Flip the script on OCD treatment as you know it

Let’s turn OCD Treat your head and try something new.

Surrender to your sensibilities instead of being insensitive

Exposure-response prevention, the most common treatment for OCD, teaches you to desensitize yourself to the fear of everything that OCD causes. fear Worried about hurting someone you love, worried about not having a perfect relationship, or anxiety I have a terminal illness.

This first inversion is simple. Be mindful of your own sensibilities. Instead of thinking of yourself as disordered, start with the opposite premise. That means you have a misunderstood gift.

Rather than desensitize yourself, as if you If something is wrong or wrong, be very sensitive yourself. Just be more sensitive in a new and enhanced way that values ​​you more.

If you have OCD, you are so emotionally tuned that sorting through all of your emotions can be confusing and overwhelming. You are hyperaware of other people’s feelings and how you might hurt them. Perhaps you are anticipating all the possibilities for making things Just right. It’s so easy to forget yourself in a situation like this.

Instead of becoming insensitive to your own emotions, why not lend yourself the same emotional sensitivity that you generously give to others? Rather than proceeding with behavioral exposure exercises by muscle training, why not start from the beginning and notice them? No more, no lessHow do you feel?

You have the gift of noticing the music around you, but you can’t hear your own singing. Try some simple adjustments to help you pay attention to what’s going on inside of you, other than the loud, distorted noise of your obsessions and compulsions. These OCD symptoms are usually caused by not being fully attuned to ourselves in the first place.

OCD isn’t just in your head, it’s also in your heart.

The second flip is in your mind. Virtually all of the mainstay treatments for OCD include exposure-response prevention (ERP), inference-based cognitive behavior treatment (ICBT) and Acceptance Commitment Therapy (ACT) – focuses solely on managing the mind.

By training your mind not to overreact to OCD warning signs and freeing yourself from the mental tug-of-war (using exposure-response prevention strategies), you will not only have fewer symptoms, but also be able to follow your true values. You can live. Tracing the logical leaps, imagination (ICBT) Then you will become rational again. Salvation comes only from your heart.

Each of these strategies is an important part of healing OCD, but emotions become a metaphorical afterthought. As you can see from watching children grow, it’s amazing. wisdom and creativity In terms of feelings. Neurologically speaking, we are hardwired to have emotions as the dominant force in our lives. Because we use emotions more than anything else for creative growth leaps.

To do this reversal, you need to examine the various emotions you have, especially those you consider taboo: selfishness, anger, jealoussad, petty, or any other emotion that you consider problematic. The Internal Family System (IFS) is one of the few OCD treatments that encourages you to befriend different parts of your self and give your emotions as much space as your thoughts. This is a very useful support for OCD treatment packages.

OCD treatment is not pointless, it is personal!

OCD therapy, like ERP, views OCD as a random, meaningless intrusion. OCD annoys you because it knows how to obsess over issues that you feel are personally meaningful, but have no value in and of themselves. Like viruses, they are only interested in finding a suitable host to feed on.

The third flip sees OCD as a meaningful, if exaggerated and distorted, messenger. If you can translate that message correctly, it will tell you something. And most importantly, not only do you need to dig into your own emotions, but you need to more fully understand what was going on when your OCD developed.

I have witnessed clients who developed OCD as a way to form OCD. boundary When they have given away so much of themselves that it becomes virtually impossible for them to remain focused on others and they are forced to pay attention to themselves. I’ve seen OCD hit as a way to describe a rich mix of fear, dread, and other ambivalence. anger, guiltand sadness — when I leave home for the first time to go to college.

Many clients complain that OCD treatment does not do a good job of fully considering the personal meaning and context of their particular OCD or explaining why it surfaced in the first place. . Its function. New treatments like ICBT and my own “Upside Approach” are fixing that problem and show great promise in bringing great hope and personal meaning to OCD patients.

These radically new (and hopeful) tips can help you find freedom from OCD. My hope is that these will also inspire researchers and clinicians, like Houdini, to develop a more complex understanding of how OCD can free you from the chains it tries to bind you to.