OCD or Obssessive Compulsive Disorder is an anxiety disorder characterized by uncontrollable and unwanted thoughts and images, leading to repetitive, ritualized behaviours that the sufferer feels compelled to perform over and over again in an effort to keep such thoughts under control. Sufferers’ lives and daily functioning are significantly affected by OCD and they feel something bad will happen if they stop this kind of behaviour.
Signs of OCD
A person suffering from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder can have obsessive, obtrusive thoughts about violence, hurting, killing someone or harming themselves and often they will have an extreme preoccupation with dirt, germs and contamination. They may take baths and wash their hands many times a day and be obsessed with cleaning every inch of their home to ensure it is spotless and free of germs.
They also have a compulsion to control such intrusive thoughts and behaviour which leads to a preoccupation with order, symmetry, exactness, constant checking, hoarding and so on.
OCD sufferers often show signs of depression and a constant feeling that nothing is right or will be right in the future.
Treatments for OCD
Hypnotherapy and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) both help people relax and improve the quality of their lives in the day to day, getting obsessive compulsive thinking and behaviour under healthy control and back into proportion so that they can return to more realistic, rational, balanced thinking.
In CBT, you learn such techniques as how to move from irrational thinking, unhealthy negative feelings and obsessive behaviour which catches you in a vicious cycle of obsessional thoughts, ideas and images, creating a compulsion to repeat these actions over and over again with apparently no escape back to normality.
CBT techniques and the application of them allows the OCD sufferer to see that he/she has a choice to think irrationally or rationally about the symptoms they experience rather than automatically being caught up in irrational thinking and its negative, catastrophic, intolerable consequences. Using CBT, the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder sufferer gains the therapeutic tools to help themselves to modify and eventually get rid of the misery of their symptoms.
Benefits of treatment
The hypnotherapy helps the highly anxious, stressed and desperate person to relax and calm down, regaining healthy control of their symptoms through the power of suggestion. When the client is in a deeply relaxed state, better able to consider a different perspective on overcoming the OCD, they learn to practice effective techniques to apply to everyday situations, overcoming the devastating impact of their problems on self and other people (family, friends, colleagues) and return to normal functioning again. In the process, they experience considerable relief in the short term and the long term.
NB: The combination of CBT and Clinical Hypnotherapy is an effective way of bringing the debilitating symptoms of OCD under healthy control in an efficient time effective way.
For more background on OCD, click here to watch the Horizon documentary ‘A Monster in My Mind’.
So if any of this is affecting you – please give me a call and I will be pleased to discuss any questions you may have about your OCD: 0207 6921818