The BrightLife Center for The Rapid Relief of OCD

How Do I Know If I Have OCD?

Worries, doubts, and superstitious beliefs are common for most people, at least some of the time. However, some worries become so excessive that one may find him- or herself engaging in hours and hours of seemingly uncontrollable behaviors, including hand washing, counting, an excessive need to keep things arranged and "orderly", driving around the block repeatedly to ensure that an accident didn't occur, and returning to check the front door again and again to make sure it is locked before leaving the house. With OCD, it is as though the brain gets "stuck" on a particular thought or urge and just can't let go. People with OCD often say the symptoms feel like a case of mental hiccups that won't go away.

Western (allopathic) medicine is generally of the belief that OCD is a medical brain disorder that causes problems in information processing. Although this may or may not actually be the case, we've found that the "reason" the problem is there is of relatively trivial consequence. In other words, we've found that we really don't need to know why the problem is present in order to help you bring about a resolution to it — and perhaps more easily than you ever thought possible.

Why Is Treatment of OCD Using Standard Forms of Medical or Psychotherapeutic Intervention So Often A Challenge?

Most individuals who seek treatment for OCD-related symptoms first report their problems to their primary physician. Believing OCD to be a medical and/or mental disease or disorder, some of these physicians will quickly prescribe anti-anxiety or anti-depressant medications in an attempt to get the symptoms under control. Others will refer their patients for standard psychotherapy, and yet others will refer their patients to medical and/or psychological organizations that purport to specialize in treating OCD in its many possible expressions.

The "state-of-the-art" in traditional psychotherapy uses either cognitive-behavioral forms of therapy ("CBT"), psychopharmacology (psychoactive drugs or medications), or both. CBT most often takes the forms either of

• Standard talk-based therapy — most often the case with relatively inexperienced therapists who just don't get that you can't "talk someone out of" an OCD problem, or
  
  
• Graduated exposure therapy (also known as desensitization or habituation therapy).

While effective in some cases, both of these approaches seem to suffer from serious limitations — at least the way they are most often administered.

Talk Therapy

To begin with, it's clear that you can't simply "talk someone out of" an OCD problem. After all, if that were possible, you'd have done it for yourself a long time ago, wouldn't you?

Standard talk-based therapy tends not to work in the area of OCD for one very good reason — OCD is not a consciously-driven problem. In fact, it's driven almost exclusively by totally subconscious processes. This is why, despite your best conscious efforts, you've been all but completely frustrated with all your conscious efforts to this point. It also explains why this problem has felt so far beyond your control.

Because both self-talk and standard talk therapy are very conscious processes, little or nothing changes at the subconscious level, the place you really need to go in order to successfully impact this problem. Attempting to use conscious processes to alter an almost totally subconsciously-driven problem is therefore almost always an exercise in futility — you're dealing with apples and oranges here. No wonder things don't change!

Graduated Exposure Therapy

On the other hand, graduated exposure therapy calls for clients to repeatedly — and willingly — put themselves in anxiety-producing contact with whatever their feared stimulus might be. The purpose for this kind of intervention is to allow the client's nervous system sufficient opportunity to habituate to (i.e. "get used" to) the formerly fearful stimulus, so that it no longer evokes the same kind of powerful sympathetic nervous system response (fight or flight) that it used to. In a manner of speaking, there's so much exposure to the feared stimulus, the nervous system eventually simply gets exhausted from trying to keep up with it all, and eventually just gives in.

G.E.T. has, in fact, been scientifically proven to be helpful in reducing or eliminating the symptoms of OCD. The only problem we have with this approach (as it is typically administered) is that clients are most often asked go into these exercises with little or nothing more in the way of tools or resources than they had to begin with. The result, of course, is that clients suffer far more than we believe is necessary during this process, particularly during the earlier parts of the intervention.

At BrightLife, we do believe in the power of G.E.T. as one of the few really effective ways to eliminate the symptoms of OCD. But we offer one powerful, preliminary component before we ever get to G.E.T. that, to our knowledge, no one else does. And it's this one powerful component that makes G.E.T. (if and when necessary) a much, much easier process than it ever would have been without it.

The Power of Perception

You see, it's not what's out there that causes, or "forces" a person to respond with anxiety to a given event, situation or circumstance. Rather, it's how we each mentally interpret what's out there — it's the meaning we each unconsciously assign to a given event that determines how we feel about it.

When we teach you to change the meaning you unconsciously assign to a given anxiety-provoking "trigger" (e.g. "If I don't pick that up, somebody could get hurt, and then I'd have to feel real guilty"), you change how your brain perceives it. When you change how your brain perceives a particular trigger, you can't help but feel — and therefore respond — totally differently to it!

Perception is learned. Perception is the result of a lifetime of experience, the sum of which have generated a collection of cause-effect relationships for you that literally dictate how you should think, feel and respond to your present day activities. An example of a common harmful cause-effect relationship in OCD sufferers is: "If I come into contact with that doorknob (cause), I could get germs on me (effect). If I get germs on me (cause), I could get very sick or die (effect)".

Of course, these cause-effect relationships are not necessarily true — but they are acted on as true by your unconscious mind, and that's why you feel the distress you feel when you think about actual contact with a given fearful stimulus.

Just What is "The BrightLife Method"? — And How Can You Be So Sure Your Program Will Work For Me?

At BrightLife, before engaging in any kind of exposure work whatsoever, we carefully examine and identify the unconscious cause-effect relationships that have almost totally been responsible for the fear you feel. We then apply a variety of powerful yet simple mental exercises that effectively neutralize the old unconscious cause-effect relationships. This flattens out partially or completely the more intense expressions of discomfort you used to feel when considering contact with a given stimulus.

Having chipped away at the cement like this, you can imagine how much more smoothly G.E.T. can proceed now that the fear you used to feel is largely or completely dissipated.

Thus, by showing a person how to think differently about whatever has been so anxiety-provoking, the underlying anxiety that drives the OCD behaviors tends to dissipate, effectively snuffing out the energy that used to drive the unwanted behaviors in the first place. The compulsion disappears.

The fact is, obsessive-compulsive behaviors are anxiety-driven... Where there is no underlying anxiety, there is no compulsion to do what you generally already know is an irrational behavior. Thus, the objective of our work together is to quell the underlying anxiety that, until now, has served as the driving force behind the compulsive behavior.

To use an analogy, it's a little like what we might do if we were having difficulty turning off a malfunctioning machine because we can't find the "on-off" switch; regardless of whether or not you know where the OCD machine's on-off switch is, if you backtrack a bit and merely cut off the power to the machine instead, the machine can't help but shut down anyway. And you can hit the machine's "on-off" button all you want after that, but the machine will stay off because you've removed the source of the energy that drives it.

At BrightLife, we feature some of the most powerful mental repatterning techniques available anywhere. While powerful, they are also amazingly straightforward in their application, and when applied conscientiously, virtually always effective — no matter how many other programs you may have tried and failed at in the past.

Our work is so effective, we have been featured on numerous local, national and even international print, radio and television, including our appearances in the Montreal Gazette, KNX 1070 NewsRadio in Los Angeles, Esquire Magazine, as well as the Discovery Health Channel's six-part television series, Things That Go Bump: Facing Our Fears. On that program, Dr. Robert Mantell assisted a client to eliminate an intense twenty-year phobia in just 15 minutes! See the video here!

How do we teach our clients to turn off the "power" to the OCD machine? The process is amazingly simple.

You see, it's not what's out there that causes, or "forces" a person to respond with anxiety to a given event, situation or circumstance. Rather, it's how we each mentally interpret what's out there — it's the meaning we each unconsciously assign to a given event that determines how we feel about it. When we teach you to change the meaning you unconsciously assign to a given anxiety-provoking "trigger" (e.g. "If I don't pick that up, somebody could get hurt, and then I'd have to feel real guilty"), you change how your brain perceives it. When you change how your brain perceives a particular trigger, you can't help but feel — and therefore respond — totally differently to it!

Thus, by showing a person how to think differently about whatever is so anxiety-provoking, the underlying anxiety that drives the OCD behaviors tends to dissipate, effectively snuffing out the energy that used to drive the unwanted behaviors in the first place. The compulsion disappears.

Eradicate the psychological energy driving the behavior, and the compulsion stops dead in its tracks.

It's a revolutionary approach by a revolutionary company.

2010 W. Avenue K, # 644
Lancaster, CA 93536

email: info@fearintopower.com TOLL-FREE: (866) LIFE-NOW

BrightLife Phobia and Anxiety Release Center has been awarded the prestigious "AAA Rating" for outstanding Service Quality and Customer Satisfaction by the Southland Better Business Bureau!
	BrightLife's Founder and Executive Director Robert Mantell, Ph.D. is a member in good standing of the American Counseling Association (Membership #06162446).
	BrightLife's Founder and Executive Director Robert Mantell, Ph.D. is a member of the American Academy of Experts in Traumatic Stress.
	BrightLife's Founder and Executive Director Robert Mantell, Ph.D. is a member of the National Center for Crisis Management.

	BrightLife's Founder and Executive Director Robert Mantell, Ph.D. is a member of the California Counseling Association.
	BrightLife's Founder and Executive Director Robert Mantell, Ph.D. is a member of the International Association of Marriage and Family Counselors.

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