← Get to know OCD
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Have you found yourself in the midst of mental compulsions and wondered how you'd got there, that you finally realized you're on the 10th time reviewing something or trying to figure something out, or the third hour of going over that conversation you had, wondering, if I had said this, then they would have said that, and then I would have said this, and then it would have gone this way, and then maybe it would have been better and I wouldn't have had that and this and all these types of things. Well, I want you to know that these things can be automatic. They can just start to occur. And sometimes that can feel frustrating for people, especially when we're talking about treatment, because you may think, well, how can you do exposure and response prevention therapy for something that just happened? And I can tell you, while we might not be able to catch something right away when it starts because, well, it might just start to happen, we can learn to catch ourselves in the midst of something and then take a different course. What I like to call undoing it, right? If you find yourself doing a mental compulsion, you can always undo it by adding a statement of doubt at the end. A, well, maybe or maybe not, or that could or couldn't be, and I'll have to learn to live with that. It's possible. And maybe that's the case, right? By adding this statement of doubt to the end of a mental compulsion, you're not allowing yourself to finish feeling satisfied or finished in the sense that you have given OCD everything that it wants. You are allowing yourself to finish in doubt and uncertainty and giving yourself the opportunity to learn that you can live with doubt and uncertainty, that it is the very fact that you know how to live with doubt and uncertainty that lets you survive day to day in this human race that we find ourselves in. OCD will of course say, oh, no, no, we need that certainty. There should be no doubt. Even though OCD says it's okay to have doubt about 99.9999% of your life, it'll say for this point, 0000001%, you must have certainty. Well, that is weird, isn't it? Why do we have a different set of rules for this thing than we do for absolutely everything else in our lives? What makes this thing something that we have to have when it's okay not to have certainty about anything else? And the answer to that is, well, OCD decides that. It becomes the arbiter of these things. OCD says, I know better. I know what's right or wrong. And I know that in these situations there must be certainty, but it's okay to not have it anywhere. Now, these mental compulsions can be tough for people, right? And sometimes people don't even know they're doing mental compulsions. This is why it takes a trained therapist to ask about them. I always ask if somebody is doing any mental compulsions. People who aren't well trained in OCD may only be looking for physical compulsions because, well, that's what you see in TV and movies, is people doing physical compulsions. Let me show you what a TV show would look like of somebody doing mental compulsions. Here we go. Not very exciting television, if that's the case. Not a great movie probably either. So we don't show those, and therefore people don't know that those are part of obsessive compulsive disorder, but they absolutely are. And that is why it is imperative to work with a specialist who knows to not only look for the physical compulsions and ferret those out, but also find what are the mental compulsions that are going on and apply ERP equally to both the physical and the mental compulsions. If you have a therapist that you're feeling is just not getting it, ask them the questions. Do they really understand ocd? Do they really understand ERP work? And if they don't, find yourself a specialist who does. The good thing is there's a very large network of specialists who treat OCD out there who specialize in exposure and response prevention therapy, and they work at nocd. I happen to be the chief clinical officer there and I'm proud of the training that we've done with our therapists to help them understand what OCD is and how to apply the principles of exposure and response prevention to both mental and physical compulsions. So if you're looking for help for OCD and you find yourself stuck in your head a lot and wondering, might these be mental compulsions? It doesn't hurt to reach out and get a diagnostic evaluation to see what's going on. We'd be happy to meet with you and do some sessions with you to see if OCD is the right diagnosis, or maybe it's anxiety or maybe it's a depression issue, which we also treat. And we could be your one stop shop for the things that you need. So check us out at nocd. Com, that's nocd. Com and hopefully we can help you start to live the life that you want to live and not the life that OCD wants you to live. Thanks.