Has OCD Taken Over Your Life?
Do repetitive and disturbing thoughts clog your mind day and night? Are you then compelled to engage in behaviors to alleviate the ensuing anxiety they cause? Stuck in an endless loop of thoughts and compulsions, are you robbed of precious time you’d rather spend enjoying life?
When OCD takes over, it can feel like your life is not your own. The sheer amount of time and energy you may spend ruminating over torturous thoughts and disturbing images—and the resulting compulsions they trigger—leaves time for little else.
Perhaps you have obsessive rumination about your health, safety, or your relationship, agonizing over thoughts you ultimately know to be “irrational” but are terrifying nevertheless. Or maybe intrusive thoughts about sex or religious/moral scrupulosity—an obsessive concern with whether or not you’re being good or bad—preoccupy your mind. OCD tells you that perfection must be achieved at all costs.
Compulsions Might Drain Away Your Time
Disturbing thoughts may lead to compulsive behaviors, such as excessive handwashing, arranging, organizing, checking, or counting. For example, you may need to constantly reassure yourself that you didn’t leave the oven on or, maybe, you feel like you can’t open doors until completing a tapping ritual. Or maybe you incessantly try to think or problem-solve these thoughts away. You might also seek outward assurance from loved ones, which, over time, could strain your relationships.
You might avoid triggering situations altogether to minimize your anxiety and obsessive thoughts. Although this strategy may work in the short term, your world continues to grow smaller. Rather than engaging in life on your terms, you may spend increased time isolated from who and what you love.
If you struggle with OCD, you simply want your life back. Fortunately, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) therapy offers beneficial treatment options that can be tailored to your needs.
OCD Can Feel Like A Bully In Charge Of Us
OCD is a mental health challenge that often overlaps with anxiety, depression, and trauma. The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) estimates that the “lifetime prevalence of OCD among U.S. adults is 2.3 percent. And among adults with OCD, approximately one half—50.6 percent—will have a serious impairment.” [1] Genetics, brain chemistry, and environmental factors are all thought to contribute to obsessive-compulsive tendencies. What’s more, cultural and religious taboos can sometimes inform the content of obsessive rumination.
People who suffer from OCD often describe it as an outside entity that invades their thoughts and feels foreign to their authentic selves. Unrelenting and irrational, OCD can seem like a tortuous bully that sucks the joy out of everything. Preoccupied by thoughts and compulsions rather than doing what we enjoy, OCD can take hours, days, and years of productive time away from us. And because it’s often misunderstood, the stigma surrounding OCD can make us feel more isolated than we already do.
Seeking Reassurance From Others Can Backfire
When we try to overcome OCD on our own, we often turn to friends and family for reassurance. Naturally, our loved ones provide it to us in hopes of relieving our suffering. However, the insidious nature of OCD means that receiving reassurance only further cements this coping strategy into our behavior. Unfortunately, when the next intrusive thought comes, we will once again turn to family and friends for reassurance, leading to short-term relief but long-term suffering. With these sorts of Catch-22 scenarios to contend with, our loved ones are left exasperated and don’t always know how to help.
The good news is that OCD treatment allows you to reclaim your time, hobbies, passions, and zest for life. Learning healthier coping strategies such as Exposure and Response Prevention therapy (ERP) can help keep OCD in check.
OCD Treatment Can Help You Get Your Life Back
You may have lived years dealing with the crippling symptoms of OCD, giving up hope that anything could be done to alleviate your distress. However, even if you’ve concluded your OCD is treatment-resistant, there is hope for you. OCD therapy provides a safe space to confront intrusive thoughts and behaviors you may feel ashamed of. You can rest assured that you will be met with compassion and empathy throughout OCD treatment.
As a skilled and knowledgeable therapist, I will gently guide you to confront difficult emotions, memories, and losses that undergird your OCD. With enhanced awareness of where your anxiety comes from and coping skills to manage your symptoms, you can spend less time obsessively ruminating and have the time, energy, and mental bandwidth to re-engage in life.
The Parallel Tracks Of OCD Treatment
The management of OCD is two-pronged. Not only will our goal be to relieve symptoms in the short term, but also drill down to core emotional challenges so you can heal over the long haul. First and foremost, we focus on eliminating OCD-reinforcing behaviors and thought patterns. From there, we identify the underlying foundation for these thoughts and behaviors. Healing from your core emotional wounds eliminates the need to rely on intrusive thoughts and compulsions for relief.
We will utilize Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) therapy—the gold standard treatment for OCD—to learn coping skills that help disrupt compulsive behaviors stemming from anxious thoughts. [2] By gently facing your fears within a controlled therapeutic environment, ERP can diminish the intensity of OCD. The ERP process allows your brain to break out of the fear-avoidance cycle, thereby alleviating OCD symptoms. Additionally, we will disrupt reassurance behaviors that are helpful in the short term but worsen anxiety over time.
Employing Experiential Dynamic Therapy helps us understand the underlying emotional landscape that drives intrusive thoughts. We will examine how coping mechanisms developed in the past could lead to problems today, creating entrenched patterns related to thoughts and feelings. Psychodynamic exploration identifies what fuels anxiety so that OCD symptoms can eventually subside.
Anxiety Regulation
OCD is fueled by dysregulated anxiety, which, in turn, signals emotions that lie beneath the surface. Paying attention to how anxiety manifests within your body will help you learn how to regulate it as well as identify the underlying emotions.
Utilizing mindfulness and incorporating Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) coping skills for OCD not only helps relieve its symptoms but also allows you to build awareness of when and why you become anxious. Once your anxiety is regulated, you can access your full range of emotions so you can make the best possible decisions for yourself.
You have it within you to take back control of your life. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) counseling can help you get there.
But You May Wonder Whether OCD Treatment Is Right For You…
I don’t think I have the time or money to commit to OCD therapy.
OCD therapy is an investment in yourself, your health, and your well-being. For some, it is even an investment in their relationships and families. Working with an OCD counselor does not take nearly as much time as that spent with distressing intrusions and compulsions, which can suck away your life day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, and second by second.
I’m embarrassed to talk to a counselor about the thoughts I have.
Clients often tell me that what they are about to say is really shameful and embarrassing to admit out loud. You may worry that your thoughts are so disturbing they will confirm what you already fear—that something is deeply wrong with you. Aside from having heard it all before, I know that intrusive thoughts are just that—thoughts. They don’t represent who you are. The goal of OCD treatment is to help reclaim your life, free from undue fear and shame.
Won’t talking about my OCD in counseling make my symptoms worse?
An unfortunate fact is that some types of talking can actually make problems worse. Without an understanding of how OCD works, well-meaning therapists can unintentionally exacerbate a client’s symptoms. The key is to know what to listen for, when to interrupt unhelpful thought patterns, and how to intervene to build new neural pathways of learning. As a skilled OCD therapist, I am trained and knowledgeable in knowing how to intervene in ways that alleviate rather than exacerbate the problem.
It's Time To Get Your Life Back
We can find short- and long-term solutions to your OCD together. To find out more about OCD treatment with Brian Jacobs, LPC you can call 703-672-0495 or visit my contact page to email me or schedule.
[1] https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/obsessive-compulsive-disorder-ocd#part_2581
[2] Foa, E. B., & Kozak, M. J. (1996). Psychological treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder. In M. R. Mavissakalian & R. F. Prien (Eds.), Long-term treatments of anxiety disorders (pp. 285–309). American Psychiatric Association.
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