Online Therapist for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)

Online Mindfulness Therapy through Skype or Face Time or Zoom for Stopping Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and Intrusive Thoughts without relying on medications.

Online Mindfulness Therapy for OCD

Looking for an Online Psychotherapist for OCD and intrusive thoughts?

Talk to an online psychotherapist for help with OCD

Email me to schedule Online Therapy with me for help with your OCD. I will teach you how to manage Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and Intrusive Thoughts and memories using Mindfulness Therapy.

This approach is particularly effective and most clients see significant changes after 3-4 sessions with me.

Online Mindfulness-based Skype Psychotherapy is very effective for stopping anxiety and depression without relying on drugs. Treat the psychological cause of your emotional suffering instead of just treating symptoms.

This is a non-medical approach to recovery, where the focus is on teaching you how to overcome the underlying psychological and emotional cause of your OCD and anxiety

What clients are saying:

“The insights that I have gained in the first two sessions of online counseling are proving invaluable. Now I can see a way through my anxiety for the first time. Mindfulness Therapy is amazing.”

“I had one Skype session with Peter Strong and it has helped me heaps in my recovery. I am now trying to apply mindfulness in my everyday, whether I go back to depressive or anxious states, or whether I am feeling normal, mindfulness helps you view life in an easier, more adventurous way.”

Get Help from an Online Psychotherapist for OCD

Online Treatment for OCD

Go to my Contact Page to schedule Online Mindfulness Therapy via Skype for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and intrusive thoughts

All sessions are with Dr. Peter Strong via Skype
Schedule a session to see if Mindfulness Therapy is right for you
There are NO upfront payments. You make your payment via PayPal after each session and only if you are completely satisfied with the therapy session
You should expect to see significant improvements after 3-4 sessions

I will teach you how to break free from compulsive and intrusive thoughts, memories and images using the proven techniques of Mindfulness Therapy.

Online Mindfulness Therapist for OCD

Complete playlist: Online Treatment for OCD

Online Psychotherapist for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder – Treatment for OCD without medication

OCD Therapist over Skype – Talk to an online Psychotherapist for OCD

Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I’m a professional mindfulness-based therapist, based in Colorado, USA and I offer online therapy for anxiety disorders, depression, addictions, and particularly for the treatment of OCD.

I get a lot of requests for help with obsessive-compulsive disorder and particularly with intrusive thoughts.

Many people suffer quite severely from intrusive repetitive thoughts that just basically obsess the mind and cause a lot of suffering and lead to a lot of unwanted behaviors to try and avoid and get away from these intrusive thoughts.

Most of my clients have already tried traditional talk therapy, but the common finding is that understanding why you have OCD and even understanding that your OCD thoughts are not real is not an effective solution. Everyone I have ever worked with already knows perfectly well that their intrusive thoughts are not rational, but that insight does not provide any significant help in overcoming OCD.

Similarly, most of my clients (by the way, never call yourself a “patient” because that will simply reinforce a victim belief and that will delay recovery) have also tried prescription medications such as fluvoxamine, sertraline (Zoloft) and fluoxetine (Prozac). These typically provide a short-term relief from anxiety symptoms, but medication does not provide long-term relief. This is to be expected, because medication does not change the underlying cause of OCD, which is psychological not chemical. OCD is a habit based on conditioned habitual reactivity. That is what needs to change if you want long-term relief.

So if you’re looking for an online therapist for OCD and you would like help in working with intrusive thoughts then please go to my website and learn more about the online therapy service that I offer for treating OCD and anxiety disorders in general. And please send me an email if you have any questions.

Mindfulness therapy for OCD is enjoyable

Most people really enjoy the mindfulness approach because it’s very practical. It teaches you how to neutralize those intrusive obsessive thoughts, which is essential to prevent the conversion of those fear-based thoughts into compulsive behaviors.

Trying to approach the problem of obsessive and intrusive thoughts by some sort of rational thinking approach is just not going to work. In fact, you already know that these intrusive thoughts are not rational and that they are not likely to manifest in action, but knowing this doesn’t stop them.

This is because the intrusive thoughts have a very strong emotional charge and it’s that emotional charge that causes them to stay in the mind and to repeat over and over again. It is the emotional charge that we have to work with and that’s the primary focus in Mindfulness Therapy.

It doesn’t matter whether the thought is rational or irrational. That’s not the point. The point is that you have to neutralize that emotional charge to allow that thought to subside and go away.

You must neutralize the emotional charge of the obsessive thoughts

If you really want to stop intrusive thoughts you must neutralize the emotional charge of those thoughts. So the way we do this in Mindfulness Therapy is by actually meditating on those intrusive thoughts.

We don’t try to run away from them, we don’t try to avoid them. We actually meditate on them, which means we hold them as a primary object in our meditation. We look at the thoughts and we start to change our relationship to them. That’s the first and most important thing.

So typically, what happens with a highly charged emotional intrusive thoughts is that when ever they arise in the mind we become completely consumed by them, we become overwhelmed by the thoughts, we become identified with them.

So the first step in mindfulness training is learning to literally sit with those thoughts without becoming reactive, without reacting with fear, which is the primary energy associated with intrusive thoughts, or aversion, some form of hatred or resistance, which are also fear-based. We have to learn to sit with those intrusive thoughts and not react to them and not identify with them.

That is the first training and the only way to do that is to consciously and actively focus on that thought; on training in that way, to sit with the thought. You can’t do it by some other indirect method. You must work directly with those intrusive thoughts.

Neutralizing the emotional charge involve changing the imagery of the emotion underneath the thought

The second part of our mindfulness work is becomes possible once you stop reacting or identifying with those obsessive thoughts.

Then we work on neutralizing the emotional charge, and that really is mostly about working with the imagery of the thought, because emotions work through imagery and very highly emotional thoughts or images, for that matter, or memories or other intrusive type imagery.

The thing that makes it emotionally powerful is the properties of that imagery itself, how you see it and the mind is what creates the emotion itself.

So we look at this imagery and then we start to change it, because when you have a non-reactive conscious, mindful relationship with the intrusive or obsessive thought, then you can begin to explore changing it, changing its properties. For example making it a lot smaller.

So an obsessive or compulsive thought, by its nature will be very large. That is the imagery. The imagery is probably also going to be very close.

That’s how you see it in the mind, very, very close. And that is what creates the intense emotional charge of the thought: it’s position, it’s size, and it’s color. Where you see it. Do you see it about you or head level. All of these details of the imagery are what actually cause the emotion.

So changing all of these details is how we can neutralize obsessive and intrusive thoughts. The same applies for traumatic memories as well.

When I work with PTSD, the primary problem that the people suffering from PTSD encounter are these very intense, intrusive images, memory images. And the same thing applies. We try to establish a non-reactive relationship with that image and then we explored changing the properties of the image.

Again even just the simple action of making it 100 times smaller in size can greatly reduce the emotional charge of that memory image. So the same principle works for PTSD as it does when working with OCD. We will need to neutralize that charge and the most effective way of doing that is to work with its imagery.

When you have neutralized the emotional charge of obsessive-intrusive thoughts then it become much easier to stop conversion of those thoughts into compulsive behaviors (such as excessive hand washing or re-checking things).

Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy has similarities with Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) Therapy, which is recognized as one of the best CBT approaches available for treating OCD without medications. The main difference between Mindfulness Therapy and ERP is the focus that Mindfulness Therapy places on recovering from the fear that propels the whole reactive cascade of OCD (Stimulus>Thought>Behavior). When you heal that underlying fear then there is nothing to sustain the obsessive thoughts or compulsive behaviors, and both tend to subside quite naturally.

So if you would like to learn more about working with an online therapist for OCD, you would like to learn the mindfulness approach for overcoming OCD and working with intrusive thoughts and memories, then please contact me and let’s schedule a Skype Therapy session. So I see my clients through Skype because it’s convenient for my clients and it’s also much more comfortable for most people.

It is less clinical in nature. I do not believe in a clinical approach to emotional suffering. I believe in a much more personal and educational approach, teaching you the skills on how to work with your emotions.

I certainly do not advocate the use of medications because medications will do nothing to change the underlying habitual process and that imagery, for example, that cause our emotions.

So if you’d like to learn practical ways of working with your OCD and intrusive thoughts, then please reach out to me and lets schedule a Skype Therapy session.

Online therapist for treating OCD without medications

Go to my Contact Page to schedule Online Mindfulness Therapy via Skype for help with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and intrusive thoughts

Types of OCD

Obsessive Checking

There are certain main categories of OCD that we can describe. The first is obsessive checking. For example, checking if you turned off all the lights or if you locked all the doors before going to bed.

There is this incessant impulse to recheck that is based on a reactive belief that things are not completed in some way, and that’s based on the emotion of fear. So the fear motivates that belief that things need to be checked again, which then leads to the compulsive behavior or sometimes ritual of rechecking over and over again. Ritualized rechecking means checking things is a specific order.

Fear of Contamination

Another very common kind of OCD has to do with fear of germs and the fear of infection, which leads to compulsive and sometimes ritualized handwashing, where you have to wash your hands in a certain way to try to eliminate the fear that you haven’t washed your hands completely. The fear of infection or contamination is often accompanied by other emotional reactions that also feed that underlying fear, fear of infecting family members, guilt, and so on.

Obsession with Symmetry

A third kind of OCD has to do with symmetry. And this is quite common with children, but also adults as well and it’s that sense of having to put everything in the right place, with the right alignment and organized in the right way. For example, arranging all of the pens and pencils on your desk in a certain way, facing a certain direction and so on. That fear of things not being in the right position, in the right order is what feeds the obsessive compulsive behavior of arranging things in a specific way.

Fear of Aggression

Another kind of OCD that is quite common in adults is the fear of doing harm to yourself or others. For example, the fear of suddenly driving your car off the road; the fear of throwing a cup of water at someone; the fear of hurting an animal. It can take many different forms and it’s very distressing if you are plagued by such aggressive thoughts. And again, this gform of OCD is often exacerbated by a great deal of secondary emotional reactivity, guilt and shame, and so on. Now, it’s very rare that people with OCD-based fear of doing harm actually act out that impulse, but it’s very distressing.

Obsessive Beliefs

Another common form of OCD is based around obsessive beliefs. For example, the belief that I am going insane, or that I will be punished if I do something wrong. This obsessive belief can show itself in a religious context where I feel like I will be punished if I stopped praying or if I stop going to church. We become obsessed with a particular belief and that can lead to ritualized behaviors to counter that fear.

Of course, all these compulsive behaviors and rituals do not actually release the underlying fear. It doesn’t actually heal the underlying emotion.

Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD)

This can also show itself has an obsession around physical appearance. For example, having an obsessive belief that your nose is too big or that you are ugly. This can convert into compulsive behaviors such as constantly checking yourself, constantly putting on makeup or some other action to try and alleviate the underlying fear. The most severe form of body image OCD is referred to as Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD).

Here, perceptions of imperfections on your body such as moles, acne, scars and general physical attractiveness provide trigger points for incessant reactive thoughts. This proliferation of thoughts acts to feed the underlying anxiety. As with all anxiety disorders, the key is to develop a conscious mindful relationship with that anxiety. When it heals, the thoughts will stop by themselves.

In Mindfulness Therapy we learn to develop a conscious, compassionate, friendly and non-reactive relationship with the anxiety through learning how to meditate on the anxiety as an object and exploring how to help it resolve. The strength of that internal relationship, the True Self – Little Self Alliance, as I call it is the main factor that promotes healing and establishes a resolution pathway for the anxiety.

Skin Picking Disorder – Dermatillomania

Also technically called Dermatillomania describes a compulsive preoccupation with irregularities in the skin including spots and scabs particularly on the face and nails. When unchecked, SPD can result in bleeding and scarring. Some form of CBT, and particularly Mindfulness-Based CBT has proven effective. In the Mindfulness Therapy approach we learn how to neutralize the impulse to pick or scratch primarily by cultivating a conscious relationship with the emotional impulse in much the same way that we would do in Mindfulness Therapy for Addiction.

Mindfulness-based impulse control is NOT about diverting attention or finding different responses or “will-powering through” but rather about amplifying objective consciousness where you stay as the Observer observing the impulse as an object.

We frequently make use of Mindfulness-based Creative Imagery to help with this such as visualizing the emotional impulse as an object, making it smaller like a grain of sand and then placing the object on the ground. We repeat this over and over as the impulse appears.

After a few minutes the impulse loses power. The advantage of this training is that we are providing a resolution pathway that becomes hard-wired in the brain becoming a new habit that resolves the impulse. After training, this new habit displaces the old habit, significantly reducing the conversion to compulsive behavior.

Hair Pulling Disorder – Trichotillomania

In the same way as described for Skin Picking, the key is to manage the impulses directly by training with those impulses using Mindfulness-based Impulse Control.

Health Anxiety and Hypochondria

This form OCD is particularly common in adults based on obsession with health matters and excessive rumination around the meaning of physical experiences and changes in the body.

Mindfulness Therapy for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)

Online psychotherapist for treating OCD without medications

Welcome! My name is Peter Strong, and I am a professional online therapist. I specialize in Mindfulness Therapy for treating a range of conditions, including anxiety, depression, stress, addictions and also for the online treatment of OCD, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

I offer online therapy via Skype. It is important that you use Skype so that you can see each other, which will make communication much more effective. Obviously good communication is necessary for effective psychotherapy.

So, how does Mindfulness Therapy work? Well, briefly, Mindfulness Therapy teaches you how to control the reactive thoughts that cause reactive-compulsive behaviors. We learn how to establish what is called a Mindfulness-based Relationship with our compulsive thoughts, so that we can hold those thoughts in our awareness without becoming overwhelmed by them. When we can do this, then we can start to examine the underlying emotion that duels the obsessive thoughts – and this is essential for the treatment of OCD.

Working with that underlying emotion using mindfulness allows us to change the structure of how that emotion operates in the mind. So, once you can change the underlying emotions, then you take the fuel away from the obsessive thinking and this then stops that obsessive thinking converting into compulsive behaviors.

Online Psychotherapist for overcoming OCD and intrusive thoughts

OCD Therapist via Skype

The principal teaching in Mindfulness Therapy for obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) is to learn how to meditate on your intrusive thoughts and on the impulses that lead to compulsive actions. The critical teaching here is that we must develop a conscious relationship with our thoughts and with our emotions. Mindfulness meditation provides one of the best and most direct ways of developing a conscious relationship with your mind.

The biggest problem that I come across when helping people manage OCD is that people fall into a habit of avoidance. You try to blot out or escape from those unpleasant intrusive thoughts and you react against those impulses to convert your intrusive thoughts into actions through willpower, through cultivating aversion to those compulsive impulses.

This will not work. The more that you react either through avoidance or through aversion, the stronger the underlying emotional charge will be for those intrusive thoughts and compulsive impulses.

So trying to overcome OCD through willpower or through rational thinking or some other cognitive process is not usually a very effective.

One of my main criticisms of cognitive behavioral therapy for OCD is that it tries to convince people that the intrusive thoughts and impulses are irrational and not real, and that you can simply replace them with more rational or positive thoughts and behaviors. But, in my experience, this is not an effective approach. People already know that their OCD thoughts and impulses are irrational. That is not the issue for the vast majority of people. The problem is they can’t stop themselves reacting. They can’t stop those repetitive thoughts and behaviors. They are just too strong.

What makes Intrusive thoughts and impulses strong is the emotional charge of those thoughts and impulses. The strength of the emotional charge is the issue, not irrational thinking, and this is the primary focus in Mindfulness Therapy. We work on those emotions. We work on neutralizing the underlying emotions, not the thoughts.

The thoughts and the behaviors are secondary, they are the logical consequences of those very strong underlying emotions. The intrusive-obsessive thoughts are simply the byproducts of the underlying emotion.

So if you want to overcome OCD, you have to work with the underlying emotions that are giving power to your intrusive thoughts or memories, including traumatic memories, as in PTSD. You have to neutralize the emotion in order for those thoughts and memories and impulses to heal and to resolve and to stop being intrusive.

The thoughts are intrusive simply because they have a high emotional charge. So the mind is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. The mind brings into into our awareness, thoughts, memories, experiences that have a high emotional charge and those that don’t have a high emotional charge resolve very quickly.

So the mind is working perfectly. The problem is not the thoughts but rather the emotional charge underneath that has become fixed and has become stuck and unresolved.

Most thoughts and experiences arise and pass away quite quickly. But in the case of OCD thoughts and impulses, they don’t pass away. They stay for a long period of time in the mind because of that strong emotional charge. That is what MUST heal in order for thoughts to stop being intrusive.

So we work at the emotional level. And the primary way that we work with the emotional charge that’s fueling intrusive thoughts and behaviors is by learning how to meditate on our emotions and thoughts. So instead of trying to avoid our thoughts and impulses, we actually do the opposite, we bring them into full conscious awareness, which is really quite different than how they usually arise, which is subconscious and habitual. OCD is basically formed around conditioned habits. These are subconscious, habitual reactions that keep those thoughts arising over and over again. It’s a habit. Habits thrive when there is very little or no consciousness.

So we need to overcome that unconscious habit. And that’s a central part of the teaching of mindfulness therapy as I have developed it for treating OCD. It’s about developing full conscious awareness around those specific obsessive thoughts and compulsive emotional impulses.

During meditation you learn to be fully present with your thoughts and emotions. Developing this very special quality of conscious awareness that we call “objective consciousness”, where you are able to see the thoughts and emotions, but as an observer, rather like watching a movie as the audience.

The real issue here is that we become lost in the movie of our mind and that is what perpetuates OCD. So we learn to meditate on our mind. We learn to bring those intrusive thoughts deliberately into our awareness to develop this objective consciousness. We learn to be very present with those thoughts and the underlying emotion that are fueling the thoughts. This is what leads to healing. This is the necessary step for healing and recovery from OCD.

So willpower, which is really cultivating aversion towards the impulses and thoughts, is actually taking conscious awareness away from those emotions and thoughts as we become ensnared in the conditioned awareness of aversion or dislike or hatred or criticism of those thoughts and impulses.

So we need to learn to be present directly, without any reactivity at all, without any aversion, without any avoidance, without any cognitive reactivity. Trying to understand the emotion, trying to change our beliefs and things of that nature will be ineffective. Beliefs change themselves once the emotional impulse that fuels those particular beliefs changes.

You have to change things at the emotional level in order for beliefs and obsessive thoughts to change. If that emotional charge remains strong, then the obsessive belief will remain active. For example, the belief that if I don’t wash my hands 10 more times, then I will be carrying those germs to my family. So I must wash my hands 10 more times. That’s a belief. And what keeps it strong and active is the emotional charge of that belief. The problem is not being irrational; the problem lies in the emotional charge that cause us to attach to the belief.

The most common emotional charge around OCD is fear. So we need to learn to heal that fear.

The best way to heal fear is by developing a conscious, mindful relationship with that fear. We learn to see the fear as being like a child. It can’t free itself from its own fear so it goes to its parent for comforting. We need to establish the same kind of inner relationship with our fear. The True Self-Little Self alliance is what I call it, and that is the most effective and necessary step for healing the fear that is keeping those obsessive thoughts active in the case of handwashing.

Once that fear is resolved you will no longer be dominated by those intrusive thoughts. They will cease to have any effect, any meaning. They will not convert into the impulse to wash your hands because there’s no emotional charge behind them. They are neutralized and are now just empty thoughts and they just resolve to be replaced by more functional, positive thoughts quite naturally and without any effort.

So we have to work at the emotional level of OCD. That’s the primary teaching in Mindfulness Therapy. And this is what I will teach you during our sessions together as an online therapist.

I will teach you these very specific mindfulness tools for overcoming your OCD.

Online therapy is an excellent option for working with anxiety disorders and also for depression and PTSD and other forms of emotional suffering that are caused by these underlying subconscious habits.

The key requirement for successful online therapy is that you can see your therapist by a Skype or Zoom or FaceTime or other video platform. Being able to see each other makes communication effective and that’s necessary for good psychotherapy.

So if you’re suffering from OCD and you would like to get help from an online therapist to treat that OCD using mindfulness, then do please contact me so we can schedule a Skype Therapy session.

You can expect to see very noticeable improvements in your obsessive, intrusive thoughts and compulsive actions in a relatively short time, once you start applying these mindfulness techniques that I’ll be teaching you.

So please contact me so we can schedule a Skype Therapy session to help you on your path of recovery from obsessive compulsive disorder. Thank you.

So, if you would like to learn more about Mindfulness Therapy for OCD, please contact me through my website. Send me an email and then we can discuss if Online Therapy for OCD is a good choice for you, and I will explain more detail about how this works, and then we can schedule a Skype Therapy Session for your OCD.

So, please, if you are interested in Online Mindfulness Therapy for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, contact me now.

Go to my Contact Page to talk to an online therapist for OCD

Online therapy for overcoming intrusive thoughts

Online psychotherapist for treating Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Mindfulness training provides one of the most effective ways of managing and eliminating intrusive thoughts, including intrusive suicidal thoughts. We learn how to hold those thoughts in the mind without becoming identified with them and without reacting to them with avoidance or aversion.

When we have learned how to do this we stop feeding those thoughts with fear. When we stop feeding them they quickly lose their emotional intensity, and when they lose their emotional charge they diminish and cease to be intrusive.

During therapy sessions I will teach you exactly how to do this.

Welcome. My name is Peter Strong and I’m a professional psychotherapist specializing in mindfulness therapy for the treatment of anxiety and depression and OCD and also I offer help for intrusive suicidal thoughts.

If you are struggling with intrusive thoughts, I invite you to go to my website and learn more about Mindfulness Therapy because that is one of the best approaches, in my opinion, for working with intrusive thoughts, in helping you break free from the grip of intrusive thoughts.

In mindfulness therapy sessions we actually focus on the fundamental problem with intrusive thoughts, which is that the way that we relate to these thoughts. Typically, the relationship is one of avoidance and aversion, resisting, struggling against those thoughts.

But any form of avoidance of intrusive thoughts, including suicidal thoughts, and any form of aversion or resistance to those thoughts will simply reinforce them and cause them to repeat.

So, in mindfulness training we understand this and so we cultivate the exact opposite. That is non-avoidance and non-aversion. We develop conscious awareness of these thoughts and friendliness, which is non-avoidance, towards these thoughts.

It’s really important to learn how to be with these thoughts and meditate on these thoughts and train yourself to become free from identifying with the thoughts and reacting to them with avoidance or aversion.

It won’t just happen by itself you have to train to break free from intrusive thoughts and that is why we make great efforts to meditate mindfully on those thoughts. We actually invite them into the mind but for the purpose of training in developing non-reactivity towards them.

This might seem difficult, but actually it’s not that difficult when you approach these thoughts in the right way. Intrusive thoughts are basically habitual in nature and that habitual tendency is based upon the absence of conscious awareness.

So when we create more conscious awareness around those same thoughts we actually take away the habitual component of the thoughts and this is really very important for the process of neutralizing those thoughts and breaking free from their influence.

If you’d like to learn more about how to work with suicidal thoughts using mindfulness therapy, then I invite you to go to my website and then send me an email and we can schedule a therapy session via Skype to help you learn how to apply mindfulness for overcoming intrusive suicidal thoughts. Thank you.

VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE ME TO LEARN HOW TO START SKYPE THERAPY WITH ME FOR HELP WITH OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE DISORDER AND ANXIETY

Online Psychotherapist for OCD

Online Therapist for overcoming OCD

My name is Peter Strong, I’m a professional, mindfulness-based psychotherapist. I provide online therapy via Skype for the treatment of anxiety and depression and also for help with OCD, obsessive-compulsive disorder.

So if you are interested in talking to an online psychotherapist. To get the help that you need to overcome your specific problems with obsessive-compulsive thoughts or intrusive memories or images, including traumatic memory images, then please contact me and tell me more about yourself and the struggles that you are dealing with and feel free to ask any questions you may have about.

Online therapy and specifically online Mindfulness Therapy is extremely effective for working with anxiety disorders like OCD as well as depression and any other emotional suffering that’s caused by habitual reactive thinking, rumination or negative thoughts that keep reoccurring over time.

If you are struggling with intrusive thoughts, then mindfulness training is one of the best ways of dealing with intrusive thoughts and also traumatic images as well, which can also occur over and over again until they are healed. So the primary focus of Mindfulness Therapy is about healing, it’s about changing this underlying habitual reactivity that is causing the OCD.

It’s very important that you learn to change the way that you relate to your thoughts and emotions. The typical problem that I encounter is that people become very identified with the underlying emotions that fuel the OCD reactive thinking, or they become identified with self-limiting beliefs or behaviors.

We have to change our relationship to these impulses in the mind so that they do not control us. We have to change our relationship to one in which we are independent. We are able to manage, maintain our position as an objective observer of our thoughts and emotions.

This is a principal feature of Mindfulness Therapy. This is what I will be teaching you. Thoughts and emotions themselves are not the problem. The real problem is reactive identification, where we simply become identified with those thoughts or emotions, where we become overwhelmed by those thoughts or emotions, where we become prisoners to our obsessive thinking.

So this can be changed by developing the objective consciousness that’s characteristic of mindfulness training. You cannot overcome obsessive or intrusive thoughts by willpower alone. You have to change your relationship to your emotions so that you are not compelled to identify with or react to those emotions and thoughts.

If you would like to learn more about the Mindfulness Therapy approach to working with OCD and other emotional problems like anxiety and depression, then please contact me and we can schedule a therapy session over Skype.

Skype Therapy is very effective. It’s very important that you use Skype or a similar video platform so that you can see each other, but if you can see each other, then there’s no difference in the effectiveness of psychotherapy, whether it’s delivered online or in-person. You must be able to see each other. That’s the key factor. So please contact me if you would like to learn more about working with an online psychotherapist like myself who specializes in the treatment of anxiety and depression and OCD using the techniques of Mindfulness Therapy.

Online Therapist for treating OCD via Skype

How to cure OCD intrusive thoughts through Mindfulness Therapy via Skype

Welcome! If you are looking for an online therapist to help you with your OCD or other anxiety disorder, please contact me and tell me more about yourself and how I can help you and what you’ve tried so far.

So I teach Mindfulness Therapy online over Skype for working with anxiety and depression and also obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Online therapy is an excellent option for you to consider it, as long as you use Skype. You must use a video platform like Skype or Zoom or face time so that you can see each other.

If you can see each other, then the communication is greatly improved and really, there’s no difference between meeting online or meeting in person.

The style of psychotherapy that I teach, Mindfulness Therapy, is very effective for treating the underlying process that’s causing your anxiety or OCD. It’s very important to look at that process and change the underlying habits that cause the reactive thinking that characterizes OCD.

Medications are not really a very good solution because they don’t help you change anything at that fundamental level, which is psychological in nature. You have to change things there if you really want to break free from any anxiety disorder and especially if you want to break free from OCD.

So, during Mindfulness Therapy, we focus on looking at the structure of our anxiety, of the underlying fear, which is the most prominent emotion that feeds obsessive thinking and rumination. We have to work with that fear and we have to change our relationship to it.

Typically, people don’t have a good relationship with their fear or other painful emotions.We tend to avoid them or seek distraction from those painful emotions or they simply become lost in reactive behaviors, as in the case of OCD. The reactive emotion of fear gets converted into behavioral reactions as a way of trying to get rid of that fear, and of course, that does not work. No matter how many times you repeat the behavior, it will not remove that underlying fear.

This is a characteristic of any kind of habitual reactivity, whether it’s behavioral, whether it’s emotional reactivity or whether it’s cognitive reactivity. You cannot heal fear through reactivity.

Instead, we need to build a relationship with that underlying fear that’s based on full conscious present-centered awareness and compassion. These are the key features of mindfulness and they are essential if you want to heal OCD, or any other emotional suffering.

So this is what I will be teaching you during our sessions together, if you choose to work with me. I will teach you how to work with your obsessive emotions and thoughts and behaviors using the well-tested methods of Mindfulness Therapy.

This approach is very effective. I have been teaching it for many years now, and people see very dramatic improvements in a relatively short time, and certainly within the first three or four sessions, you should see real improvements.

So if you would like to learn more about Mindfulness Therapy for OCD and other anxiety disorders, then please contact me and let’s go ahead and schedule a trial Skype Therapy session.

The first session is always a trial session, which means that if you do not see benefits, then you do not have to pay for that session. You only pay when you are completely satisfied with the outcome of each session that we have together.

So please contact me if you’d like to learn more about Mindfulness Therapy for working with OCD.

Online Therapist for the treatment of OCD via Skype

Online Therapist for OCD and Intrusive Thoughts

Welcome. I’m a professional psychotherapist and I provide online psychotherapy for OCD. So if you’re interested in getting help from an online psychotherapist for the treatment of OCD and for work with intrusive thoughts and intrusive memories and other forms of intrusive thinking, then please reach out to me.

I offer all my sessions through Skype. Skype is really important for online therapy because it allows you to see each other and this greatly improves the effectiveness of communication, which clearly is needed for good quality psychotherapy.

During our online psychotherapy sessions for OCD we learn how to break free from the blind habitual reactivity in the mind where we become blindly identified with these intrusive thoughts or obsessive thoughts.

This is critical because if we become blindly identified with the thoughts, then they basically control us. And this leads to the proliferation of more intrusive thoughts, which in turn feeds the underlying emotion, whatever that may be, that’s feeding the intrusive thoughts. So we need to stop this process of proliferation of reactive thinking in the mind.

The way we go about that in Mindfulness Therapy, which is what I teach for the treatment of obsessive compulsive disorder and intrusive thoughts is by learning how to meditate on those thoughts.

So we don’t avoid the thoughts. That’s the worst thing you can do, because if you try to avoid the thoughts, as painful as they may be, you will simply feed the underlying fear, the emotional charge that makes those thoughts intrusive. So we don’t want to avoid our thoughts.

Instead, we want to meditate on them, which is a process of choosing to bring them into the mind, but to remain fully present as a conscious observer. This is what makes all the difference. So by meditating on our intrusive thoughts or memories or images we are training ourselves out of this habit of reactive identification and we start to see the thoughts more as objects in the mind. This helps us detach from them. They become objects and we become the observer of those objects.

This produces a very significant shift in the mind and starts to fundamentally resolve the emotional charge of the thought. When you stop feeding it, it starts to heal.

So we learn to meditate on our thoughts. We learn to develop that healthy distance from the intrusive-obsessive thoughts. Then we we can start to develop a response pattern that helps resolve the underlying fear, learning how to comfort the fear internally.

Finding a way of being with the fear that helps it heal. This is called the response of compassion, which is very much a part of mindfulness, and Mindfulness Therapy is about developing this internal consciousness and compassion towards those emotions that are in pain. This is what is needed for healing. And it’s very effective.

Trying to stop thinking by willpower, trying to replace negative thoughts with positive thoughts, arguing with them and trying to convince yourself that those thoughts are irrational and you shouldn’t be thinking them is not an effective way of overcoming OCD.

Those kind of cognitive processes don’t really work. The reason they don’t work is because they are at the wrong level. They are at this same level as the intrusive thoughts that you’re trying to change. Thoughts cannot change thoughts very effectively.

If you want to achieve freedom from intrusive thoughts, you have to change and heal the underlying emotion that is feeding those thoughts. And that is the function of meditating on the thoughts so we can find that emotion, which is usually fear, and help it heal.

We can help it heal mostly by developing this internal relationship where you are the observer, which is your True Self, and that does not react out of fear to those fear-based intrusive thoughts. This is what is needed to heal intrusive thoughts. You have to bring your True Self into connection with the Little Self, the fear.

So if you’d like to learn more about working with an online psychotherapist for OCD and you like the idea of online psychotherapy via Skype, then do please contact me and schedule a therapy session via Skype.

Learn how to work with your intrusive thoughts

Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I’m a professional psychotherapist and I offer online Mindfulness Therapy via Skype for the treatment of anxiety, depression addictions and particularly for help with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

So OCD is very common and you are certainly not alone if you suffer from obsessive thinking or intrusive thoughts and images. It’s a very common anxiety disorder, especially when there is a lot of unresolved underlying anxiety. OCD is very distressing and tends to reinforce the underlying anxiety and may also lead to depression. The good news is that OCD is something that responds very well to the techniques of Mindfulness Therapy.

If you’re interested in seeing an online therapist for OCD then please reach out to me. Contact me and schedule a therapy session via Skype for your OCD.

So the principle of Mindfulness Therapy is learning how to work with these intrusive thoughts and compulsive impulses. Mindfulness is a way of changing the relationship that you have to intrusive thoughts and emotions in general. It overcomes this habit of becoming reactively identified with thoughts and emotions.

This is the primary problem with OCD. The thoughts get triggered and they appear in the mind. And then we simply become completely overwhelmed by them.

We become identified with and become consumed by the thought. And then it tends to propagate and produce even more thoughts, and that feeds the underlying anxiety that fuels the obsessive thoughts.

So the first step in Mindfulness Therapy is learning and retraining yourself to sit with a thought consciously, but without becoming identified with it and without becoming reactive. The process for doing this is meditation.

You learn to meditate on those thoughts. People think that meditation is about escaping from the mind and thoughts, and it’s not. That is not the kind of meditation that I teach.

So mindfulness meditation is about learning to establish balance in the mind so that you can be free from emotional suffering no matter what thoughts arise in the mind. That’s the primary focus for mindfulness meditation: freedom.

So that’s the first part of the training and I will teach you how to do this and you will learn how to meditate on your intrusive thoughts and how to re-establish this balance so that they do not overwhelm you.

Change the imagery of your emotions – Mindfulness-based Image Reprocessing (MBIR)

Changing the imagery is very important

So the emotion of fear, like any other emotion, is based around imagery. There is a certain habitual imagery that has triggered in your mind and that is what creates the fear. So we need to uncover this imagery, which we do by meditating on the fear.

We get to see the imagery. And then when we see the imagery you can help it change. You can explore changing the imagery so that the fear resolves itself. This is a very important part of Mindfulness Therapy that we call mindfulness-based imagery reprocessing.

It is the same process that we use when we’re working with PTSD and recovering from very distressing, traumatic memories. Same process exactly. You look at the imagery itself, how it works and then we explore changing that imagery into a form that no longer triggers emotional trauma.

As you investigate the imagery of your fear you may notice that the fear has a particular position. You may notice that it is primarily located in the chest or throat. That is referred to as its habitual position. You may notice that the fear imagery is very large in size; it may have a particular color; it may feel hot or cold; it nay feel hard or soft; rough or smooth.

All these properties are part of the habitual imagery of the emotion and are an essential part of the structure of the emotion of fear. The point here is that that imagery is essential in order to feel fear; the imagery for another emotion, such as grief or depression will be quite different.

This emotional imagery is habitual in nature, which means it appears subconsciously every time fear is triggered in the mind. But, as we know, habits can be changed when they are made conscious. Seeing the structure of your emotional imagery is immensely valuable for helping emotions heal. By changing the imagery of your fear or anxiety you can accelerate the process of healing. When the imagery changes, the emotion changes. When emotions heal, which they will do over time, when you overcome your fear, it is because the imagery has changed. This is how the mind processes and resolves emotions. You mind will automatically change the imagery of your fear as it processes the emotion. We are simply accelerating the healing process by consciously modifying the emotional imagery directly rather than just leaving it to time.

You have to heal fear if you want to heal OCD

You have to heal that fear if you want to heal from OCD. So the primary way we do this is by developing compassion and friendliness towards that fear.

The second part of mindfulness therapy is really about looking at the image structure of your emotions, the emotions underneath the thoughts, the emotions that are fueling the obsessive intrusive thoughts, and this emotion is primarily anxiety and fear-based.

So we learn how to work with fear and the most important principle that mindfulness can teach you is to learn how to bring compassion to that fear because that is exactly what the fear needs in order to resolve itself and heal.

You need to learn to develop a compassionate and friendly relationship with your intrusive thoughts. If you try to avoid your thoughts or suppress them or run away from them or even distract yourself from them this will have the effect of reinforcing those thoughts, and more importantly, reinforcing the fear underneath those thoughts.

We learn to treat the fear the same way that we might treat a child. If a child is afraid, what does it most needs? It needs the presence of the child’s parent. The parent is not afraid. It needs to connect with a larger self that is not afraid. And that’s how the child is able to overcome its own fear by the presence and connection with something that is fearless.

In mindfulness work we develop this inner fearlessness. This is what we call your True Self and the True Self is really nothing more than the observer within you that we train to sit with that thought or series of thoughts or to sit with the fear and not react to it.

It is training in non-reactive. This is training in fearlessness. That is the nature of fearlessness, it is non-reactive by nature. So it is able to be present with the fear without reacting.

That is your True Self and that is what we are developing when we meditate on our thoughts. You have to train your True Self; you have to bring it out. It’s already there and always has been there within you, but we have to reawaken to our True Self.

So when you are able to bring that fearless quality of your True Self to the fear, it’s like bringing the parent to the child, and that’s what really accelerates the healing of that fear, the resolution of that fear. So that’s another very important part of mindfulness meditation work.

And another part that we explore is to look at the structure of the fear itself, the emotion that fuels the intrusive thoughts. Without that emotion those intrusive thoughts would not remain in the mind. They would simply disappear quite naturally because there’s not anything that’s keeping them there. There’s no fuel.

Schedule online therapy sessions via Skype for help with your OCD

So the way to break free from those patterns of emotional reactivity that cause our anxiety and that fuel our obsessions is to learn how to form a mindfulness-based relationship with them and to train with those those thoughts and the anxiety. We train ourself to sit with them without becoming reactive.

When you can sit with your emotions and thoughts without allowing them to proliferating further, then you are taking away the fuel source that feeds the underlying anxiety that fuels those intrusive thoughts. So learning to sit with your emotions and thoughts is the heart of the Mindfulness Meditation Therapy approach that I teach for overcoming OCD.

This approach is very effective and it’s very effective because it’s very direct. It is about working directly with your emotions. Just talking about your emotions is seldom enough to change the underlying reactivity that feeds your anxiety. You have to change your relationship to that reactivity directly so that you do not become blindly identified with it, blindly caught up in the reactive thinking or in the emotion itself.

The more you can develop this quality of objective consciousness where you can maintain your identity as your True Self, the Observer, looking at your emotions and thoughts as objects in the mind the freer you become and the faster the recovery.

With training you see the thoughts and the anxiety as simply objects in the mind that you can observe and respond to with compassion. That’s the power of this teaching – it frees you, it liberates you from emotional suffering by allowing you to strengthen your perspective as your True Self.

Connection with that True Self is exactly what the anxiety needs in order to heal itself. So your True Self is fearless by nature because it is non-reactive.

The anxiety is completely fear-based. In order to resolve fear, it needs to come into contact with that which is fearless and that is your True Self. So this is what we cultivate by meditating on our thoughts and the emotions that fuel those thoughts, which is generally fear.

So do please contact me if you’d like to learn more about this approach. And if you’re interested in online help for overcoming your obsessive compulsive disorder, or if you would like help with working with intrusive thoughts and images, including traumatic memory images, which are often at the heart of OCD.

So please contact me if you would like help in overcoming OCD, and also ask any questions you may have about online psychotherapy for obsessive compulsive disorder.

If you’d like to get started with me and schedule some online therapy sessions via Skype then please contact me and let’s set up a session. The mindfulness approach is really effective for working with intrusive and distressing thoughts and OCD. So most people who I work with see quite remarkable changes within three or four sessions.

Once you start learning how to apply mindfulness yourself to work with your fear and with the thoughts you’ll rapidly see progress, and that’s the focus of Mindfulness Therapy.

I will teach you how to work with your emotions and thoughts more effectively, to give you the tools to do that. So please contact me if you’d like to get started and you would like to overcome your OCD using Mindfulness Therapy. Thank you.

Find an Online Therapist for OCD

GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION FOR HELP WITH OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE DISORDER AND ANXIETY

Looking for an Online Therapist for overcoming OCD?

How to overcome OCD intrusive thoughts – Online Mindfulness Therapy over Skype

Mindfulness Therapy gives you the tools for overcoming obsessive intrusive thoughts and memories. When you have the tools and apply them then progress can be very fast, and most of my clients see big improvements after 3-4 sessions with me.

Welcome. My name is Peter Strong and I specialize in Mindfulness Therapy, which I offer online over Skype.

If you would like to learn how to overcome OCD intrusive thoughts, then Mindfulness Therapy is well worth considering.

The mindfulness approach that I teach is extremely effective for working with intrusive thoughts, with obsessive thoughts that basically seem to continue without any kind of break, that dominate the mind and that keep recur reoccurring over and over again.

Intrusive thoughts are quite problematic and are a source of tremendous suffering for people. So if you are suffering from intrusive thoughts and OCD in general, then you might want to start looking into mindfulness therapy for controlling these thoughts.

The basic principle for controlling OCD intrusive thoughts is to learn how to change your relationship to those thoughts. We must stop avoiding those thoughts.

We must not indulge in any kind of distraction behaviors to try and avoid those thoughts and we must also change our relationship from one of aversion or hostility or resistance to one of friendliness and actually working with those thoughts in a non-aversive manner.

So, developing in a friendliness towards intrusive thoughts is really important. If you don’t and if you develop hatred for those thoughts or struggle with them, you will simply make them stronger. So, in mindfulness training we learn how to hold intrusive thoughts in the mind without becoming overwhelmed by them.

We learn to actually see the intrusive thought as simply an object in the mind. We actually work on giving it an image and we make sure that we stay separate and larger than that object image of the thought.

That’s the most important thing – changing the way that you see the thoughts in the mind. One common practice that we develop in mindfulness for intrusive thoughts is actually to imagine not only seeing the thought as an object in the mind, but actually moving the thought out of the mind and placing it on the floor, for example.

Taking the thought and moving it is very effective for working with intrusive thoughts because it essentially makes the thought smaller and it prevents this problem of reactive identification where we become, if you like, consumed by the thought. When that happens the thought itself becomes bigger than we are.

That’s what happens when we become identified with that thought, we shrink into the thought, we contract into the thought, and that we have to avoid at all costs.

So, by working with the intrusive thoughts in this way using mindfulness and creative imagination you can essentially disarm the thought, you take away its emotional intensity, and when you do that the thought ceases to stay in the mind, it begins just fade away quite naturally when you take away the emotional charge of the thought.

So, this is something you can try yourself. Greet the thoughts in a friendly way, that friendliness actually makes you bigger than the thought itself, it changes the imagery. Then take the thought and move it and put it on the floor and see how that works for you.

If you would like more detailed help with working with intrusive thoughts using Mindfulness Therapy then do please go to my website and then email me and we can schedule a Skype therapy session to help you overcome your OCD intrusive thoughts. Thank you.

Find an Online Psychotherapist for OCD

Go to my Contact Page to schedule Online Mindfulness Therapy via Skype for help with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and intrusive thoughts

How to treat Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and intrusive thoughts with Mindfulness Therapy

Looking for an Online Therapist for treating OCD?

You do not need medications to treat Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Instead you should learn how to work with the emotional part that makes intrusive thoughts intrusive. This is what we work on during online mindfulness therapy sessions.

So how to treat OCD without medication? So, OCD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, is a problem in which we become prisoners of intrusive thoughts. Essentially we become prisoners of highly emotionally charged thoughts whatever they might be. There can be many many different types of obsessive thoughts or beliefs that we’re struggling with.

But the key component here is that the thoughts are emotionally charged. So in order to overcome OCD you have to neutralize this emotional charge that makes those thoughts so intrusive. And that’s what we focus on during online Mindfulness Therapy sessions for treating OCD.

We actually learn how to meditate on those thoughts. We introduce those intrusive thoughts into the mind and then we learn how to change our relationship to those thoughts so that we can become the Observer observing the thought as an object in the mind instead of our usual habit which is to become identified with the thought and therefore become reactive and overcome by the thought.

When we become reactive and identified with intrusive thoughts that simply feeds those intrusive thoughts, it feeds the emotional energy behind the thoughts and that leads to proliferation of intrusive thoughts, which creates even more emotional suffering.

So when we are meditating on the same intrusive thoughts, we’re learning to break that pattern of reactive identification, we learn to see the thoughts without reacting. And that’s the first essential step in the treatment of OCD using mindfulness.

We have to completely break the habit of becoming overwhelmed by the thoughts, we have to be able to learn how to sit with those thoughts without becoming identified with them. That’s an essential part of mindfulness training to overcome OCD.

A second part of working with the emotional content of the intrusive thoughts is to actually work with their imagery, and this is quite a novel concept to most people, but emotional imagery is very, very important. This is what actually creates the emotion that is triggered by the thoughts.

The imagery: how you see it in the mind. How big are the intrusive thoughts? What position does it have in your psychological space? Do you see it in the mind? Do you see it in the heart or the stomach? Do you see it in front of you or above you? The position of thoughts is part of their imagery and that’s an extremely important part of what makes those thoughts emotionally charged.

So the imagery is what creates the emotion and the emotion is what causes the thoughts to become intrusive and repetitive and prevents the thoughts from simply resolving themselves like other thoughts.

So we work with this imagery and we work on changing this imagery and when we change the imagery you change that emotional charge. When you change the emotional charge of a thought, the thought begins to subside and lose power in the mind.

So those are two parts of what I will teach you during online therapy sessions for your OCD, and the mindfulness approach works extremely well and most people will see quite substantial changes after three to four sessions of practicing mindfulness meditation on thoughts.

If you’d like to learn more, please email me if you’d like to schedule a therapy session with me via Skype to help you overcome your OCD. Thank you.

Looking for an Online Therapist for help with OCD?

GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE ONLINE THERAPY WITH ME FOR HELP WITH OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE DISORDER AND ANXIETY

Online therapist for OCD — Online Mindfulness Therapy for OCD

How to stop OCD thoughts though Mindfulness Therapy

Contact me to find out more about Skype therapy sessions with me. During these Skype therapy sessions I will teach you how to apply mindfulness for healing all forms of anxiety disorders, depression and other emotional problems. I will teach you how to manage and overcome intrusive OCD thoughts and rumination.

The key is not to avoid intrusive thoughts or try to argue with them. Instead we need to learn how to change our relationship to these thoughts and we do this by learning how to meditate on those thoughts. We also have to neutralize the underlying emotion, usually fear, that fuels OCD thoughts.

This approach is very effective and you can expect to see significant reduction in the intensity of your anxiety or depression after the first few sessions with me. Online Mindfulness Psychotherapy is very effective for controlling anxiety and depression without using medications.

It is far better to treat the psychological cause of your emotional suffering rather than just managing symptoms.

“After 8 years, two therapists, many self-help books…..my hypochondria and OCD was worse than ever. I figured I would just have to live like this and deal with it. I put on a good show in front of people and cried alone. Then, I stumbled upon Peter’s website. I figured this was my last attempt.

Peter is kind, understanding, and patient. He helped guide me out of the dark and see the light. He is truly there to help. He never looks at his time during sessions. I would have to remind him that time is up. His rates are reasonable so everyone cam get proper therapy.

He gave me practical tools to use to overcome my anxiety. He is always available via email for advice. He truly cares about the progress of his patients. Peter changed my life and gave me the chance to enjoy my life again. I am eternally grateful to him.”

Go to my Contact Page to schedule Online Mindfulness Therapy via Skype for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and intrusive thoughts

Online Psychotherapist for treating OCD

Find an Online Therapist for help with OCD

In order to stop obsessive and intrusive thoughts from dominating the mind we need to neutralize the emotional charge of the intrusive thoughts and we need to break the habit of blind reactivity that allows the thoughts to proliferate. During Mindfulness Therapy we address both of these components of OCD.

The compulsive behaviors and actions of OCD depend on the power of the obsessive thoughts. When they are neutralized then the impulse to act is also neutralized.

The first focus of Mindfulness Therapy is to cultivate a conscious relationship based on mindfulness with our thoughts. We consciously train ourselves out of the blind habit of thought proliferation, and the way we do this is by learning how to meditate on our obsessive-intrusive thoughts.

Mindfulness meditation, as I teach it, is about meditating on the mind in order to liberate the mind from the blind habitual reactions that cause our suffering (dukkha) and open the mind to discover the innate wisdom that leads to skillful action and wellbeing.

We need to meditate on our intrusive thoughts if we want to gain freedom from them. Therefore, we consciously invite those thoughts into our mind, but stay with them mindfully, which means we are actively watching for the impulse to proliferate thinking.

When we notice that impulse, we greet it with mindfulness and stay with that impulse, not allowing it to convert into reactive proliferation of more thoughts.

Mindfulness of thoughts is very much like tending to a camp fire. We watch for any sparks and extinguish them the instant they land on the ground so preventing the fire from spreading and potentially causing great harm and suffering.

We also know that the best way to manage our camp fire is to create a space around the fire. Mindfulness has this effect. The consciousness that we bring to our thoughts effectively creates a space around them. This inhibits proliferation.

Eventually the firs burns itself out. Our thought impulses also lose power and burn themselves out if we stop feeding them through reactive proliferation.

Over time with sustained mindfulness training the thoughts will be extinguished and neutralized. We refer to this a s the liberating effect of mindfulness.

We also need to work on healing the underlying emotional charge that converts into intrusive thoughts. This emotion is almost always based on fear. The best way to heal fear is to build a conscious and compassionate relationship with the fear. This is exactly what we are cultivating when we are meditating on the fear or other emotions.

We are cultivating our True Self, conscious presence that is non-reactive and, therefore, fearless. When you connect your True Self with the fear, then the fear gets what it needs to resolve itself and heal.

This takes the fuel away from the intrusive thoughts so they further lose their strength. With sustained meditation practice the intensity and frequency of our obsessive and intrusive thoughts diminish and eventually no longer arise, which also leads to reduction and extinction of the compulsive behaviors as well.

Find an Online Therapist for treating OCD

Go to my Contact Page to schedule Online Mindfulness Therapy via Skype for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and intrusive thoughts

How to Overcome “Pure O” intrusive thoughts

Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I am a professional psychotherapist specializing in Mindfulness Therapy for the treatment of anxiety and depression and also obsessive-compulsive disorder including what is now becoming called Pure O, Pure Obsessive OCD.

So this is basically the situation in which the mind is bombarded by intrusive thoughts. The kind of cognitive material that invades the mind can be in the form of just repetitive thoughts; it could be in the form of repetitive intrusive beliefs; it could be in the form of an obsessive desire to hurt another person; it could be sexual in nature.

Very often the intrusive thoughts take the form of imagery, whether fantasy imagery or memory imagery as in the case of PTSD flashback memories. These thoughts and images become very intrusive, taking a great deal of our attention and cause a tremendous amount of emotional suffering in the form of anxiety and also depression, as well.

So it’s really quite common. Pure OCD, Pure O is quite common. It’s estimated probably at least 1 % of the population in the USA and also in the UK and Europe suffer from some form of Pure OCD.

The best approach to deal with this is not to try and block those thoughts, because that reaction, that response of aversion, tends to feed the intrusive thoughts themselves. It feeds the emotional charge that keeps those thoughts recurring in the mind. So we don’t try to argue with the thoughts, we don’t try to remove them; we certainly don’t try to avoid them, either.

What we find is most effective is some form of exposure therapy. So exposure response prevention therapy has become quite popular, ERP, and the type of therapy that I offer online is called Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy, which is very effective indeed.

So in the approach that I use, we deliberately bring those intrusive thoughts into the mind but we train ourselves to remain as the observer. The habit we are trying to combat here is the habit of reactive identification, whereby we become and thought.

We lose our identity as the observer and we become the object that is observed, which in this case is the obsessive thought or image. So that process of reactive identification is really what feeds Pure O and other forms of OCD, because the moment that you become captivated by the thoughts or the emotion and you start reacting then that will feed the emotion that is fueling that intrusive thought.

So we have to learn how to sit with the intrusive thoughts or images without reacting. And that takes some training and that’s what I will teach you during the Online Mindfulness Therapy sessions that I offer.

We will learn to meditate on those thoughts, taking each thought and making it the primary object of our conscious attention. That’s quite different than reactive awareness where it’s just running the show.

Now we are training and becoming detached from the thoughts and becoming the observer of the thoughts, and that’s a very different quality of consciousness and that does not feed the emotional charge of the thoughts or images.

Look at the imagery of the thought and emotion behind the thought and change it

So that’s the first stage in working with OCD intrusive thoughts. We learn to become the observer and cultivate that state of being the observer.

The second part of working with Pure O thoughts is one of looking at the imagery of the emotion that is feeding the thoughts. So the thought itself is not actually the problem. The problem is the emotion that’s feeding the thoughts, and that is generally fear-based or anxiety-based in nature.

So we have to work with that emotion. Now emotions work through imagery in the mind. The imagery of an emotion is what actually causes that emotion to take form, and then that emotion converts into thoughts and actions, and so on. So we examine the imagery of the emotion: the fear or anxiety behind the intrusive thoughts.

We work on changing that imagery, because when you change the imagery you change the intensity of the thought. When you change it enough, then the thought loses its emotional charge and then it will cease to be intrusive.

So working with the imagery of our thoughts is very important indeed. And the same applies to those image-based thoughts, the fantasy thoughts or memory images.

In the case of PTSD and emotional trauma the factor that really keeps those image-based thoughts active and repetitive in the mind is the intensity of the imagery itself, the nature of that imagery, the qualities of the imagery are what keep the thoughts alive in the mind.

And typically, especially in the case of graphic fantasy images and certainly in the case of traumatic memory images, those images tend to be very vivid in color and detail. They are very large in size and very close in are in our visual field. Those properties are what cause the distress and suffering associated with those image-based thoughts.

So we need to change that imagery, and we can do so once we establish mindfulness-based consciousness and we can look and examine the imagery without becoming lost and overwhelmed by reactivity.

When we change the nature of the memory imagery or the graphic imagery and make it smaller, we can rapidly take away its emotional charge and essentially neutralize it.

When you reduce the intensity of the color and make it very faded or black and white, then that will also deactivate the emotion.

There are other properties that we can examine as well, but working with imagery is really very central to Mindfulness Therapy and to helping recover from OCD and these very distressing Pure O obsessive type thoughts that we may be struggling with.

If you would like to learn more about how to work with your Pure O OCD using Mindfulness Therapy and you like the idea of online therapy sessions via Skype then do please reach out to me.

Ask any questions you have about the process and how to set up online sessions and I’ll be happy to answer those questions and then when you feel ready we can schedule s Skype Therapy session.

Typically people see quite dramatic improvements within three to four sessions because this approach is so direct it works on the actual structure of those obsessive thoughts how they work in the mind rather than just talking about them or trying to suppress symptoms through some kind of medication or other treatment that may be appropriate in some situations but it’s not going to change the underlying psychological process that causes OCD.

You have to work on the structure of these thoughts and the way that you see the imagery of those emotions behind the thoughts and the mind. So please contact me if you would like to schedule online therapy sessions with me. Thank you.

Go to my Contact Page to schedule Online Mindfulness Therapy via Skype for help with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and intrusive thoughts

Find an online psychotherapist for help with OCD and intrusive thoughts

Looking for an Online Psychotherapist for OCD?

Online Therapist for Pure O intrusive thoughts

If you are looking for an online therapist for help with OCD, then I invite you to contact me and tell me more about your particular struggles with obsessive compulsive disorder.

I offer online therapy through Skype for the treatment of OCD and also for help in reducing intrusive thoughts, intrusive memories and intrusive imagery, often referred to as “Pure O”, ie pure obsession, which can be very distressing for many people.

The approach that I use is called Mindfulness Therapy, which is extremely effective for working with reactive thoughts and memories and for reducing the frequency of obsessive, intrusive thoughts as well as reducing their intensity, until they no longer are a problem.

Normal thoughts go through a simple cycle of arising and passing and do so in a relatively short period of time, but OCD thoughts do not resolve but persist and often lead to the proliferation of even more thoughts. This stage of reactive proliferation feeds the underlying emotion, usually fear-based, that fuels OCD.

The key to breaking the cycle of reactive thinking, obsessive compulsive thinking, is to develop a different relationship to those intrusive thoughts or memories or images.

We have to develop a mindfulness-based relationship, which means that it’s a relationship based on opening to the experience and staying present with the experience of the thought or the image as an observer, we have to learn to be able to observe the thoughts or image without becoming lost in that intrusive thought.

We have to learn to stay present with the obsessive thought, without becoming reactive and converting into some compulsive behavior or action.

The mindfulness approach is one of the most effective approaches available for working with OCD and intrusive thoughts. I will teach you during our Skype therapy sessions together, very precise methods of working with your thoughts using mindfulness that will allow you to develop this objective consciousness that is so essential for breaking the habit of reactive-obsessive thinking.

With the mindfulness approach, most people see dramatic improvements within a very short time, often within three or four sessions.

The mindfulness approach is about teaching you new methods to work practically with your intrusive thoughts, to neutralize them and heal the underlying emotional energy that’s feeding those thoughts.

This cannot be done by just talking about your thoughts or emotions. And it cannot be done through willpower. It has to be done by changing your relationship to your thoughts. And when that relationship is right, then the healing process begins. But you must develop an open, mindful relationship with your thoughts and emotions.

Mindfulness is the combination of openness, non reactivity, friendliness and compassion. These are the qualities that promote healing. Just trying to understand why you are feeling the way you are reacting is not sufficient.

Most people with OCD fall into the habit of avoidance and aversion. They try to block out intrusive thoughts and feelings. This is not effective and will actually reinforce the underlying fear because avoidance and aversion are based on fear, themselves, which will simply feed the underlying emotional suffering that is feeding the intrusive, obsessive thoughts or memories.

So we need to learn to develop a different relationship with our emotions if they are to heal. And that’s the central focus of Mindfulness Therapy.

And if you’re interested in working with an online therapist to overcome your OCD, then I invite you to contact me.

Online therapy is an excellent choice and works just as well as in-person therapy, providing you use Skype or Zoom or FaceTime, because you need to see each other for effective communication.

Go to my Contact Page to talk to an online therapist via Skype for help with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and intrusive thoughts