Anxiety & OCD Therapy Bristol

What causes OCD formulation and how does it tend to manifest?

 

With the right treatment OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) can be managed or removed completely. However It does take some effort and willingness to experience discomfort when addressing fears and compulsive behaviors.

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In my experience OCD formulation occurs in certain personality types when anxiety alone was not enough to get the persons attention to make them realize that their subconscious mind and biology is exhausted. Or anxiety got their attention but they didn't understand the message being delivered. OCD is the subconscious mind bringing in the big guns to get your attention.

 

OCD behaviours

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Its amazing the knots that OCD can tie people up and provide all kinds of seemingly logical reasons for the behaviors. It's important to note that although scary thoughts about harming others can feel terrifying they are not real and you won't do them, it is just a trap of OCD.

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These are symptoms, I'm sure you've experienced just as you finally manage to conclude one OCD theme a new cycle of doubt about a new topic takes its place, bringing on another round of "what if" scenarios. It becomes a relentless struggle where reassurance offers little relief. 

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To overcome anxiety and OCD, it's crucial to ease the relentless stream of thoughts. We need to learn how to detach from and let go of thoughts without analysis. You don't have to unravel every thought pattern or decipher their meaning. 

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Anxiety thrives on overthinking and excessive worry – With practice using effective techniques the mind does quiet as your exhausted biology begins to relax, gradually loosening the grip of OCD. I will teach you how to do this. 

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OCD formulation as an addiction

It might seem odd to compare OCD with an addiction, but lets look how addictions work. Simply, it is doing something over and over that you are unable to consciously control. Someone who smokes doesn't smoke because they love the taste and feeling of having a cigarette, they smoke to alleviate the craving.

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OCD can be seen in a similar way. It is an addiction to not feeling unwanted feelings being presented from the unconscious mind. There is usually a feeling of repressed shame, guilt, or anger which has been stored in the body as trauma that the subconscious sees as being so horrible it is trying to distract you with OCD obsessions and compulsions so you don't consciously experience the trauma. It is not that completing a compulsion feels good, it just prevents the person from feeling even more overwhelmed. This where a gradual and supportive approach to ERP (Exposure and Response Prevention) is so beneficial.

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A vital key to freedom is to access these repressed traumas and vent that stuck energy (emotions) linked to the trauma. I can teach you methods of how to safely access these traumas and finally process out the trapped emotions you have been carrying around with you for so long! I can personally testify that when this comes out you immediately feel lighter, happier and more optimistic about life.

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By letting go of the need to constantly validate ourselves externally and running repetitive narratives in our minds, we can free ourselves from unnecessary mental burdens. This process can lead to forgiveness, self-acceptance, and reduced dependence on external validation, bringing on emotional well-being.

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Are these thoughts me? What do they mean?

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OCD offers up the worst possible thoughts to you in order to scare you and sabotage your life as outlined above. So what do they mean? Well thoughts don't mean anything, apart from the meaning you give them!

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There are too 'places' where these thoughts arise from, they either come from the part of the unconscious mind which is just an operating system which offers up the thoughts that we were programmed with, usually in our initial development from hundreds of sources. These are usually negative and OCD knows how to pick the exact thoughts that push your buttons.

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So that's all those thoughts are - old legacy programming which is running under the surface from when you were a small child who didn't understand the world and had no experience to differentiate if what you were being told was true or false so you just believed what you were told.

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So the answer to these particular thoughts is to reprogramme the unconscious mind so that those old stories running in your head are updated with new ones. After this is done, the unconscious mind won't be able to give you these thoughts to your conscious mind as the outdated 'software' has been replaced.

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Another wellspring of these OCD thoughts comes from is the primitive animal ego. This is a part of the psyche that was developed long ago before we were human and often has very disturbing thoughts of violence, murder, sexual assault, harming others and putting oneself ahead of everyone else for self gain regardless of the harm they may cause to others.

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What I want you to understand is that these unconscious thoughts are very common, not just with people who have OCD but in my experience affect a lot of 'normal' people as well. The only difference is when someone without OCD has a thought like this, they barely even acknowledge it and have quickly moved on to thinking about something else.

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However the OCD person begins to question these thoughts, here's an example - "because I thought about killing my family does that mean that I will do it? Am I a murder? I must be a horrible person to have these thoughts, what sort of person would think about killing their family?

So this is the OCD trap. The truth is that because you have these thoughts it means that you are a good person and you will not do those things. OCD uses the opposite of who you are to try and scare you! When you realize this they begin to lose there power.

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My method of therapy is not to teach you how to manage OCD, it is to get to the core of the issue. I will teach you to think and act in new ways so that you become a person where it would be very difficult for anxiety or OCD to exist within you. 

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