It’s very popular in OCD patient communities, and in mental health communities in general, to get stuck on labeling superficial symptoms. But it becomes just another way to practice the judging and categorizing and discriminating that can fuel so many compulsions. A more effective approach to support recovery from OCD is to understand (and eliminate) the compulsive…
If you’re starting off the new year with plans to make changes that will support recovery from mental illness, be honest about where you are and the skills you’ll need to learn to get to where you want to be. Our goals are often the results of the skills we need to learn, so be sure…
Stuart Ralph has launched a podcast to go along with The OCD Stories site, all about exploring OCD and recovery from OCD. For the first episode of the podcast, which you can watch here in video, we discussed a slew of topics about recovering from OCD. Check it out:
Ruminating on reasons you can’t recover because your symptoms are different or you have very unique circumstances that prevent you from moving forward… is one of the most common symptoms. You’ll always be able to think of reasons why you can’t cut out compulsions, why you need to keep doing unhealthy things right now, why…
When we’re struggling with mental illness, it’s often the compulsions that get all of the focus, both when we’re trying to figure out what’s going on and when we’re getting treatment. Many disorders are defined only by the superficial characteristics of the compulsions they’re engaging in when they show up to get a diagnosis. But…
When we’re struggling with mental health issues, they can come become a filter that defines how we see the world. We can’t imagine seeing it any other way. Everything revolves around the mental health challenges and we begin to rely on them. We can start to believe that not feeling anxiety means we don’t care…
When it comes to dealing with horrible, weird, upsetting, terrifying intrusive thoughts or whatever else your brain is throwing up when you’re struggling with mental illness, learning to practice accepting the stuff in your head and shifting your focus to doing the things that will actually make you healthy, can stop the struggle in your head.
When I say that mental illness is like drowning and building better mental health is like learning how to swim, I’m not suggesting that mental illnesses aren’t real biological experiences. Drowning is a very biological experience. If we took some guy that doesn’t know how to swim and pushed him off the side of a…
I will fail because trying not to fail has only made things worse. I will fail my assumptions about other people and let them fill in the gaps with the truth. I will fail so I make progress. I will fail at lifting heavy things in my life, and then I’ll fail again and again…
Accepting silence is an advanced recovery skill. Learning how to be happy with silence and maintain your focus in silence takes practice. That’s because silence leaves our brains unoccupied, and when unhealthy brains are unoccupied, they fall back on all of the compulsions that have become so easy for them, like ruminating and catastrophising. Your…