1. Treatment Strategies
2. Individual Therapy
3. CBT for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)

Location

Sessions held in Chelmsford, Essex

Purpose

The overall objective of this programme is help you to learn that you can control your anxiety without obsession (fears you know to be completely unrealistic but are unable to stop) and/or compulsion (also known as "rituals").

Typical obsessions include:

• Fears of getting a disease, such as HIV or cancer
• Fears of touching poisons, such as pesticides
• Fears of hurting or killing someone
• Fears of forgetting to do something, such as turn off the cooker or lock a door
• Fears of doing something embarrassing or immoral, such as shouting obscenities

Typical compulsions include:

• Excessive washing or cleaning, such as washing one's hands many times a day
• Checking, such as looking at the oven repeatedly to make sure it's turned off
• Repeating actions, such as always turning a light switch on and off sixteen times
• Hoarding or saving things, such as keeping old newspapers or scraps of paper
• Putting objects in a set pattern, such as making sure everything in a room is symmetrical

Intendend Results

In my Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) programme we will work together to:

• Learn simple but extremely effective breathing relaxation exercises and progressive muscle relaxation to increase your sense of self-efficacy in dealing with your anxiety.
• Use gradual exposure techniques to weaken the association between your obsessive thoughts and your emotional distress. You will come to understand that if you allow yourself to think your obsessive thoughts, without attempting to avoid or neutralise them through 'ritualising', your anxiety will eventually decrease.
• Learn a number of Response Prevention techniques to help you block the performance of rituals.
• Use cognitive interventions such as Cognitive Restructuring to weaken belief in the possibility of danger; challenge automatic thoughts, assumptions and schemas, as they contribute to your anxiety; and challenge the processing errors that maintain the assumptions and schemas.
• Learn a number of Relapse Prevention tools to help you deal with stressors post-treatment, and learn new ways to cope with such stressors as, if and when they occur.

Structure

Depending on the severity of the symptoms, this CBT for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) course of therapy has a duration of twelve-to-twenty weekly, one-hour psycho-educational sessions.