When in Doubt, Make Belief: An OCD-Inspired Approach to Living with Uncertainty:
This book is insanely amazing in treating OCD by giving you strategies to motivate you to do the "hard work" of facing your obsessions without compulsions. It gives you tips and strategies on how to confront your obsessions but also on how to get motivated to resolve your obsessions and get over OCD and Anxiety.
Some of my book notes:
OCD Therapists often encourage clients to externalize their disorders - that is, to think of the source of their obsessions and compulsions as some force or creature separate from themselves. The objective, as I’ve always understood it, is twofold: first, to help OCD sufferers understand that they are not merely composites of the thoughts that plague them; and second, to define the disorder as an entity that people with OCD can stand up to and fight back against.
Standing up to this entity and seeing them for what they are (which is that they feed of our doubts and us fighting our doubts by our compulsions and thus those compulsions serving as food for our entity). Choosing not to feed our entity. This is one of the key ways to fighting OCD.
Exposure/response CBT behavior therapy is needed for treatment.
When stuck in “doubt” and searching for a way out, we often fall through one or more of the following six “trapdoors”:
Trapdoor 1: Checking: Physically searching for verification that some feared consequence did not, or will not, happen.
Trapdoor 2: Reassurance-seeking: Asking for the assurances of others that some feared consequence did not, or will not, happen.
Trapdoor 3: Ruminating: mentally replaying events, conversations, and other sequences in search of verificiation that some feared consequence did not, or will not, happen.
Trapdoor 4: Protecting: Performing rituals (Such as repeating patterns) and acting in unproductive ways for the sole purpose of warding off feared consequences.
Trapdoor 5: Fixing: performing rituals (often relating to symmetry) for the sole purpose of making things “feel” right.
Trapdoor 6: Avoiding: deliberately avoiding events that trigger anxiety; this can be thought of as the ultimate compulsion.
Reverance, Resolve, Investment, and Surrender.
Find the Greater Good meaning like Viktor Frankl did when he was in a concentration camp in Auschwitz.
I must be far more powerful, more capable, more grand than I recognize - certainly much more so than my doubt bully would have me believe.
OCD sufferers should relabel their obsessions and compulsions
Relabeling means “making a mental note”.
To implement the four principles, we can take ten simple steps that offer a way out when stuck in Doubt.
Applying Reverence in 3 steps:
Reverence:
1. Choose to see the universe as friendly, you have the ability to choose what the universe is, if its good or not. Affirm that the universe is trying to help you achieve your greater good
2. Embrace the possibility in every moment: Choose to see life as a classroom offering lessons at every turn. Seek meaning and purpose in every situation. Allow your Greater Good goals to motivate you.
3. Affirm your universal potential: Recognize that you, as part of a universe with infinite potential, must also have that potential inside. Allow mindfulness to help you call out your doubt bully’s “What if” questions and demands. Recognize that the part of you that is capable of observing thoughts is also capable of tapping into the full potential of the universe.
Resolve:
4. Put your commitments ahead of your comfort. The key to living with uncertainty is learning to embrace the discomfort of uncertainty. Exposing yourself directly to it. That is the very key to the exposure/response prevention treatment for OCD.
5. Keep Sight of the Big-Picture and the Greater Good….practice laughing and try to not take life seriously and laugh at yourself. I take very seriously my commitment to not taking life too seriously. I go out of my way to find reasons to laugh.
6. Claim and exercise your freedom to choose
7. Picture your possibility and direct your attention
8. Act from abundance in ways that empower
9. Accept and leg go of what you cannot control
10. Allow for bigger plans than your own to unfold
Kindly like my Page on Facebook for more book reviews! Thanks my fellow OCDers and Anxieters! There's always hope! Never forget that!
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