Overcome OCD, Obsessing & Ruminating
with Solution Focused Hypnotherapy
Obsessive thinking, ruminating or rituals, and even OCD, can be overcome with Solution Focused Hypnotherapy, SFH.
Usually approaches to resolving OCD involve CBT and exposure therapy, which is a perfectly valid approach. However, I see many clients who have had CBT and although they have found it helpful, they often report finding tough and unpleasant and it hasn’t resolved the issue. Of course by definition, I don’t see people for whom CBT has been completely successful.
Solution Focused Hypnotherapy is still a form of exposure therapy. It’s a much more gentle approach, and much of the exposure takes place while in a deeply relaxed natural alpha brain-wave state we call trance.
Sense-Ability - can free you from anxiety and obsessions
By addressing what’s happening in the subconscious mind, SFH helps sufferers to free themselves from distressing and pervasive obsessions and habits, and the accompanying generalised anxiety that underpins it.
I use breathing, mindfulness exercises, NLP techniques and EFT tapping to support the SFH recovery process to make the process as comfortable as possible. Where a trauma or traumas appear to have been involved in the development of the condition, Rewind Trauma Therapy can be helpful too.
If you, or someone you know, suffers from OCD or obsessive ruminating, it’s likely that coronavirus, with its attendant barrage of press coverage, social media comment and overwhelming pervasive presence, has made things worse.
What is an obsession?
An obsession is when unwanted and unpleasant thoughts, images or urges repeatedly enter a person's mind, causing anxiety, unease or distress.
When you recognise that your thoughts and rituals are unhelpful and beginning to dominate your life, it’s time to seek help so you can get your life back on track, improve work performance and relationships, create an enjoyable social life, and start new hobbies.
If you have OCD, the need for order can be overwhelming
What is OCD?
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder or OCD describes a condition where a person is overwhelmed by obsessive thoughts or compulsive and repetitive activities. When obsessions develop into pervasive OCD, then all aspects of life are affected.
The NHS explains there are three elements to OCD.
obsessions – where an unwanted, intrusive and often distressing thought, image or urge repeatedly enters your mind
emotions – the obsession causes a feeling of intense anxiety or distress
compulsions – repetitive behaviours or mental acts that a person with OCD feels driven to perform as a result of the anxiety and distress caused by the obsession
How does OCD affect people?
The impact of OCD will be unique in every case and it’s likely that work, relationships and friendships will be significantly and negatively impacted.
OCD involves varying degrees of obsessive thinking, ruminating, intrusive thoughts, hoarding and repetitive behaviours in varying degrees of severity. The impact can be pervasive affecting every day activities, relationships and work.
As our daily lives in the modern world become ever more stressful, our brains struggle to adapt to the increasing demands and challenges we face. The symptoms of OCD pile on even more stress, leading to generalised anxiety, irrational intense fears, avoidance behaviours, depression, broken relationships and damaged careers.
When there’s no relief
If you, or someone you know, struggles with unwanted and intrusive negative thoughts, checks the front door is locked over and over again, has repetitive habits that bring no relief to anxiety, or has an obsession with germs and cleanliness, then every day becomes profoundly stressful.
OCD sufferers can’t ‘switch off’, become hyper-vigilant, ruminate, procrastinate and develop insomnia.
Obsessive or just cautious and ordered?
It’s important to distinguish here between being highly organised, clean and tidy, and OCD symptoms. OCD symptoms are compulsions, interrupt normal life and interfere with thinking and planning.
When your behaviour manifests obvious damaging physical outcomes, e.g. your hands become red raw, or severely dry and cracked, or you start pulling your hair out, literally, you know you have a problem.
It’s time to seek help.
Catastrophizing
One effect of OCD is the constant worry that something terrible is going to happen. It’s exhausting. We call that catastrophizing.
Over time, family and friends struggle to understand or give support. The long term result can be social isolation and emotional torment, leading to generalised anxiety and depression.
What causes OCD?
The roots of OCD are founded in our primitive mind. Our hunter-gatherer subconscious mind sees the world from the worst possible point of view. It’s still primed to protect us from sabre-toothed tigers and warring tribes. It’s tries to do that by telling us to run, fight or hide.
Our subconscious tries to protect us
In our modern times, our subconscious mind continues to try to protect us by obsessively trying to resolve things, order them or create rituals that we know make no sense. These negative patterns of thinking end up in our ‘stress bucket’ which continuously overfills and we end up in a permanent state of stress and anxiety.
Stress and our primitive minds
Once stress pushes us to become constantly anxious, we are living in our primitive minds. When that happens we are not able to think or act rationally. Perhaps some ritual or pattern of behaviour coincided with a good outcome, so we form an association and repeat the behaviour, even though our rational mind understands this makes no sense. Then the pattern of behaviour is repeated, modified, and becomes essential to our perceived survival.
The good news is, if we had the imagination to create the problem in the first place, we have the imagination to reverse the process.
How can Sense-Ability Therapies help?
Sense-Ability Solution Focused Hypnotherapy is a gentle process which works by changing your subconscious thought patterns, forging new neural pathways that promote healthy ways of responding to stress, and organically creating more positive and helpful patterns of thinking, acting and reacting.
Rewinding Traumas
Sometimes obsessive thinking is linked to trauma and, in this instance, Sense-Ability Rewind Trauma Therapy helps to resolve traumatic memories, and break negative associations that lead to obsessive thinking.
To find out more about Rewind Trauma Therapy see my blog Can I Recover from Trauma?
Using Solution Focused coaching and therapy methods, clients can envisage the behaviour and patterns of thinking they would prefer; and the various Sense-Ability methods are then tailored to help clients realise their preferred vision of the future.
The initial consultation
In our initial consultation, I explain how the brain works and how it creates obsessive thinking in the first place (and how common and natural this). After a detailed assessment, we discuss how we will work together to resolve the defined problem. I also provide a free relaxation CD or online recording following the consultation which is an important part of the therapeutic process.
The neuroscience
To read more about the general neuroscience behind Solution Focused Hypnotherapy, see: Sense-Ability Blog Change Your Mind
Hypnotherapy
Solution Focused Hypnotherapy is proven to help sufferers gently resolve these challenges by steadily changing perceptions embedded in the subconscious mind, and breaking the pattern of negative or repetitive thinking, and catastrophising.
Solution Focused Approaches
Understanding what has caused your OCD, will not resolve the issue.
Solution Focused Hypnotherapy focuses on your automatic and embedded responses and behaviours, now and in the future. We are not concerned with analysing the root causes of how the problem was created. The process works by helping clients to imagine and create incremental improvements through guided Solution Focused discussions, then embedding the preferred behaviours deep in the subconscious through sugesstiom-based hypnosis.
Case Studies
Helen had an understandable fear related to death after a personal tragedy. She was partly haunted by trauma; and partly caught in a pattern of obsessive thinking and rumination linked to that trauma.
Helen’s Story - Obsessive ruminating
Following Rewind Trauma Therapy to address the original ‘stuck’ trauma, a series of Solution Focused Hypnotherapy sessions enabled Helen to reduce her anxiety to manageable levels, improve her sleep routines and break the habits and obsessive thought processes that caused her to feel overwhelmingly anxious when her children left the house.
You can read more about Helen’s story in my Overcoming Trauma blog.
Harry’s story - Ruminating on the past
Sometimes obsessions are related to a specific issue. Harry was obsessing over something that had gone wrong in his relationship some time previously. He couldn’t stop thinking about these past events and couldn’t rebuild his relationship.
For *Harry, Solution Focused Brief Therapy helped him create preferred patterns of thinking which he embedded over time through hypnosis, while working to reduce his overall stress.
Harry explained, “I just couldn’t move on, even though the original issue had been resolved. It was like a stuck record going round and round on the same track… I couldn’t forget. Images of past events were intruding on my thoughts. I couldn’t sleep. I felt more and more anxious. Jane helped me to break the pattern of thinking so I could put the issue firmly into the past and rebuild my relationship within three sessions.”
Margaret and Fran’s stories - OCD
*Margaret and Fran are two more clients who came to me with more typical OCD type issues.
Margaret had a number of rituals she had to perform that dominated her life.
Fran was trapped by patterns of behavour and thinking linked to her generalised anxiety and a fear of germs. Both these issues were deeply embedded over a number of years.
Both had sought solutions elsewhere for some years including CBT.
It took a few weeks to change the patterns of thinking, acting and reacting, however Solution Focused Hypnotherapy enabled Margaret and Fran to reduce their ruminating and obsessing habits and get their lives back on track.
Margaret explains, “I went from obsessively checking I’d Iocked the door, washing my hands until they were raw, and some strange meaningless rituals to ‘keep me safe’, to just getting on with my life. In just a couple of months, I stopped obsessively ruminating on what I’d done wrong or how I might be punished. I still check doors and ovens, but just once or twice, not ten times!”
Margaret added that she has a tendency to feel anxious and that tendency tipped in to OCD type behaviours when she got too stressed. She now listens to her de-stress recording and has hypnotherapy every month to keep her stress levels down and her ruminating is kept in check.
Having been sceptical about hypnotherapy for OCD, in fact any therapy at all, Margaret committed to the process. After seeing significant progress after eight weeks she said, “I am glad I did commit to Solution Focused Hypnotherapy. I don’t really know why it works. It seems so gentle but it does. I feel like I have got my life back already.”
The Sense-Ability process
The Sense-Ability process starts by emptying your ‘stress bucket’ with deeply relaxing guided meditations, which are followed by suggestion-based hypnosis - no commands which the subconscious can resist or reject - to gently ease the subconscious mind in to healthier automatic responses.
The gentle hypnotherapy element embeds new more helpful programmes and patterns of thinking through Ericksonian suggestions.
The process in practice
Fran had a serious and embedded problem linked to feelings of self worth and childhood traumas.
At the initial consultation, where we were explored the nature of the problem and possible solutions, Fran explained: “I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sure Sense-Ability’s therapies would work for me. My anxiety, constant ruminating and obsessing about what I did, and what people said or didn’t say felt like it was part of my personality and couldn’t be changed. But it was starting to affect so much of my life I was prepared to try anything.”
”Jane’s initial consultation, which includes a presentation on the neuroscience of OCD and obsessive thinking, made so much sense and was so reassuring. Now I understood why I was thinking in the way that I was. I took a leap of faith and committed to the process. I’m so glad I did. I’ve got my life back.”
Fran explains, “My obsessive ruminating was so bad it took me a month of therapy before I started to unwind and sleep well. Listening to my recording really helped me get to sleep. Once I’d broken the ruminating pattern at night, and was able to get to sleep and stay asleep, I started to make rapid progress with my ruminating habits and my obsessive thinking.”
Exposure and Response Prevention Therapy v Sense-Ability
The traditional way of treating OCD is Exposure and Prevention Therapy. Although researchers and medical professions say this method is proven and effective, it comes with a number of issues. Clara Law and Christina L Boisseau in their review of ERP* write, “Despite strong evidence supporting the use of ERP in the treatment of OCD, about 50% of patients do not show significant improvement and 25% to 30% drop out of treatment prematurely.”
To my mind, these are not good outcomes. I’d soon be out of business with these results! My experience is that almost my OCD clients show significant improvement and very few drop out of the therapy process because it’s not onerous, and sessions are generally relaxing and pleasant.
Law and Boisseau explain the inhibitory learning model associated with ERP, “Based on this model, extinction is maximized when patients learn new information that can block out – or inhibit – their obsessional thoughts and/or urges.” They elaborate that this model teaches “… that the experience of distress is bearable rather than aiming for an overall decline in anxiety.”
That sounds exhausting!
My aim is to help OCD sufferers to reduce and manage anxiety, to cope with difficult emotions as they arise, to develop better coping strategies and, ultimately, to change deep-rooted unconscious programmes that cause distress. It’s a process, and it does involve exposure, but it’s much gentler than ERP making it easier to commit to the process.
Therapy Sessions
At the beginning of each subsequent session, clients are asked Solution Focused questions that move them to the part of the mind that creates solutions, and away from the problem-focused anxious mind. Using scaling and detailed descriptions of your preferred future, in small steps, the client’s mind starts to imagine a more secure and stable future.
In Rewind Trauma Therapy sessions, the client creates a sequenced imaginary film, which is rewound repeatedly in order to move the traumatic memories from the flight, fight, fright part of the brain (the amygdala) to the part of the brain that stores narrative memories. With a skilful therapist, overwhelming emotions can be uncoupled from memories of traumatic events permanently. This can be an excellent foundation for resolving obsessive thought patterns and behaviours.
The rehearsal room of the mind
The imagination is the rehearsal room of the mind.
Hypnotic trance, as induced by a Solution Focused Practitioner, is a very natural state of mind. We go into trance several times a day: when we drive, watch television or walk the dog. Solution Focused Hypnotherapy induces the deeply relaxed trance state so that new, healthier subconscious patterns can be embedded.
By focusing the mind on more positive thinking prior to entering the alpha brain wave trance state, clients are priming their subconscious mind to begin making positive changes.
Deciding to go ahead
Diagnosis or recognition of the problem
You may or may not have an official diagnosis of OCD.
You may just recognise traits or are concerned about a growing problem you want to tackle now.
Hypnotherapists are not qualified to diagnose you. If you’d like a formal diagnosis, then please see your doctor on the first instance. However, regardless of any formal diagnosis, a Solution Focused Hypnotherapist can help you with any issues related to obsessing, ruminating or compulsions as defined and recognised by you.
How many sessions are needed?
The number of sessions to resolve OCD or obsessive thinking and ruminating can vary. It depends how long the condition has persisted and the intensity of the problem. We would discuss the number of sessions needed in the initial consultation.
For longer term issues that require several sessions, I do offer discounts where cost is an issue.
Exclusively online
I work exclusively online at the moment. If you prefer to work with a Solution Focused Hypnotherapist face-to-face in your area, please see the Association for Solution Focused Hypnotherapists www.afsfh.org.
Working with me
If you would like to discuss working with me, or would like to book your initial consultation online, see my Contact me or Book now page
Alternatively, text me in the number below in the first instance.
*Harry, Fran and Margaret asked to remain anonymous. Their names and identifying details have been changed to protect their anonymity.
Jane Pendry
Sense-Ability Hypnotherapy & Coaching
Solution Focused Hypnotherapist & Coach
jane@sense-ability.co.uk
07843 813 883
www.sense-ability.co.uk
Photos courtesy of Unsplash. Beach picture: jeremybishop/portfolio; Sweets in line photo: dezjeff.com; Shirts on rail Benjamin Reisner; Notebook and pens - karisheacreative
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