OCD Treatment Cardiff
OCD Treatment Cardiff
OCD Treatment Cardiff: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is a mental health condition that is characterised by having uncontrollable obsessions and compulsions. Obsessions are unwanted, persistent and sometimes intrusive thoughts, images or impulses that cause emotional distress. Obsessions can cause the individual to act out certain repetitive behaviours or additional mental acts (called compulsions) in order to immediately reduce the distress of the obsession.
It is estimated that about three quarters of a million people in UK suffer with obsessive compulsive disorder, with about half of those being affected severely. It tends to interfere with the majority of people’s lives around early adulthood, but can be problematic at any age.
OCD Treatment Cardiff: OCD in everyday language and OCD in reality
There are many medical terms that cross-over into everyday language. Being “addicted”, “paranoid” or “agoraphobic” are common labels that can be used respectively to describe how a person can exaggerate the enjoyment of something, fear that something terrible is going to happen or have a lack of enthusiasm for social events. But the real conditions are far more distressing than those applied in everyday language.
Similarly, being “obsessed” or “obsessing” are common terms used to give casual reference to say, being preoccupied with a person, a new hobby or with a specific goal. Used in this context, your “obsession” will absorb your time and attention in some momentary way, particularly if the event is recent. You may listen to a new song repetitively and keep singing it when you are doing something routine. Or you may persistently think about a new love interest so intensely that it can distract some moments of your concentration, but it will be placed in the context of your other responsibilities that will help your day to function.
Undoubtedly, the nature of the “obsession” can be related to negative situations like illness or death, but the preoccupation lessens when the situation has ended or when it gradually fades with the passing of time. Generally, you will still get to work at the time required, eat meals regularly, attend social events and ensure that you have a reasonable night’s sleep.
With OCD, the obsessions and compulsions have more permanence. The time spent (usually more than one hour per day) replaying thoughts or perfecting rituals will interfere with the other important parts of your life such as your health, your relationships and your occupation. There is extensive loss of control over your repetitive thoughts or behaviours. Additionally, there is little or no satisfaction when carrying out your compulsions; any relief from the anxiety is usually brief.
OCD Treatment Cardiff: Types of OCD
Your obsessive compulsive disorder can attach onto any specific issue depending on your belief system, history of traumas and reactions to those traumas. There are some common categories of obsessions and compulsions however.
Categories of obsessions can include contamination fears, orderliness and symmetry, fear of danger (and harm), and taboo thoughts.
Categories of compulsions can include rituals of decontamination, rearranging, checking, and reassurance-seeking.
You can access more information here on the common types of obsessive compulsive disorder.
OCD Treatment Cardiff: What causes OCD?
Despite extensive research into the causes of obsessive compulsive disorder, no definitive cause of OCD has been identified. Instead there are various theories that relate to possible causes:
Biological factors – Varied blood flow in parts of the brain and chemical deficiencies of serotonin (and other neurotransmitters) are indicated with OCD brain chemistry. These differences do not confirm whether this is a cause or an effect of having OCD however.
Genetic factors – Those with close relatives who have OCD can increase the likelihood that you will also develop OCD. There have been attempts to identify a specific gene with OCD, but no research has been conclusive. Where OCD is limited to only some members of the family, it may still suggest that the condition could be a learned behaviour from authority figures, rather than a genetically-linked condition.
Environmental factors – The effect of past abuse, traumas and stressful events play a significant role in the development of OCD. They are likely to accelerate its development where there are biological or genetic connections. OCD can also develop in children following streptococcal infection.
OCD Treatment Cardiff: Signs and symptoms of OCD
The severity of your mental or behavioural rituals is the major factor in determining whether you have OCD. In the early stages, you may live inside the condition and not realise its development. For some people, it may take a partner or close relative to point out that your rituals are excessive.
When OCD is suspected, it’s important to have the condition formally diagnosed by your doctor.
What are some of the common signs and symptoms?
Checking – Checking rituals are used to prevent harm, danger and avoid feelings of irresponsibility. It becomes more troublesome when the checking rituals cause you to miss deadlines (e.g. being late for work) and when the rituals have a fixed numerical routine that cannot be compromised e.g. you must check it five times or you have to start the ritual over again.
Hand-washing – Hand-washing becomes an OCD problem when you are in possession of elaborate hand-washing routines that focus more on the comfort of the ritual than the cleanliness of your hands. Hand-washing can also be problematic when you still feel anxious about contamination even after you have thoroughly washed your hands.
Cleaning – Cleaning rituals can become an OCD problem when you experience no relief from your contamination fears, despite you having spent an extensive amount of time on cleaning.
Ruminating on relationships – It’s common to obsess when a relationship has broken down; it’s part of the grieving process. With non-intimate partners, obsessing over the intricacies of what was meant by someone or whether your comment was likely to offend someone can mean more than just issues of social anxiety. It could be a sign of OCD when those conversations keep replaying in your mind and you struggle to turn them off.
Counting – Counting becomes problematic when the ritual of repetitive counting distracts you from being able to function in important situations. Or it could be a sign of OCD when you assign excessive superstitious value on to your behaviour e.g. will only take action with “lucky” numbers, and will avoid participation with “unlucky” numbers.
Despising your looks – Disliking some physical features of your appearance is common. Extensively avoiding social situations or spending hours in front of the mirror fixating on a body part that you perceive as abnormal can be linked to body dysmorphic disorder (BDD). OCD is indicated when you place too much importance to your physical features.
Reassurance seeking – It’s ok to have moments of doubt and seek reassurance from people that you trust. Continually asking for reassurance on the same issues and being told you are doing this by someone close to you could be a warning sign for OCD.
Symmetry – Organisation issues are troublesome when they exceed perfectionism. Tidying the sock draw is occasionally helpful, but OCD can be indicated when you may not really want to do the task in the first place, but need to “order it and re-arrange it” to relieve anxiety.
Fear of violence – It’s common to have fleeting thoughts about harming yourself, harming others or being harmed by others. But it could be a sign of OCD when these (sometimes intrusive) thoughts are persistent, you continually seek reassurance about these negative thoughts, or you avoid the situations that could cause this harm.
Hoarding – Most people are guilty of collecting things for that “just in case I need it in the future” moment. When those collections pile up and prevent you from routine functions because they are taking over your sleeping space or the ability to use the bathroom, then it’s time to accept that you have an OCD (related) condition.
Forbidden thoughts – Most people have fleeting taboo thoughts that you can dismiss easily. Struggling to reject forbidden thoughts, believing that they are part of your identity and avoiding those people who are connected with your forbidden thoughts can be a sign of OCD.
You can access many more of the common signs and symptoms of OCD in this article detailing the various types of obsessive compulsive disorder.
OCD Treatment Cardiff: Common Treatment Methods
Accepting that you have OCD is an early common obstacle because most sufferers can feel embarrassed and ashamed of the condition. This denial can cause more avoidance and negative, suppressive coping strategies. Like with so many mental health conditions, you will have done your best to prevent the development of your condition. But once the condition is in full swing, it can be very challenging to treat it without external help.
Depending on the severity of your condition, your GP will offer some of the following methods to treat OCD:
Medication – You may be prescribed SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) antidepressant medication from your doctor.
CBT – Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is a talking therapy that explores how your thoughts, beliefs and emotions are influencing your behaviour.
ERP – Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) is similar to systematic desensitisation where you are gradually exposed to situations whilst changing how you react to them. With ERP, you are assisted by your therapist to confront the situations that cause you anxiety. Instead of carrying out the compulsion, you are encouraged to tolerate the anxiety and resist your compulsive urge.
OCD Treatment Cardiff: How Can Hypnotherapy Treat Your OCD?
The research for treating OCD with hypnotherapy may not be as comprehensive as treating it with CBT and medication, but there are smaller isolated studies that demonstrate its effectiveness. For example, hypnotherapy has been used when treating two OCD patients with contamination fears, with another OCD patient who had an AIDS-related contamination fear and again as an OCD dissociative tool.
How can you benefit from hypnotherapy?
Hypnotic states of awareness are similar to OCD states of awareness
Hypnosis can be an effective tool for treating OCD because the two states of awareness are so alike. In both hypnosis and OCD, your attention is highly concentrated; your mind will “zone out” and become inwardly absorbed into the intense “reality” of what you are imagining.
There is also a similarity with temporal distortion. When you are in hypnosis, it’s common to lose track of time whilst in deep visualisation. In the same way, during the performance of your OCD rituals, hours can pass you by without noticing how much time you have spent inside your ritual or what is happening in the outside world.
With these common features, it’s logical to treat what can be considered as a “hypnotic” condition using a treatment mode that is so similar. You won’t be surprised to know that previous OCD clients that I have treated have been highly responsive to hypnosis.
You can test your level of suggestibility here with this hypnosis test.
Hypnotherapy can help with anxiety reduction
Reducing your level of your anxiety is an important part of coping with OCD. Hypnotherapy has an advantage over other therapies because anxiety reduction is incorporated into the hypnotic induction. But anxiety reduction by itself is not the complete treatment for OCD; being able to confront the emotions that dominate your obsessions so that you can resist the urge of your compulsions is also a necessary part of your treatment. When you are in a relaxed hypnotic state, you will be more receptive to suggestions that will target this treatment goal.
Hypnotherapy can help you interrupt the patterns from past traumas
Using regression techniques selectively, hypnosis can be used to change the negative emotional learning from past traumas. Interrupting the past patterns of thoughts, emotions and behaviour that have consolidated your OCD rituals will help you to break recurrent ritualistic habits that now define your OCD. But this doesn’t mean ploughing through every year of your life as is commonly considered with age regression techniques. Only the most pertinent traumas are selected and reframed for you to benefit from this treatment technique.
Hypnosis can treat the problem part of your OCD mind
Obsessions and compulsions can be intensified when you have recurrent traumas. Your feared reactions then serve to reinforce the impact of these past traumas. Over time, this habitual functioning becomes automated and gets pushed down into your subconscious mind. This process can create (what can be considered as) OCD “parts” of your mind (or ego states) that replay your OCD “programme”. Traditional counselling methods attempt to work on these issues at the conscious level, but this can be a challenging process when this OCD “programme” now resides in your subconscious mind.
In hypnosis, your subconscious mind is accessed. The subconscious OCD “programme” can be treated, adding insight into the sensitising emotional causes of your OCD “programme”. By treating the emotional parts of your OCD mind, you can relearn to cope with these negative emotions, to resist the urge to perform the compulsions and relearn that nothing bad happens when you don’t give in to your compulsions.
Hypnotherapy can be integrated with ERP (Exposure and Response Prevention) Techniques
It’s a common misconception that hypnosis will be the magic wand and will simply turn off your OCD in one session. Is a hypnotherapist actively promoting this belief? If you see any hypnosis being advertised in this way, you will know not to bother giving it a second thought as quite simply, it will fail. When you enter your treatment with this expectation, not surprisingly, you will leave saying “hypnosis didn’t work for me”. ERP techniques are the effective way to treat OCD, but these techniques are not a quick fix either. ERP takes commitment and persistence to go through what can be a short-term increase in anxiety, before your condition gradually improves.
What happens in a typical ERP treatment? Under the guidance of your ERP therapist, you learn to confront the anxiety of the obsessions whilst resisting the urge to perform your compulsions. Over time, as you resist your compulsions, the anxiety fades. You progressively learn to challenge the fear that drives your compulsion and accept that nothing catastrophic follows. In other words, rather than taking the short-term “compulsion fix” that has dominated your OCD ritual, you learn to ride out the anxiety as the structure of your OCD “programme” changes.
Another misconception by the other therapies considers that hypnosis is not suitable for ERP techniques because when you are “put under”, you will not be exposed to the anxiety sufficiently to change what drives the urge to perform the compulsion. This depends on how hypnosis is being used. There is some previous research with a war veteran that demonstrates how hypnosis can be integrated with ERP techniques successfully.
Hypnotherapy offers a multitude of therapeutic interventions to treat OCD. It is only limited by the skill of the hypnotherapist employing these techniques. Other therapists may not be able to appreciate this enough if they don’t have the experience of using hypnosis. Hypnotherapy can thus be mistakenly classified as a single-approach modality in which you are “made” to change in one session or it doesn’t work. There are many reasons why other therapies outside of hypnotherapy would fail to treat OCD too, particularly if you only had one treatment session.
Hypnotherapy can treat the emotions that are manipulating your feared reality
Contained within your deceptive OCD programme of “fictional outcomes” is a mix of unwanted (and sometimes intrusive) thoughts, images, sensations, urges, emotions and behaviour. The biggest driver that formulates your OCD “programme” and convinces you that your OCD story is real are the emotions and feelings of guilt, shame, disgust, blame, fear, responsibility etc. Without these strong emotions and feelings underpinning your condition, you would be able to dismiss the thoughts and triggers as nonsense. Instead, you fear them, avoid them, seek reassurance from them and have the strong urge to immediately perform the compulsions as safety behaviour.
Hypnotherapy can help you access, welcome and embrace the emotions and feelings that overwhelm your OCD programme. As part of your integrated ERP hypnotherapy treatment, you can learn to tolerate these negative emotions and feelings that are out of control. This process of emotional desensitisation will give you the confidence to believe that the intrusive thoughts are irrational, overestimated and undeserving of those needless and time-consuming compulsive rituals. Hypnotherapy can convince you that you are strong enough to deal with the deceit behind the OCD programme, to confront the painful emotions and feelings until they pass. With hypnotherapy, what awaits you is emotional freedom from your OCD programme.
