SKYPE THERAPY WITH ME FOR HELP WITH OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE DISORDER AND ANXIETY
Talk to an online psychotherapist to overcome OCD