Welcome back to another episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit Podcast. As you all know, I traveled back to Australia to visit family last month. The Australian government requires a 14 day quarantine for any visitors coming into the country. When my plane landed, I was escorted by police to a hotel in Sydney. I was then taken to my room and told that under law, I am not allowed to leave or even open a window for 14 days. Now that I am home and reflecting on my time in Australia, I really want to share with you some of the skills that I had to practice all day every day to get me through that quarantine. I hope some of these skills can also help you when you are facing a difficult situation. (more…)
Welcome back to another episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit Podcast. Today I am so thrilled to share a fantastic interview I did with Sommer Grandchamp. Sommer has OCD and anxiety and she, just like so many people, went through some not so great therapy until she found the gold standard treatment for OCD, Exposure and Response Prevention. However, along the way she found that she needed some additional skills to help with her mental health. With her therapist, she learned a type of therapy called Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). Sommer is here today to talk with us about DBT and mindfulness and how these complements to ERP have been so useful in her recovery journey. (more…)
Welcome back to another episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit Podcast. I am so excited because today we are so lucky to have with us again Dr. Jonathan Grayson. Dr. Grayson is a psychologist who has been specializing in the treatment of OCD for more than 40 years. He is also the author of Freedom from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and founder of The Grayson LA Treatment Center for Anxiety and OCD. We did an episode a couple of weeks ago that I hope you all were able to hear and at the end of that conversation we both really felt that we needed more time to talk about acceptance. (more…)
Welcome back to another episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit. Today on the podcast, I am so thrilled to have such an amazing and talented guest, Georgia Lock, on with us. Georgia is an actor, presenter, OCD advocate, and poet. She lives in London and has so much wisdom and beauty to share with us. Georgia is here to share how she has used poetry to turn the pain of her experience with OCD into beauty. (more…)
Welcome back to another episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit Podcast. Today I wanted to talk to you about something that I have been struggling with recently. So you all know that I made the decision to travel back to Australia to visit my family. This decision caused a good deal of anxiety initially, but I also soon recognized that feelings of hyper-responsibility, such as am I being irresponsible by going home, were popping up as well. (more…)
Welcome back to another episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit Podcast. As I am working on this podcast, I am about to embark on an international trip where I will be gone for a long time, away from my family, and part of the time isolated, in a quarantine hotel for several weeks. My emotions, I’m not going to lie, are all over the place. I swing from being grateful to angry to sad to happy to fearful. So I thought this was actually a perfect time for the subject of this episode which is your feelings are meant for feeling. (more…)
Welcome back to another episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit Podcast. On today’s episode I am so excited to have Sean Shinnock with us. Sean is an amazing artist and mental health advocate and he is just one of the sweetest souls that I know. I am so thrilled to have Sean with me today to talk about the monsters that live inside us. (more…)
Welcome back to another episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit Podcast. Today we are going to be talking about a subject that I hope will resonate with a lot of you. We are going to be discussing the stages of grief because I really want to normalize the experience of grief and give you all permission to grieve what we are collectively going through right now. (more…)
Welcome back to another episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit Podcast. Today on the podcast we have a wonderful interview with OCD and mental health advocate Mimi Cole. Mimi is currently working on her graduate degree in counseling and she is here to talk with us today about her lived experience with OCD, scrupulosity, and an eating disorder. Mimi so beautifully states that she wants to share her story in order to increase awareness, education and resources while decreasing the shame and misconceptions surrounding OCD.
Mimi shares her OCD story, specifically her struggles with scrupulosity. She describes how her religion and her religious upbringing became intertwined with perfectionism and OCD. She shares a bit about her exposures for scrupulosity and what motivated her to begin ERP.
Mimi also describes her experience with orthorexia and her obsessions surrounding clean eating and how she feels this became a link between OCD and an eating disorder. We discuss that intersection between body image, clean eating obsessions, restrictive food intake and how these are all connected to OCD. Mimi is currently exploring a research project on eating disorders as a coping mechanism for OCD.
Towards the end of the interview, Mimi shares how she manages her OCD in recovery. She talks about self-compassion and accepting our common humanity as a few tools she uses to help.
This interview is full of such great information particularly about scrupulosity, a theme of OCD that is not often discussed. I found it so uplifting and informative and I think you will as well.
ERP School, BFRB School and Mindfulness School for OCD are open for purchase. Click here for more information.
Additional exciting news! ERP School is now CEU approved which means that it is an accredited course for therapists and mental health professionals to take towards their continuing education credit hours. Please click here for more information.
Welcome back to another episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit Podcast. Today’s episode comes out of a conversation I had with a client and I thought you all might need to hear this as well. Today we are going to be talking about guilt and this idea that feeling guilty doesn’t mean you have done something wrong.
I know that idea might feel strange. When we are feeling guilty, we usually assume that means we have done something wrong. Try thinking of guilt as an intersection. When the feeling arises you can chose to take the road that you have done something wrong or you can go in a different direction and try asking yourself “Is this real? Is there actually evidence that I have done something wrong? Is there a chance that my brain has made a mistake and set off the guilt alarm without there being a problem?” If you see that there is no evidence that you did something wrong, you can try practicing compassion and mindfulness and just allow those feelings of guilt to be there. If you recognize that yes you made a mistake then you can work to address the situation.
A lot of us simply have a little glitch in the guilt system and our guilt gets fired off a bit too easily, too often, and at times where guilt isn’t really that appropriate. Guilt is just an emotion and when it comes up it provides an opportunity for growth. Guilt can be painful and it can make us feel bad about ourselves, but remember that you have a choice when guilt shows up. You can choose that road of compassion and simply allow the emotion of guilt to be there.
ERP School, BFRB School and Mindfulness School for OCD are open for purchase. Click here for more information.
Additional exciting news! ERP School is now CEU approved which means that it is an accredited course for therapists and mental health professionals to take towards their continuing education credit hours. Please click here for more information.
