OCD Hope

I-CBT stands for inference based cognitive behavioral therapy. It's an evidence based treatment designed specifically for OCD. All other treatment methods have been adapted for OCD. This is not to say that they are not effective  I-CBT was developed in the late 1990s and is only now making it's way to the United States.  It's a completely different way of looking at and treating OCD. Much more to write on this, but for now I'll leave you with the official website.  https://icbt.online/ Looking forward to you comments!

I lost my sister in February. She was taken from us all way too early! She was a kind and gentle person that loved life and was not afraid to speak up for what's right or for people that don't feel they have a voice.  I have no predetermine paragraph to write or story to share, rather a reminder to myself to try not to take things for granted. To not always listen to the loudest voice in the room or in my head. That I cannot control thoughts and I cannot control feelings and that's okay - the sooner I'm able to accept this, the sooner I will find some peace. I must now, and always for that matter, give myself extra grace and love for OCD is so hard on the person that it inhabits. Over the years, when things have gotten really tough, I continue to go back to a meditation that allows me to sit with what I'm feeling, unattached from the thoughts, and share intense kindness and love with me.  Here's a link to the meditation from Kristin Neff: Soften. Sooth. Allow.  

I think it's the fear or worry that you'll never know if you married/are dating the right person - if you could be happier with someone else, if life would be "better" with someone else (OCD takes advantage of the word "better" because it can mean just about anything; prettier, kinder, etc.) If you are completely honest with yourself, you'll come to the conclusion that you'll never know if another relationship would be "better" or make you happier. It must be this fear of not ever knowing that can make this obsession so scary. You'll never know this because everyone has different and strengths and weaknesses and no one is perfect or will ever be. Moving to another relationship also means that you would lose all the happiness you have in your current relationship. What you deem the most worthy quality in a mate may not be the same tomorrow or next month when your needs change. REMEMBER, when ROCD has more of your attention, it has you...

 For those of us that have ocd, our go-to-method for trying to get rid of a thought or feeling is to think our way out of it. We review the thought, again and again, as if it were a tangible being sitting in front of us and we are attempting to have a rational discussion with it. This gives the thought WAY too much power. The thought then grows in size and intensity. What usually happens next, that gives the thought even more power, is the feelings that arise in association with the thought. The thought's journey continues as we unconsciously attach feelings and emotions to it. These feelings and emotions manifest themselves in our body and add gas to the thought fire that's rapidly burning away. To put out this dumpster fire we continue our usual methods -  trying to think our way out of it.  Here's the problem - thinking doesn't work that way. The brain doesn't work that way. The more attention we give to a thought the more active it is and the more feelings it wi...

Which comes first? Factually speaking the obsession comes first and is followed by compulsions. It's easy to know this to be true when not caught in an ocd loop, but when in the loop it can be hard to remember. What's in our control is not the obsession but the action, mental or physical, to act on a compulsion. We can't stop thoughts, and that's exactly what an obsession is. The compulsion may appear to be a thought, but it's a thought masquerading as a mental behavior. You may likely know all of this already - I'm writing this more to remind myself than anything else. So if the obsession comes first, is beyond our control, and is followed by compulsions what's a person to do? The answer is to stop doing the compulsion - often much easier said than done, but still very much possible. The perfectionist in those of us with ocd may attempt or try to stop all compulsions but I think this ends up putting more pressure on us than anything else. Do your best ...

To help others you first need to take care of yourself first. The quote that says this best is "you can't pour from an empty cup".  I strongly believe in helping others so for me this way of thinking didn't come naturally. I guess it seemed selfish and perhaps egotistical. Doing what's suggested has made helping those around me much more achievable. One thing that can easily get overlooked is that helping others feels good, it's what we as humans are programmed to do and when it's done with sincerity it feels wonderful and in turn helps us. For many, many years I had consciously and subconsciously come to the conclusion that I didn't deserve self kindness. That the thoughts that went through my head were 'bad' and that because of that I was a 'bad person' often not worthy of self love and self kindness. This is possibly one of the most dangerous lies that OCD tells us. We get trapped into feeling bad about ourselves and can...

There are a lot of books on OCD; often times it feels like too many. Over the years I've read many self-help books. A few are pretty good, many are okay, and some suck.  I think the authors mean well, however they don't have OCD and aren't able to authentically step into our shoes. They know OCD at an intellectual level but not an experiential level. Many books also do not integrate mindfulness into the treatment of OCD.  There is one author that really gets it. His name is Jon Hershfield and everything that he's written is brilliant. He's an OCD therapist that's ahead of his time and has OCD himself. He's now co-written three books. The most recent book to come out is: 'Everyday Mindfulness for OCD '. It's available on Amazon and it is the best book that I've yet come across on how to incorporate Mindfulness into your treatment plan for OCD. If you want to learn how to incorporate mindfulness into how you treat your OCD then this is ...

Don't ever forget that you have every right to find and choose the tools that you'll need to manage your OCD. Once you've learned what's available, use the tools that work best for you and give them your time and energy. It may be that mindfulness isn't what allows you to make peace with your OCD. I started practicing mindfulness with the intention of helping make things a little bit better. Four years have passed since and I continue to practice mindfulness but now with a new goal, to make OCD go away. I think it's possible. It's not going to happen overnight and may take years but I'm okay with that. Not doing anything and having nothing change is a far worse alternative. We are capable of so much more than we'll ever give ourselves credit for.   

I train people for a living and the longer that I've been in the profession, the more I've come to realize that it's not what we know, it's what we do with what we know and how consistent we are in doing it. There's the adage that 'Knowledge is power'. I agree, but more accurately said, 'Knowledge is power when acted upon'. Searching and finding knowledge is now easier than it's ever been in the history of humanity. Not too long ago one would seek out knowledge by spending hours researching at a library or paging through encyclopedias.  Perhaps the downfall to the ease of finding knowledge is that we think that finding it is enough. Many times, perhaps it is. However, for the stuff that really matters in life, finding it is the first step. We must then act upon it. The majority of behavioural changes that happen don't occur simply because we know something, it's because we acted upon what we learned. Mindfulness is a prime example ...

It's been too long since I've posted to this blog. What would you like to see a post about? Please let me know by commenting on this post. Thank you!

I speak from personal experience and from the observations of people I'm close to; we are our harshest critics. The toll this takes on our emotional well-being is huge, however we seem to put up with it because we think that we need to be hard on ourselves to be 'better people', to 'learn from our mistakes', so that we can be 'successful'. The society that I live in embraces self-punishment as a form of  self-improvement.  We focus on feeling guilty rather than feeling remorse; different words with vastly different meanings. I think we fear that if we aren't hard on ourselves that we won't learn or get lazy and not improve. Modern psychology has definitively determined that self-punishment does not help us, in fact in often slows us or prevents us from changing or take a different course of action in the future. I can remind myself of this until I'm blue in the face but unlearning that self-punishment is not helpful is a tough thing to do an...

OCD can be one of the most stubborn and unwelcomed guests you'll ever run across. It's ability to take up so much energy in one's brain and to sabotage our awareness and perspective is what can make OCD so seemingly powerful. We can't change it's basic qualities but we can change how we respond. The emotions that OCD evokes are almost always unpleasant and these are the emotions that we are hard wired to pay the most attention to. The stickiness and intensity of the unpleasant emotions can very easily spiral and make us feel depressed, anxious, and without hope.  This all sounds very unfortunate and sad if we take it at face value but there are things working on our behalf that we forget about and things that we have the ability to build and strengthen. Resilience is a very powerful friend to us and can can cast away the doom and gloom picture we paint in moments rather than day or weeks. One thing that has been scientifically proven again and again about...

By the standards of the society that I live in I've "succeeded" at making a life for myself. Before I go further with this, I want to assure you that this is not going to be an egotistical post about myself; far from it. So back to the "succeeded" part. This statement must be taken with a grain of salt for it depends upon the specific time frame that I'm focusing on. There have been many and will be many periods in my life in which I will feel that I have not "succeeded". Our ideas of what success means differs from one person to the next with no one person owning the right answer. Here's my idea of success. I have a mental illness and most of the time it doesn't interfere with my life. I have a full time job that allows me to provide for my family. Our bills are paid, the house is warm in the winter, we never worry about having enough food or water, we are able to purchase material needs and wants. We don't have to worry about our s...

Target is selling a sweater that has OCD plastered on the front of it. Below the letters it says 'Obsessive Christmas Disorder'. Really Target? You are that insensitive to sell something that completely trivializes and minimizes what OCD is and the devastating effects it has on the people that have it. Below is the email that I sent to them and the link to their website to contact them if you feel you'd like to do so. Link:  http://www.target.com/contactus/form My wife and I spend a lot of money shopping at Target, both in store in online. We use you pharmacy, buy your groceries, buy all the other things that you have to offer. We enjoy shopping at your stores.  It's extremely irresponsible and inappropriate that you are selling a sweater that trivializes OCD. People will say, 'it's just a sweater'. Well it's not. It's a decision, intended or not, by Target to make fun of and minimize a mental illness that causes severe pain and suf...

Just as our mood influences our perception of everything so does our perspective influence our ability to see things as they really are. On a day that I feel that I have a bit of perspective I'm much less likely to fall into the highs and lows of any given emotion. Even the good stuff that we like and try to hold onto.

Short post today. My wife shared a quote with me that moved her and does complete justice to the difference between sympathy and empathy. Sympathy's easy. You have sympathy for starving children swatting at flies on the late-night commercials. Sympathy is easy because it comes from a position of power. Empathy is getting down on your knees and looking someone else in the eye and realizing your could be them, and that all that separates you is luck. -Dennis Lehane

We spend a lot of time wishing things were different than they are; small stuff and big stuff alike. For example, we may wish that we had a 'better' or different car, better or different job, or we may wish that it wasn't raining right now and that it was sunny out instead. "I wish I hadn't eaten so much", " I wish that the I had gone to bed earlier", "I wish that I was happy today". We may phrase this differently than "I wish", but it's the same thing. It would be nice if I were better at writing...same thing different words.  We tend to become so caught up in this vicious cycle that we rarely ever appreciate how things are. If I'm honest with myself, most of the time I cannot change how things are. I can make decisions that will impact and shape tomorrow and perhaps days to come but what I'm wishing for to be different resides in the present and not in the past or future.  Think of how much of your life is wa...

1971 is the year that Prozac was invented. It wasn't until 1987 that it first became available for public use. Eli Lilly did not develop the drug for depression, rather it was developed as a drug for the treatment of high blood pressure. This never happened because they couldn't duplicate the results viewed in animals when human trials of the drug were done. Plan B for Lilly was to use Prozac as an anti-obesity agent which also proved to be a failed option. They next decided to market it as a drug to treat those hospitalized with depression; yet another failure. Finally they tried it on a few people that were mildly depressed and it appeared to help them. By 1999 Prozac provided 25% of Eli Lilly's revenue; a whopping 10 billion dollars per year.  I am not anti-medication. I take multiple medications and they have helped me and continue to help me. Prozac happens to be one of them.  What I am is disgusted.  Disgusted at the lack of attention and money focused on treati...

From my experience with intrusive thoughts, the kind that go against what we value, they can cause so much anxiety, sadness and guilt. You may be feeling depressed because the thoughts that bother you so much are wearing you down. That's what happened to me. I bought into the thoughts and assumed that they had some value about who I am and because of that, buying into them, I'd taken ownership of them and they were no longer chemical reactions but something that I needed to be concerned about, to worry about, to fix. I grasped them so strongly in my hand and wouldn't let go. The ironic truth is that those thoughts are like hot coals that we hold onto. We try to fix them when what we really need to do is let go of them. Why would one purposefully hold onto something that hurts them so much?  You are giving energy and power to thoughts that occurred in the past and projecting how they may impact you later, the future. All we have is the present, the now.  OCD thrive...

I strongly believe that people should help one another and that people are always more important than money. I've become sickened by the lack of compassion and ethics that some companies in this country believe is acceptable.  I ran across a story about a hospital in St. Joseph, Missouri. The hospital is now called Mosaic Life Care and was formerly known as Heartland Regional Medical Center. They are the only hospital in the region so people that need emergency care really have no other choice but to go to them. What they have been doing to their patients without health insurance is atrocious. The whistle blower for what's happened at this non-profit hospital is an investigative journalism piece by Pro Publica; one of the few truly objective, data and fact driven journalism organizations in this country.  I'll link the full story below. Mosaic Life Care (AKA Heartland Regional Medical Center) has been going after the working poor by garnishing their...