ERP breaks this vicious cycle by gradually exposing you to the things that you are avoiding and that trigger your obsessions, whilst you resist the urge to carry out your compulsive activity. Remaining in the exercise without carrying out the compulsion means that your distress/anxiety reduces naturally. As your anxiety or distress naturally reduces, the strength between your obsession and compulsion also reduces. You start by confronting easier situations and then more difficult ones. Each time you carry out an ERP exercise it becomes easier and easier and the anxiety or distress gradually subsides.
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) teaches you, through discussion, how to recognize and cope with stressful influences in your life. It can help you understand how your thoughts and behavior patterns influence your symptoms, and how to change the way the body responds to anticipated pain.
Acceptance and commitment therapy is an empirically-based psychological intervention that uses acceptance and mindfulness strategies mixed in different ways with commitment and behavior-change strategies, to increase psychological flexibility.The objective of ACT is not elimination of difficult feelings; rather, it is to be present with what life brings us and to “move toward valued behavior”. Acceptance and commitment therapy invites people to open up to unpleasant feelings, and learn not to overreact to them, and not avoiding situations where they are invoked. Its therapeutic effect is a positive spiral where feeling better leads to a better understanding of the truth.
The concept of using both Neurofeedback and ACT in parallel is a relatively new one. However, studies have shown that combining them may increase the power and effectiveness of each individual treatment to improve your mental health and treat the problems you’re experiencing, especially where other treatments have failed. Increasing numbers of health professionals are combining these therapies for their patients and we now offer this at the Center for Neurofeedback.
We offer therapeutic group therapy for OCD led by Dr Hank Srednicki! The primary focus is on response prevention and exposure.
Neurofield is a technology that uses ultra-low output pulsed electromagnetic field (pEMF). pEMF provides the brain with information that the brain is then able to use to alter brainwaves. pEMF increases the brains ability to be flexible and adjust into patterns of more optimal functioning, i.e. increases wave activity where there are deficits. pEMF works at an intensity that is much less than what energy a cell phone puts out and similar to what headphones put out. pEMF may be widely unknown, but it has been around for decades and there have been thousands of clinical studies to prove its efficacy and safety.