Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) can take all the fun out of life. You feel like you’re stuck in an endless loop, doing rituals to try keep distressing thoughts out of your head. But they keep coming back, and fighting with OCD seems to make it stronger. It’s exhausting, and peace and happiness seem out of your reach.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
I’m Shala Nicely, LPC, and I’m a cognitive behavioral therapist specializing in helping people reclaim their lives from OCD using exposure and response prevention (ERP) therapy, the evidence-based therapy for OCD.
- I provide ERP therapy to clients with OCD in the state of Georgia in the US
- I write books, including Is Fred in the Refrigerator? Taming OCD and Reclaiming My Life and Everyday Mindfulness for OCD.
- I write three blogs about how to use ERP to tame OCD, and you can browse them by category.
- I produce the free Shoulders Back! Tips & Resources for Taming OCD email newsletter.
BLOGS ABOUT TAMING OCD
OCD can influence your life in subtle (and not so subtle) ways that can affect how you view the world, how you approach treatment, how you manage your recovery, and how you function in relationships with others and the world around you. Often when I’m reading books or watching movies or videos, even ones that have nothing to do with OCD, I have moments of epiphany where I say, “Aha! That applies to people who have OCD!” In my Aha! Moments blog posts, I use my own experience with OCD to explain these epiphanies and how I apply them to my own recovery. In recent years, I’ve also expanded the blog to include descriptions of tools and techniques I’ve found helpful in my journey to tame OCD.
I also post on the Beyond the Doubt Psychology Today blog, where I share an inside perspective on life with OCD and the lessons of uncertainty.
If you’re pressed for time and would like some action-focused tips & tricks to help you tame OCD and reclaim your life, then check out my FredTalks blog, where I share posts you can read in a few minutes that are based on stories and concepts from my memoir, Is Fred in the Refrigerator? Taming OCD and Reclaiming My Life.
You can browse my blog posts below, or by category, go to a list of all of them. As you probably already know :), my blogs are not a replacement for therapy, and I encourage all readers who have OCD to find a competent ERP therapist. See the IOCDF treatment provider database for a provider near you.
Why talk therapy can make OCD worse
Because our executive reasoning capabilities go offline when we're in the throes of OCD, talking about the content of obsessions tends to make OCD worse.
Keeping your OCD recovery strong: the ERP lifestyle
What I've learned in the almost 15 years of my OCD recovery is the more I live a lifestyle of ERP and the less I interact with OCD either physically or mentally, the fewer intrusive thoughts I have, and the more my life stays my own.
Your guide to ERP therapy for OCD
Understanding and addressing the shades of grey in both how OCD manifests and how we approach and implement ERP therapy can truly help us supercharge our efforts and our recoveries. I've selected the posts for this guide from the more than 100 I've written in the past decade because they highlight the most important of these nuances, these spaces between the black and the white that can give you the biggest OCD recovery rewards.
Motivating yourself to do ERP therapy for OCD
Here are some creative strategies you can use to motivate yourself to do ERP for OCD.
