The term Pure O or purely obsessional was coined by Dr Steven Phillipson in 1988 to help those people who didn’t have obvious physical compulsions get diagnosed as having OCD. The term has proven very useful in raising awareness around…

We can navigate through life by our values. Sailors used to use the North Star 🌟 to navigate. The North Star was used to find true north. So no matter how lost they felt they could find the North Star…

Compulsions can be hard to stop. So in therapy one approach is to initially set a more achievable goal which can look like delaying the compulsion. If a particular compulsion feels far too challenging and scary to stop right now,…

Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl (1946) founder of logotherapy, which was used for OCD many decades ago long before exposure and response prevention therapy (ERP), shared this powerful view of our ability to make choices: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In…

It’s really hard and uncomfortable to make space for our internal experiences: urges, sensations, feelings/emotions, thoughts. Because it’s tough to feel them we avoid and push them away. This is called experiential avoidance. Experiential avoidance doesn’t work in the long…