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Reclaiming Your Personal Boundaries When OCD, Guilt, and Intrusive Thoughts Won’t Let Go
If you’re a therapist, educator, healthcare professional, or another helping professional, you probably understand the importance of boundaries. You may even spend your workday encouraging other people to set them. But knowing that boundaries are healthy doesn’t necessarily make them easy to practice yourself—especially when OCD, intrusive thoughts, guilt, or anxiety get involved. You may…
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Understanding “Pure O” OCD and Intrusive Thoughts
Many of the educators and healthcare professionals I work with are thoughtful, conscientious people. They care deeply about doing a good job, helping others, and living in alignment with their values. Those qualities are often strengths. But OCD has a way of taking those same strengths and turning them against you. For many adults, OCD…
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Why Trying to “Ignore” or “Combat” Your Intrusive Thoughts is Making Them Worse
If you are a high-performing professional, your career is built on your ability to solve problems. When a challenge lands on your desk, you analyze it, tackle it head-on, or eliminate the distraction. You execute. So, it makes perfect sense that when a disturbing, bizarre, or highly anxious intrusive thought pops into your mind, you…
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Could It Be Moral OCD? Recognizing Hyper-Responsibility in High-Achieving Professionals
If you are a driven professional, a high-level manager, an entrepreneur, or a specialist in your field, you are likely no stranger to responsibility. You take pride in your integrity. You double-check your work, care deeply about the ethical implications of your decisions, and strive to “do the right thing” for your team, your clients,…
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How to Deal With Intrusive OCD Thoughts Without Trying to Get Rid of Them
Intrusive thoughts can feel scary, confusing, and exhausting. They may show up as unwanted thoughts, images, urges, doubts, or “what if” questions that seem to come out of nowhere. For some people, they focus on harm, relationships, sexuality, religion, morality, health, contamination, or whether they are secretly a bad person. The content of the thought…
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5 OCD Themes/Subtypes: Moral (Scrupulosity), Contamination, and Others That Might Surprise You
OCD doesn’t always look the way people expect. A lot of the time, it doesn’t even look like OCD at all. It looks like overthinking. Like being careful. Like trying to be a good person, a good partner, a responsible human. But underneath it, there’s usually the same feeling: “I can’t/shouldn’t stop thinking about it.”…
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“But What If I’m Actually a Bad Person?” Understanding Moral OCD (and a Different Way Through)
It usually doesn’t start out feeling like OCD. It sounds more like:“What if I crossed a line?” “What if I hurt someone and didn’t realize it?” “What if I’m not who I think I am?” And then it sticks. You replay the conversation. You analyze your tone. You scan your memory for anything you might’ve…
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Exercise for Dealing with Overthinking and Intrusive Thoughts: Trainspotting
This is one of my favorite exercises. I use it to teach my clients a different way to deal with their thoughts. They are often confused when I say that you need to learn to “allow” the thoughts, without engaging them, but also without avoiding them. This exercise is from the workbook: “Trauma Treatment Toolbox…
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What Is Moral OCD? (And Why It Feels So Real)
If you’ve ever had a thought that made you question your character, something that felt disturbing, confusing, or completely unlike you, you’re not alone. Most people have questions about what it means to be a good person, or what is the most moral or ethical thing to do in a situation. For some people, these…
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How to Handle Intrusive Thoughts: Practical Strategies that Actually Help
Dealing with intrusive thoughts or anxiety spirals can be debilitating. Even when you don’t want them and try to make them go away, they usually come right back. They are unwanted, unhelpful, and can range from annoying to disturbing. I have a post on the nature of intrusive thoughts here, but the main thing to…
