Articles and educational documents by Carol Edwards
Bring out your strengths! Write them down on sticky notes and stick them to your computer, your door, your wall (wherever you like) and remind yourself that you have what it takes to be successful. Get past the negative hurdle about your memory by accepting uncertainty. In other words, ask yourself, what is the likelihood that I have a memory problem? Now scroll down to tip 5 to put uncertainty into perspective!
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I see fellow students learning things very easily, but me, I seem to have to put a lot of effort into learning things. For example, any concept for me is hard to grasp lately, and I have to study long hours to make learning material clearer. It’s like my memory is failing me. I have OCD, and I’m wondering if this plays a part in the mental blocks I’ve been experiencing.”
How does ruminating about an obsession in OCD differ from worrying, generally? It could be said that worrying makes you … More
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Cognitive restructuring helps alter thoughts, feelings and behaviours, and improves insight. Subsequently, agreeing to face obsessions (exposures) and resisting compulsions (response prevention) shows how this active process eventually weakens obsessions, further increasing rational perception.
These illogical thoughts had latched on to what mattered most to John – his morals. Subsequently, and despite the real-event theft situation, he failed to see that his intrusive thoughts were at odds with his true moral values, or at least doubted it. This is an example of what is known as trait-guilt, meaning that the corresponding emotion is rigid. In other words, John’s previous healthy beliefs about himself shifted to thinking instead that he truly was a sinner and a traitor to his religion.
There is another factor to consider, which comes from Isaac Mark’s expression “obsessive phobia” which is not, as he puts it, ‘a direct fear of a given object or situation, but rather of the results which are imagined to arise from it’. While there is a distinction between a standard phobia and an obsession, an overlap can be noticed when a person shows signs of one and the other.
Exposure response prevention has been practiced for almost half-a-century and remains the most effective therapy for treating OCD. With Mindfulness integrated into the process this offers a solution for improving task engagement (in and out of the therapy room) and offers scope for preventing relapse.
