OCD Therapy
Are You Overwhelmed By Stress Or Anxiety?
Do you find yourself consumed by the same intrusive thoughts or held down by the need to conform to certain rituals and routines? Have you experienced any of the following symptoms or patterns:
Anxiety or shame?
Social isolation?
Relationship strain?
Perhaps you’ve been suffering from general anxiety, panic attacks, or crippling rumination. Maybe you’ve had difficulty with your overall functioning due to time spent on rituals or routines in an effort to cope and prevent bad things from happening. It’s possible that in addition to anxiety, you may be experiencing the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which can overturn all aspects of your life.
OCD Can Turn Into A Debilitating Mental Health Issue
You may be experiencing intrusive thoughts, repetitive behaviors, or physical symptoms like nausea, headaches, and issues with your sleep schedule or diet. You probably go out of your way to avoid certain environments or conversations that you fear will trigger your anxiety. When you think about it, you might even realize that some of your thoughts are irrational, yet you still have extreme difficulty controlling them. Perhaps you’ve even wondered by now if you’ll ever get back to a more fulfilling place in your life again.
The good news is that even though OCD symptoms won’t necessarily go away on their own, they can be alleviated and managed by therapy with the right counselor. And at Taylored Therapy, I can help you manage your anxiety or OCD symptoms so you can regain your peace and calm and live your best life again moving forward.
Have any questions? Send me a message!
OCD Is More Common Than You May Think
Despite being a well-known mental health issue, OCD remains widely misunderstood by the general population. Many give themselves a false OCD diagnosis, which can trivialize the condition—while many others actually suffering from OCD symptoms don’t realize that they could benefit from outside support and treatment.
Although OCD may not be as common as some other mental issues, the symptoms for those who experience them can be severe and extremely debilitating. In fact, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), “OCD is one of the top 20 causes of illness-related disability, worldwide, for individuals between 15 and 44 years of age” (1).
Outside Factors Can Worsen OCD Symptoms
Many factors outside of our control can also exacerbate anxiety and OCD. We are flooded by social media and negative news constantly. And it’s all too easy for us to absorb this larger background anxiety and for it to feed our fears and worsen our symptoms. On top of this, many of us turn to the internet as a way to offer reassurance and alleviate our anxiety, when it often makes things worse and sends us into a loop of obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors.
Therapy can do the opposite of this by counteracting your symptoms and bringing you back into peace, harmony, and balance. OCD counseling with Taylored Therapy can help you rewire your brain so you can better live with some of the uncertainty and doubt that are unavoidable in life.
Counseling Can Help You Move Past OCD
When you’re in the thick of chronic OCD symptoms, your overwhelming anxiety can keep you from envisioning a better, calmer future for yourself. But this also keeps you stuck in a pattern where your anxiety about the future negatively affects your peace of mind in the present.
Therapy can give you a space where you can talk about your intrusive thoughts in a judgment-free space. Oftentimes, the more that you avoid intrusive thoughts, the stronger they get—but you’d be surprised how actively talking about them can lessen their negative impact.
An Eclectic Approach To OCD Treatment
In general, the best option for the treatment and management of OCD is Exposure and Response Prevention Therapy, or ERP. ERP serves to carefully yet actively expose you to the situations that trigger your obsessive and compulsive symptoms and behaviors. By having to actually face these situations, you can become better at dealing with the negative emotions that accompany them and how they affect you.
Another effective treatment option for OCD is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or CBT. CBT works to identify many of the thoughts and core beliefs that contribute to your OCD and anxiety while developing new ways of responding to these triggers. CBT can thus help you break and move past old patterns of thinking that keep you stuck in a loop of anxiety.
By incorporating these modalities and others, we can effectively treat your symptoms in the short term while building toward long-term healing. Although OCD symptoms can come and go over the course of a person’s lifetime, the techniques you learn in counseling can help you feel confident managing any symptoms that arise in the future.
Remember: your brain is directly wired by experience and, therefore, can change—this is what neuroplasticity is all about. And through OCD Therapy, we can work together to create that positive change so that you can live a life of greater peace and purpose.
You May Still Have Some Questions About OCD Therapy…
I’m concerned that it will take a long time for OCD Therapy to make a difference.
You may be surprised by how quickly you can find some short-term relief from your symptoms, but long-term management and healing can take more time and effort. While everyone’s experience will be slightly different, I can promise you that getting closer to the life you actually want to live is worth every step.
I’ve had a bad experience with therapy in the past and I’m afraid of being judged or misunderstood.
Although we can’t predict specific outcomes, ERP Therapy is currently the most effective and gold standard treatment method for OCD. We will also identify and address the reasons why therapy didn’t work for you last time so that we don’t make the same mistakes.
I’m wondering if my OCD therapist will have the skills and training to understand my unique situation.
I’ve been trained in ERP, receive regular consultations, and am part of an anxiety therapist group that provides support to each other in order to help us better assist our clients. I view each client as a unique individual with unique needs, and I look forward to developing an understanding of who you are and how you can benefit from therapy.
You Can Break Free From OCD And Live Your Best Life
If you are struggling with the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder, OCD counseling with Taylored Therapy can help you recover, heal, and thrive.
Please call 517-234-5688 or visit my contact me to get started.
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