Need Help With Anxiety And Ocd. Recommended Reading?

[brown_kat]

Hi Everyone, I am new here and looking some advice for my anxiety and OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder).

My anxiety has been very bad for the last week. I put it down to stress at work. I am also feeling very stressed out due to thinking I am not good enough.I have stopped watching the television as it makes me feel worse about myself. This week the media has been making me feel terrible and making my anxiety 10 times worse than it has been. I have suffered with anxiety and OCD for a number of years and lately it seems to be getting more and more harder to control. Sometimes it can take me up to an hour to be able to leave my house. I have to make sure my rituals are done before I can even think about walking out the front door. My anxiety is now getting so bad that even the thought of going to work is starting to make me feel ill. I am so lost and don't know what to do.

Someone recommended I read up on a guy called Carl Sheppard. I was hoping someone could offer me some feedback on his workshops for anxiety or his book for anxiety and OCD sufferers. I really need some help as I don't want to be on medication and my anxiety and OCD is taking over my life. please if anyone has any feedback on Carl Sheppard and anxiety workshops, please come back to me ASAP. Thank you everyone.

 

[Hashi]

Hi brown_kat and welcome to the forum.

I'm sorry your anxiety and OCD are so bad. (By the way, the first time we write it in a post we're asked to put it in full as "obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD)" since often other members won't know what abbreviations stand for.)

I understand OCD taking over, and dreading it escalating any more. I'd got to the point of it taking two hours to leave the house, and two hours again before bed. However, I've been able to do things to make it much better and it's still improving, so please have hope.

I'm afraid I don't know about Carl Sheppard's method. I just looked at his website and I have to say I really didn't like the high marketing/high secrecy approach, with a lot of talk about how great the method is but nothing revealed until you've paid. This is always suspicious and is usually when people don't have a genuinely new approach, but are cobbling together existing approaches in a slightly different way. It also makes me feel that he's trying to tap into the vulnerabilities of people like me who are desperate to find a solution, rather than genuinely caring and wanting to help.

What I'd recommend is looking at this free video of Dr Jeffrey Schwartz explaining the four steps he's developed for helping people to overcome OCD. Link Removed His approach has really helped me. Oddly, reading his book Brain Lock didn't help me as much as the video - I think it's because of hearing him talk and explain things more directly in the clip - but you might find the book helpful, I don't know. At least, you can find out about it without having to pay anything, since he genuinely wants to share something that he has found works (from working as a psychiatrist in this area for years). There's also a text summary to accompany the video here: Link Removed.

The refocussing step (Step 3) is hard, I warn you, and so does he! But if you do it and stay with it, it really does start rewiring your brain so the OCD thinking gets replaced by calmer, non-anxious thoughts. He suggests that you need to do refocussing for at least 15 minutes and my first time I had to do it for nearly an hour before the anxiety subsided. I was so proud and relieved when it did though! And after that the time got shorter.

Are you seeing a therapist who can help you as you work on this?

Are you in the UK? I've found Anxiety UK very helpful ([DLMURL]http://www.anxietyuk.org.uk[/DLMURL]), including their helpline.

Take heart, you can find a way through this. Sending you good wishes.

 

[Hashi]

Oh, sorry - you did write OCD out in full. :oops: Please ignore what I said about that. Tired brain.

 

[Lady of Longbourn]

Actually, I edited it after you mentioned it Hashi. :) I completely forgot to check for abbreviations in brown_kat's post when I was editing it. Thanks for the reminder. :)

 

[new gamma rays]

Here are two good books on Anxiety and OCD. I would start with the anxiety book as its a little bit easier read, and not as challenging. The ocd author takes a pretty challenging approach to ocd, so maybe I would not start there just now.

Anxiety, Phobias and Panic by Reneau Peurifoy is a very good book. Easy to read and simple concepts, but probably ideas that don't often occur to people with anxiety. I would really recommend it as a place to start (no links because of the RULES).

The book I was going to suggest for OCD is Freedom from Uncertainty by Johnathon Grayson. It really drives home the concept of what people with OCD need to live with, but I'm probably not recommending it because its something I avoid, especially with the amount of anxiety I have now.

You can also check out the OCD foundation for more help (no link likewise, google oc foundation) as they might have more book recommendations. But take it easy and see if you can find the anxiety book, and if not its probably worth ordering.