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Hey, everybody. Dr. Patrick McGrath here, Chief Clinical Officer at NOCD. Glad to have you with me. And I wanted to discuss a topic today that I think is really important to consider. I do a webinar on Wednesday nights and a question that I'll get is, I'm doing this with a therapist. Do you think that that's helpful? Should I be continuing to do that? Is there something else that I should do instead? And so I wanted to take a few moments today to talk to you about are you in the right therapy and are you meeting with the right therapist? Let's take it out of OCD for a moment. Imagine that you broke your hand. Who would you want to do the surgery for you? Would you want a general surgeon or would you want a hand specialist who had spent years training just on that part of the body to do your surgery? I would bet you would want your hand surgery to be done by a hand specialist. Now think about that for your mental health. If you had the opportunity to meet with someone who really specializes in the condition that you have, would you want to meet with that person or someone who does more of a general treatment? On the flip side, if you are seeing somebody who does a general therapy, but you have a suspicion that OCD might be the thing going on, that general therapist might not have enough knowledge or education about OCD to even make the diagnosis for you of obsessive compulsive disorder, which means that they're missing what it is that really needs to be addressed in the therapy sessions that they're doing with you. Now, here's what I believe. Your time and your money have a lot of value if you're going to be working with somebody. I want you to spend your time and your money on a service that actually really targets the thing that you need help with and not on some general type of concern or issue. If you have O, C, D and you're meeting with a therapist who tells you that whenever you have an intrusive or unwanted or obsessive kind of thought or image or urge, here's what you should do. Take a lot of diaphragmatic breaths. Do a ton of muscle relaxation. Tell yourself not to think about it. Snap a rubber band on your wrist as a way to punish the thought out of you. Or close your eyes and put yourself into a deep meditative state and just allow yourself to think of calm, soothing things like the ocean or a gentle breeze or things of that nature. That's not going to help you. That's not going to give you the Results that you're looking for. What that will do is that will lead you to feel good in the session that you're in, but it won't teach you anything about how to handle OCD once you leave that office or leave that virtual session. And the world is still waiting for you out there. With all of the triggers in the world, and how are you going to face them? Oh, there's another trigger. Diaphragmatic breathe again. There's another trigger. Do that muscle relaxation all over again. Hmm. I keep doing more and more muscle relaxation. I keep doing more and more deep breathing, and I keep getting triggered. And so then I do more muscle relaxation, and I do more breathing, and I find more triggers. That's because safety behaviors are not the answer to dealing with ocd. If you're doing things like avoiding anything, you're afraid of seeking reassurance from the people you know or love to tell you that you'll be fine and everything will be okay, distracting yourself as much as you possibly can so that you don't have to face your fears, Using substances more and more is a way to try to eliminate those thoughts or images or urges that you don't want to be having anymore or getting stuck in more and more compulsions all of the time. You're actually feeding obsessive compulsive disorder instead of defeating obsessive compulsive disorder. And what I want you to do is spend less time giving OCD what it wants and having you live more of the life that you want to live, because that's the most important thing at all. OCD does not have your best interest at heart. OCD does not care about you losing a job or your friends or your relationships, all due to the fact that you spend so much time doing what OCD wants you to do. In fact, let's just give an example. If you were told by your job that if you're late one more time, you're going to be fired and you're halfway there, and you think, oh, gosh, what if I left the door unlocked? And then, oh, the dogs, they know how to open the door. Or they could figure it out today even. Maybe I should just go back one more time just to make sure that the door is locked so that they can't get out, and then be in the street, get hit by a car, and all the guilt and shame they'll have when the family comes home. And it was all my fault. So I turn around and I think, okay, as long as there's not a train I'll be able to make it to work. So I turn around and I'm driving home and I look and I see the train. I think I. And then the gates go down and I'm stuck. And I get to work and it's one minute after nine when I'm supposed to be there, and the security guard meets me at the door with a box of my stuff and says, sorry, you knew what the stipulations were. And I get in the car and I drive home. Do you think OCD is going to say, I'm really sorry about that? It's not going to happen? OCD is going to say, if you had just done what I told you to do the first time, which was to make sure the door was locked, you wouldn't have had to have gone back, you wouldn't have had to deal with this and you would still have your job. It's all your fault. Right? You need a therapist who's going to approach it that way and tell you these types of things, and not one who's just going to say, I'm sorry you lost your job. Let's do some more diaphragmatic breathing as a way to manage that. Let's. Let's hold some crystals as a way to try to align things for us. Let's smell this thing to kind of get our chakras in line or whatever other things people may say, right? What you need is a therapist who's going to hold you in line and really help behave you out of ocd. Right? I've never once talked to anybody out of ocd, but I sure have behaved people out of ocd. And if you're looking for help and you want help, it means you work with a specialist who really knows what they're doing. And if that means the therapist that you're with right now, who may be wonderful, and we're not saying that you can't ever see them, but OCD might not be the thing you see them for. Work with a specialist for ocd, and if you want to go back to that therapist when you're done with that and spend time talking to them, because you really get a lot out of sessions for doing that, that's wonderful. But like I said, if you see a primary care physician and they're doing great for your health care, but then you break your hand, they're not the one to do the surgery. You go to a specialist to find one, and then you go back to your primary care physician after you've dealt with all the surgery and all of the rehab that you have to do, and they're going to do some general things to follow up afterwards. You can have the same model for your mental health in that same way. So you need that therapist who's really going to be helpful to you for OCD. Well, check us out@nocd.com that's nocd.com because we're here for you. We know that evidence based treatment for ocd, we can provide that to you, and we can help you start living the life that you want to live that isn't ruled by ocd. And then you can go back to that therapist that you really do enjoy talking to and maybe do get a lot out of for many things, just not for the ocd. And then you move on and you live that life that you want to live. We hope to hear from you soon. Check us out@nocd.com.