Online Therapist for OCD

Online Therapist for OCD over Skype

Online Mindfulness Therapy via Skype for Stopping Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and Intrusive Overthinking without relying on drugs.

Mindfulness Therapy provides an extremely effective treatment for freeing yourself from obsessive-intrusive thoughts and addictive behaviors by teaching you how to work with your OCD thoughts and impulses using mindfulness training and the techniques of Mindfulness Therapy.

One of the primary problems that sustains OCD is the habit of becoming identified with your obsessive thoughts. We have to break free from this conditioned habitual reactivity.

This is the primary focus of Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy for treating OCD and is what I will be teaching you during our Skype Therapy sessions together.

Everyone that I have worked with really benefits from the mindfulness approach that I teach for healing emotional suffering…

“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.”

VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE ME TO LEARN HOW TO START SKYPE THERAPY WITH ME FOR HELP WITH OCD

Find Online Therapy for OCD

The principal teaching in Mindfulness Therapy for treating 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.

GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE FOR DETAILS AND TO SCHEDULE AN ONLINE THERAPY SESSION WITH ME FOR HELP WITH OCD

OCD Therapy Online via Skype

Welcome. My name is Peter Strong. I am a professional psychotherapist specializing in Online Mindfulness Therapy, which I offer via Skype for the treatment of anxiety disorders, including obsessive compulsive disorder or OCD.

If you’re looking for online therapy for OCD, then I invite you to go to my website and contact me if you have any questions about the Mindfulness Therapy program that I teach online via Skype.

If you are looking for online therapy, and a lot of people prefer online therapy these days because it’s so convenient and it also gives you greater access to therapists like myself who specialize in Mindfulness Therapy or cognitive behavioral therapy. Whenever you’re selecting an online therapist, do make sure that the therapist offers therapy via Skype.

It’s very important that you can see each other. If you can see each other, then there’s no difference in the effectiveness of online therapy by Skype compared to therapy in-person. But you do need to be able to see each other.

So in the Mindfulness Therapy approach our focus is on helping you fundamentally change the way that you relate to those intrusive thoughts, those obsessive thoughts that trigger unwanted repetitive behaviors in the compulsive aspect of OCD, and that also cause a great deal of suffering, emotional suffering.

So we do that by developing a conscious relationship, first of all, in which we are able to observe the fear and its thoughts without becoming identified with the fear and its associated thoughts. When you become identified with the fear, then the fear controls you.

But when you are not identified with the fear, then the fear is reduced to what it actually is, which is an object, a mental object. So cultivating a mindful relationship with the fear means that we are learning to see the fear objectively as an object in the mind instead of becoming that fear.

The only way to do that effectively is to meditate on the fear, because meditation is the process of cultivating a fully conscious and non-reactive relationship with whatever it is you’re meditating on. In this case, we meditate on the fear because we want to break free from that habit of reactive identification, which feeds the fear. So that’s a very important part of the mindfulness training that I will be teaching you during our therapy sessions together, if you choose to work with me.

There are other aspects, of course, that we have to look at in OCD. So working with the underlying emotions that are fueling the obsessive thinking and compulsive behaviors is central. But we also need to look at ways of managing the compulsive aspect.

That is where that fear is converted into repetitive behaviors like hand-washing. So there we need to learn how to manage that impulse itself. So we use mindfulness to develop an objective relationship with the impulse so that we can see it separately as an object and not become overwhelmed by it.

This is the same principle that we have to apply when we’re working with addiction. We have to learn how to break free from becoming controlled by that impulse.

If you would like to learn more about Mindfulness Therapy for OCD and you like the idea of online therapy for the treatment of OCD, then do reach out to me and ask any questions you may have about this process and we can go ahead and schedule your first Skype Therapy session for your obsessive compulsive disorder or problem with intrusive thoughts.

The Mindfulness Therapy approach is very effective. Most people sees tremendous improvements in a relatively short time. I have worked with people who have suffered from intrusive thoughts for years, and it really affected the quality of their life, dramatically. Within three or four sessions, they begin to see a way out from this nightmare, which is how obsessive thoughts, intrusive thoughts are often experienced; it’s like a nightmare, it is terrible, terribly painful.

So it is possible to change and really quite quickly once you learn how to work with your emotions, to fear primarily, and with thoughts and with emotional impulses using mindfulness.

When you develop a conscious relationship without fear, it will heal. If you feed it with reactivity, including acting out the particular compulsion, that will simply feed that underlying fear. But when you change your relationship to one that’s based on mindfulness, and with mindfulness comes compassion, then you’ll start to see rapid healing from OCD.

So if you’d like to learn more about how to recover from OCD using mindfulness. Then please contact me.

GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE TO GET STARTED! FOR HELP WITH OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE DISORDER AND ANXIETY

Online Therapist for help with Intrusive Thoughts

How to treat OCD without medication through Online Mindfulness Therapy for OCD and intrusive thoughts

Welcome! My name is Peter Strong and I provide online therapy via Skype for the treatment of anxiety, for depression and also for working with obsessive-compulsive disorder or OCD.

So if you’re interested in online treatment for OCD without using medications, then do please go to my website and learn more about this online therapy service.

Mindfulness Therapy is very good for treating all forms of anxiety disorders because it teaches you how to work with your thoughts in a very direct and practical way, and that is essential in working with OCD.

We have to basically change the way that we relate to our thoughts. Some people teach that we have to overcome irrational thoughts. I do not agree with that. Whether the thoughts are rational or irrational is of no particular importance. What matters is the emotional charge of those thoughts and the nature of your relationship to them.

So typically when we experience an obsessive thought or an intrusive thought we become immediately identified with that. This is called reactive identification, and then we tend to react even further to intrusive thoughts by creating more thoughts that feed the first intrusive thought, and that is called reactive proliferation of thoughts.

So this is what typically happens out of habit for most people with OCD. But with mindfulness training and the methods that I will teach you during our online therapy sessions, you will begin to be able to break free from the compulsive aspects of those intrusive thoughts.

You do not require medication to treat OCD. Medication simply masks the intensity of the emotion, but it doesn’t do anything to change the underlying process that is causing those intrusive-obsessive thoughts to arise in the mind, and that’s what we address with Mindfulness Therapy.

So the first step is learning to be with your intrusive thoughts without becoming overwhelmed by them. And then when you establish this relationship with them, then you can begin to change the emotional component of those intrusive obsessive thoughts, and I will explain in great detail how to do this.

If you want to work with me, if you would like to learn how to overcome OCD without resorting to medications, then please go to my website and send me an email so we can schedule a trial therapy session for you.

With the mindfulness approach, because it is so practical and so focused on overcoming the underlying cause of your OCD, most people will see significant changes after the first three to four sessions with me. It doesn’t take that long to break out of these habitual patterns of reactive thinking and reactive identification with thoughts.

It just requires some skillful guidance and then practice of the methods that I will teach you. So please contact me if this interests you and let’s get started.

GO TO MY CONTACT PAGE TO GET STARTED! FOR HELP WITH OCD

Treating OCD online

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 yourself or another person.

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 O OCD, Pure O, is quite common. It’s estimated probably at least 1 percent 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 (ERP) has become quite popular and the type of therapy that I offer online is called Mindfulness-based Exposure Therapy, which also includes the essential component of Exposure Therapy which is essential for overcoming OCD.

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.

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.

This is 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.

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.

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.

In the case of PTSD and emotional trauma the factor that really keeps those image-based thoughts active and intrusive in the mind is the intensity and size of the imagery itself. The qualities of the imagery are what keep the thoughts alive in the mind so we work on changing that imagery.

Contact me to learn more about how to work with your Pure O OCD using Mindfulness Therapy.

VISIT MY CONTACT PAGE TO SCHEDULE ONLINE THERAPY WITH ME FOR TREATING OCD WITHOUT THE NEED FOR MEDICATION

Related pages:

Online Therapist for OCD