January 2008

JANUARY 2008

The total amount raised by Marcus Head and his friend David Badock in being sponsored for the London Marathon was £3,034.41. Congratulations to them both, and our sincere thanks for all their effort.

What would you like to see in future Newsletters? Just let me know, after all this is your Newsletter after all.

Lesley - Chair Anxiety Alliance

The following is taken from Brain Lock - Free Yourself from OCD by Jeffrey Schwartz, M.D.

‘Wishing Wont Make it So’

I like to tell the story of the chameleon and his therapist to illustrate the futility of trying to think away the nagging symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder. The therapist tells the hapless chameleon ‘ Listen, you’ve got to calm down. The more you worry about changing colour, the less progress you’ll make. Now, why don’t you put yourself on the green background again?’

With the OCD patient, the problem is exactly the same. The more you worry about trying to drive some foolish and bothersome idea form your mind, the less chance you’ll succeed. Eventually you’ll just give up. OCD will win. A key principle in self-directed cognitive behavioural therapy for OCD is this. It’s not how you feel it’s what you do that counts.

And perhaps the most critical thing you must do during an OCD attacks is to Refocus on another activity. What do I mean? Here’s one way to look at it: Refocusing is like learning a martial art. Your opponent, OCD is very strong, stronger than the power of your mind to make it go away. But you have one clear advantage: OCD tends to be very stupid. The closer OCD comes to being clever is the fiendish way it puts doubts in your mind. Now, if you stand right in front of this stupid but powerful opponent, it will knock you right over. Therefore you have to take advantage of its stupidity. You have to step aside, put the OCD thought aside, and work around it by putting your mind in another place and doing another behaviour, one that is more pleasant and functional.

This is Refocusing. You Refocus on another behaviour. It can be a physical activity, such as taking a walk, doing needlepoint, shooting a few baskets. Early in therapy, physical activity seems to be especially helpful. But the important thing to remember is that whatever activity you choose, it must be something you enjoy doing. You may listen to music, cook, knit, play a computer game, or water your geraniums. The object is to pursue the activity for at least fifteen minutes instead of acting out some silly ritual in response to an obsessive thought that has come from your brain. This is the fifteen-minute rule.

Now, fifteen minutes is only a guideline. At first, five minutes may be the limit to your staying power, The important thing is that for at least a few minutes, you will not be sitting and dwelling self-destructively on the bothersome thoughts and urges that have invaded your mind, that you will not be acting on those thoughts and urges. Instead you will be consciously Relabeling those senseless thoughts as OCD and Reattributing them to a wiring problem in your brain. Relabeling and Reattributing help you get ‘connected’ and ready to bring your mind away from OCD and back to reality. Now you’re ready to work around those thoughts by Refocusing your attention on another, more wholesome, behaviour.

The one-line summary of Refocusing is : Do another behaviour. When you do, you’ll learn that the OCD urges change and tend to diminish over time, when they’re not acted on. (It is also true that medication tends to make the OCD fade more quickly while you’re following the fifteen-minute rule).

ONE STEP AT A TIME

Don’t just plunge in and try, through some kind of frenetic, non-stop activity, to dismiss all the bothersome thoughts at once. Rather, you take things gradually; slow and steady wins the race. You can’t do everything at once. Let’s say you have an obsession about contamination and that dreaded thought comes up again; ‘ I have to wash my hands’ First, your Relabel and call it what it is - an obsession. Then you Reattribute and place the blame squarely where it belongs. You remind yourself ‘It’s not me - it’s the OCD’ Then you Refocus. You walk away from the sink without washing your hands and do something worthwhile that makes you happy. You do not attempt to make the OCD go away through some kind of magical understanding of what it is and what it means. That’s a fruitless struggle. You will only become demoralised, literally beaten down internally.

By refocusing and changing to another behaviour, you shift those sticky gears in your brain and resist the urge in an intelligent way. When you do so the urge slowly begins to lessen because you’re working to change the chemistry of your brain. When you pay the urge no attend, it starts to go away. When you shift behavioural gears, you improve how your brain works.

So, after one successful fifteen-minute wait, you may assess the situation and decide ‘Hmmm…it’s not bothering me as much. I’m going to wait another fifteen minutes’. People who can do so always get better. I have yet to see anyone who reaches that level of mental resolution who fails to improve.

Now how do I define ‘getting better’? Since OCD is a chronic disease my definition of getting better is reaching a point where they OCD affects your everyday functioning far less, where it is no longer making you act in ways that you regret, not longer interfering with your personal relationships, no longer commanding your constant attention. And I can guarantee that you can do this for yourself. Even though your OCD may still try to sneak in and make your life miserable, you now know that it’s not how you feel, it’s what you do that counts. On the other hand, if you just sit there, repeating over and over ‘I have to feel more comfortable’ you’re not going to change your behaviour, you’re not going to change your brain, and you’re not going to get better. You need to be active, you cannot be passive.

By learning to put off acting on an obsessive thought for fifteen minutes - or even five minutes - you are teaching yourself response prevention. You do not need to spend hours in therapy with a medical professional, as was once thought necessary. This is truly self-directed therapy in the sense that you are your own therapist. Of course, you can always get additional help and support. But you will find that as you apply the Four Steps - Relabel, Reattribute, Refocus, and Revalue - you will be able to expose yourself for longer and long periods to those terrible thoughts and urges without performing compulsive rituals in response to them. Initially you may have to remove yourself from the sink very quickly so as not to give in and wash your hands again or move away from the doors so as not to check the lock again. It’s okay at first to put some physical distance between yourself, the sink or the lock. But never say to yourself ‘Oh my God. I gave in. I’m terrible. I’m a loser. I’m never going to get better’ If you do a compulsion, just tell yourself that OCD won this round - and vow that next time you’re going to work to ignore the sink or the door and try to Refocus on doing something worthwhile and pleasurable. Just realising that this is a form of behaviour therapy, even if you’re doing a compulsion at the same time, prevents you from taking the compulsive behaviour literally at face value, (it’s not ‘’washing your hands’’ it’s ‘’doing a compulsion’).

Typically, a person with OCD experiences the urge to perform a compulsion may times during a day. However much time you’re able to put between getting the urge and acting on it is time well spent, even if it’s only a minutes or two. At the end of that period, it’s important that you reassess the bothersome urge and make a mental not of any change in the intensity of the urge during the time you were able to held it at bay. Even if there is an almost imperceptible change in its intensity - which often happens - you will have learned that you can control your behavioural response to the OCD thought.

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The following is taken from Stop Thinking Start Doing by Richard Carlson.

Your past is now only a figment of your imagination, and so is your future. The only moment that is real is right now. As you recognise the powerful part that your thinking plays in creating your experience you begin to realise that life is not responsible for your happiness or unhappiness, your thoughts are. This is a powerful insight because it suggests that you alone are capable of changing your own life. American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson once said ‘The ancestor to every action is a thought’ You must realise that to become a happier person, you must first imagine that it’s possible.

The way you feel is determined by your thoughts. The more attention you put on anything that is negative, the worse you will feel. Again, I ask that you use your own wisdom and common sense to decide whether or not to believe me. Despite the popular idea that talking about and working through negative emotions is a good idea, I’m suggesting that common sense dictates otherwise. People have been ‘working through ‘ endless negative emotions for years now,, and very few are much better off than when they started. The questions to ask yourself (and your therapist) are: when does the analysis stop? When have I had enough? When do I get to feel better?

If you believe that your thoughts are real - and you are encouraged to work through the worst of them - you will end up with even more to contend with, because the more you think, the bigger and more important the thoughts will seem, and the more of them there will be to deal with, Because your feelings are determined by what you think about, you will, by necessity sink even lower. And unfortunately, because you are feeling lower, you will now think even more negative thoughts, new ones that you now have to ‘work through’. It’s an endless negative spiral that never takes you upward towards where you want to be - happy. The spiral will end when you decide that enough is enough. It will end when you start with a clean slate, with a clear mind, and when you realise that the only thing holding your unhappiness in place is your own thinking. If you really want to be happy, you must stop focussing on your negative feelings and start looking for the magical feeling of healthy functioning that resides inside you.

Troubleshooting

Troubleshooting is a way of life for many people. It means being on the look out for what’s wrong, finding flaws, seeking out imperfections, pointing out potential pitfalls, finding fault, generating concerns, being a sceptic, and remembering mistakes. For a computer product this can be crucial; but to a human being it can be devastating.

Troubleshooting is a socially acceptable form of mental illness. Many people are proud of their ability to predict potential problems, see fault in others, and remember past mistakes. They call themselves ‘realists’ they consider their fault-finding skills necessary and important. They rationalise their behaviour and way of thinking by saying such things as ‘You must learn from history’ and ‘Someone has to look out for the problems’ Troubleshooters often raise children with low self-esteem. They are so busy pointing out the ways that their children could improve that they totally forget to enjoy their presence. The children often interpret their parents’ attitude to mean that they are not good enough. Troubleshooters have low self-esteem themselves. Rather than experiencing what is happening in their lives, they are constantly thinking of ways to improve their experience. Regardless of how good things get, they constantly want more.

A troubleshooter can never be satisfied because she is using her thinking against herself. She is too busy evaluating her life to enjoy it. She picks up the slightest imperfections and turns them into a big deal. Even when she likes something, she compares it to something else.

There is certainly nothing wrong with wanting to improve, excel, achieve or compare. But there is something harmful to the human psyche when, instead of being open and receptive to the beauty of life, it is overflowing with comparisons, criticism, suggestions and thoughts of imperfections. Life doesn’t have to be a contest to see how many flaws you can find. Life can be beautiful, and it will be, when you start dismissing the thoughts have that take you away from a good feeling about life, a feeling of love and appreciation, your healthy psychological functioning, Instead of following the troubleshooting thoughts you have, practice ignoring them. Rather than following through with an unnecessary suggestion to someone, practice holding your tongue. Instead, offer your support for doing it their own way. Instead of anticipating potential problems and reviewing past mistakes, keep yourself here, in this moment. See for yourself how living moment to moment tends to take care of most problems. Remind yourself that your inner wisdom and healthy functioning will learn from history - all by itself - even if you don’t review your mistakes in your head. Watch what happens when you dismiss a concern in your mind as ‘just a thought’ Notice how very few of your concerns actually manifest into significant real life problems. For those concerns that really do become problems, watch how gracefully your solve them when you remain present and focused, when you head isn’t muddled with a lot of other thoughts, related or not, that only add to the problem.

The process of a troubleshooter’s thinking is very easy to explain. She looks at something or someone and thoughts begin to bubble. The specific content of her thoughts aren’t important. What ends up hurting her is the nature of her thinking, the fact that her thoughts are seeking to improve the person, place or thing. Rather than dismissing those thoughts, as a happier person would tend to do, the troubleshooter pays attention to her thoughts, believing them to be real. Because she thinks her thoughts are so important, she points them out to someone or keeps thinking them to herself. The thoughts feed on one another and begin to take on a life of their own. She feels that she wouldn’t have thought them up if they weren’t worthy of concern.

A happy person might have the very same thoughts enter his mind, but the way he would respond to those thoughts would be quite different. The thoughts would bubble to the surface. He would then acknowledge that he was thinking them dismiss them and go on with his day. Obviously, if his wisdom told him that any particular thoughts did have merit, and the issue was important, he would choose to do something about the situation. He wouldn’t however, allow his mind to blow the situation out of proportion. He would tap into his healthy functioning as best he could, knowing that his wisdom would provide him with the answers he needs. He would remember a golden rule of happiness; it’s impossible to feel gratitude for something when you are too busy trying to improve it.

The Past

To break free from unhappiness you have to bring yourself back to the present. You must realise that your past is no longer here - it’s over. It exists only within your own thinking. It was real then, but now it’s only a part of your imagination.

From generation to generation, each of us has been taught that the past represents what is, and that it predicts the future. A person who is psychologically sound and of good judgement is seen to look carefully to the past when thinking of future plans. Therefore, it makes sense to most people to recall the past when dealing with something in the present. This tendency, however, while useful at times, can wreak havoc on our rapport with others. It also takes us away from our healthy functioning.

The truth is that many arguments, painful confrontations, or difficult situations are only difficult because the people involved are busy thinking about the past without realising they are doing so! In other words they are filtering their present moments through thoughts of the past.

On the surface, almost everyone realises the past is over. Very few however, internalise this understanding deeply enough to prevent the past from haunting them. Instead they allow thoughts of the past to contaminate the present, interfering with the present experience of healthy functioning. If you can remember that the past is only a memory, you will be able to ignore, to a very large degree, the thoughts of the past that get in the way of enjoying life. You can learn a great deal from your past, but you need not suffer because of it. Your understanding of thought will allow you to remain right here, in the present moment, where happiness can exist.

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