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Hi, everybody. Dr. Patrick McGrath, Chief Clinical Officer at NOCD. Happy to talk to you today about, well, contamination and the fact that contamination isn't just about germs. Contamination can also be what we call an emotional contamination. And what do we mean by that? Emotional contamination could be things like bad energy or some kind of bad vibe or negative emotion or undesirable trait we may see in a person that we don't want somehow transferred to us. Right? We may see someone we really don't like sit in a chair and think, I can't sit in that chair anymore because that chair has now absorbed the bad energy of the person that I don't like. And. And maybe now I'll even watch if anybody else sits in that chair because now they've absorbed the energy, and then I have to watch what they go touch. And I can't touch that either, because, of course, bad energy just transfers. It never decreases. It always transfers and transfers and transfers. And, ooh, maybe I can't even come to this house anymore, because by the time this party's done, 12 people have sat in there. Then they've all gone and eaten, and then they've all sat in other places, and now this house is just full of bad energy, and I don't ever want to be in it. Whatever. Again, this kind of emotional contamination can happen to people. Maybe you receive bad news while wearing a certain outfit and you think, well, I can't ever wear that outfit again because that outfit is attached to getting bad news. Maybe we know someone who's wronged somebody and we don't ever want to be around them because we don't want that to transfer to us. And we don't want to wrong other people by associating with someone who's wrong someone else maybe we feel needs to clean and wash and mentally reset after hearing some kind of disturbing story. We could do that mentally by telling ourselves a good story. We might shake it out of our head or something like that. But. But we have to somehow get rid of that content that we might find to be upsetting. Now, let's take a look at some other conditions. Let's talk about, like, say, PTSD or somebody who's experienced trauma. Let's say you pull into a parking lot and you get mugged and you start to, you know, have flashbacks of it and nightmares about it, and you avoid that parking lot, and pretty soon you might avoid other parking lots. And that's a trauma response, right? That's somebody who has learned that things weren't as safe as they thought they might have been. And so they avoid those situations so that they can't put themselves back into that unsafe situation again versus somebody with obsessive compulsive disorder might hear there was a mugging in that lot, which means there's bad energy in that lot. I'm never going to park in that lot again. And in fact I'm also going to see what way cars go usually out of that. Oh, they always take a right. It's a one way street. So I can't go past the parking lot down that street because those cars have taken the bad energy out of the lot onto the street. And the street also has bad mugging energy on it too. And if I get some of that bad energy, then maybe something bad will happen to me. So I'm safe as long as I up to the driveway. But anything past the driveway will be dangerous. And so by my obsession, my thought about this is I have to make sure that something bad doesn't happen to me. And the best way to do it is to not gather that bad energy into me and I'll do all that I can to stay away and avoid that situation. There are people who experience anxiety disorders, right. And some people may have something happen like a specific phobia, right. Maybe there's a fear of heights. We have a fear of throwing up, something like that. And we may just avoid that situation or things that are triggers to that situation. So. So that we don't throw up or fall down the stairs or something of that nature. But let's go with the stairs. 1. There may also be people with OCD who have a fear of what if I were to push people down the stairs? That could come from. Well, I saw a news story where somebody got really angry at another person and they started a fight and they pushed them down the stairs and that person was hurt. And boy, what if I get angry at somebody and I'm by a staircase and then I push someone down the stairs? That would be an awful, horrible thing. Here's what I'm going to do going forward, since I'm so afraid of what if I were to do this? I will only take stairs if there's no one else anywhere near me within 100ft of the staircase. And then I will run up or run down the stairs to make sure that I can't harm anyone else who's on the stairs. Right. There could be moral concerns that we have, right? We talked about this idea of bad vibes or something and we may hear about something bad Happening or people doing bad things in the world. And. And then those things could just happen and we hope not to have it. Or OCD could say, hmm, what if you were to do that? What if you would be somebody who would do that? One day they seem to be, you know, quote unquote, normal people and suddenly they snapped. What if you snap one day? Well, let's do this. Let's make sure that before we leave the house, there's no knives on us. And we could start first with just patting our pockets. Okay, no knives, but within three months, we're stripping naked in front of the door, checking our whole body, checking all of our clothes to make sure that I don't have any knives with. Because I want to make sure that there's no way whatsoever that I would ever be able to harm or stab somebody. Right? When things start to get to this point where it's that interfering in your life, this is really time to get some help. We want to make sure that, you know that good therapy is available. These thoughts, these images, these urges that you have, they lead to compulsions. And what do compulsions do? They alleviate distress or guilt or shame or anxiety for a moment and then the stuff starts to creep back in and then we have to do it again and this becomes the OCD cycle. And it's sometimes what I call the hamster wheel of hell, right? We're just stuck on this thing and going in over and over. But you don't have to stay on that hamster wheel. You can step off and good treatment helps you to be able to do that. And we do that treatment here at nocd, we do something called exposure and response prevention therapy. We expose you gradually, not throwing in the deep out of the pool, but starting with really low level stuff to the things that are uncomfortable, teaching you that you can handle them without doing your safety behaviors, without doing avoidance and reassurance and distraction and substance use and compulsions, and you learn to live with them. And as you do that and handle more and more things, your fear starts to drop off more and more and you start to get to live the life you want to live and not the life that OCD wants you to live. If you're interested in that and you want some help with that, reach out to us@nocd.com our care team is available. They can set up a free call with you. They will set you up with one of our well trained ERP therapists all across the US and we also do work in Canada and the UK and Australia too. And we'll make sure again that you start to live the life that you want to live and not the life that OCD wants you to live. We hope to hear from you soon.