APTC Blog

We all experience anxiety in life. And most people have experienced flushes of panic in particularly stressful moments, like right before stepping on stage for a performance or taking a make-or-break test. Some of us have even had particularly frightening "out of the blue'' panic attacks. But only a few people--about 3.5% of the total population--go on to develop panic disorder. So the question is, what is happening for those relatively few people who do develop panic disorder?

As I mentioned in my last post, OCD can be a difficult disorder to manage because it is full of tricks and unless you understand these tricks and learn how to play the game to win, then OCD has the upper hand. It's almost as if the OCD has a tenth degree black belt in karate and you are just beginning. In this blog post I will list three tricks that OCD uses to "trick" people into doing compulsions. Understanding and recognizing some of the tricks and distortions that OCD uses can be helpful when seeking to manage OCD.

OCD has many tricks, maneuvers and distortions that keep you repeating your compulsions over and over, and one of the subtler ones is that the minute you don’t want a thought/feeling/urge then, guess what, you have that thought/feeling/urge!  And the less you want it and the more you resist it…the more you get it! This is especially relevant when the type of OCD is the Intrusive Thought version – usually unwanted sexual or harming thoughts about an inappropriate or vulnerable target. 

I covered the need to do exposure therapy for anxiety disorders in my last blog post, but I didn’t spend much time talking about another aspect of treatment. As you may already know, the preferred form of treatment for anxiety disorders is Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) and the exposure work is the “Behavior” part of that framework. The “Cognitive” part may be just as important as the behavioral part for many clients. Below you will find a list of what are called “cognitive distortions”. These are common mistakes in people’s thinking that can lead to anxiety and depression

I saw a new client recently and asked one of my usual opening questions for a new client “Tell me what it is you most want to accomplish by working with me”, and my new client responded (as most new clients do) with “I want to learn how to control my anxiety”. I think this reflects a fundamental mistake in how people are thinking about how to better manage their anxiety. If the goal is to” get rid of” or “control” anxiety I think we’re heading off in the wrong direction so I often will offer a different perspective to make sure that the new client and I are on the same page. That perspective is that it’s not helpful to try and “get rid of” or “control” anxiety.