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    The Blackmailer in Your Head: What To Do About Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
    The Blackmailer in Your Head: What To Do About Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
    The Blackmailer in Your Head: What To Do About Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
    Ebook119 pages1 hour

    The Blackmailer in Your Head: What To Do About Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

    By Sue Breton

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    About this ebook

    Obsessive Compulsive Disorder often holds its victims to ransom for years.
    It is threatening, just like a blackmailer.
    It makes its victims do or think things for fear that something worse will happen if they don’t.
    •Do you lead a restricted life because you have OCD?
    •Have you struggled for years to get over it but have failed?
    •Does someone you’re close to struggle with it?
    •Do you find it hard to understand why they don’t just stop doing it?

    But, unlike a normal blackmailer, this one is in the victim's own head. It is purely their own thoughts. Therefore they are the only ones who can put an end to it.

    OCD behaviours appear totally illogical to others who can’t understand why the sufferer just doesn’t not do it. Sufferers themselves often acknowledge that what they do is pointless, yet they just can’t stop.

    The development of OCD habits is quite logical once you understand the ways in which the brain works. This book explains these mechanisms. This understanding then makes it clear why the steps described for reducing or even overcoming OCD are necessary.

    The approach described here is based on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy combined with some Mindfulness. This method has been used by the author to treat patients within the NHS mental health service to good effect.

    Improvement is straightforward if the steps are followed patiently one by one. There is no quick fix. Any habit that has been learned takes a while to unlearn again. The over-riding message though is that it is possible and very do-able.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSue Breton
    Release dateJul 3, 2014
    ISBN9781311462114
    The Blackmailer in Your Head: What To Do About Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
    Author

    Sue Breton

    I grew up in the 50's and 60's in a Surrey village but left home to attend University in Swansea. In those days the Welsh universities didn't make you commit to your Honours subject until the end of the first year. I didn't know what I wanted to do. At one time I had wanted to join the Diplomatic Service but when I discovered that women were expected to leave if they married I decided it wasn't for me. Polite society would shun you if you lived with a man to whom you weren't married!My 'A' Levels were in French, German and Latin. I'd wanted to do Maths but in those days you couldn't mix arts and science subjects. So in my first year I studied French, Politics and took Psychology simply because I was curious about it. And I never looked back. After my degree I went on to do in-service training in Clinical Psychology. I currently work for the NHS.I raised five children, learnt to sail yachts in races and on long trips across the world, kept and still have horses, ring church bells, and could once do the Highland Fling and the Scottish sword dance. I have just about finished a three-year project renovating an old cottage to be my new home. This entailed learning to do lime hemp plastering among other things as my restricted budget meant I could only employ others for those things which I really couldn’t do myself. It was hard work and it felt never-ending at times. But now I sit and bask in the self-satisfied glow that comes from achievement and the knowledge that I personally know every inch of this building I call home.At one time I attempted to write romantic fiction. I did get one title published by Rainbow Romances but I soon realised that I was unable to make my characters suffer sufficiently so reluctantly I gave up. I do still have a steamy novel about a riding school lurking somewhere on my hard drive and maybe one day I might feel a desire to revisit it and see if I can adapt it at all . . . I have contemplated writing a psychological thriller, but never seem to find a plot that satisfies me. So for now I stick to what I can do —writing psychology self help texts when I feel inspired.Fortunately from childhood I had my own anxiety and obsessive tendencies. These later enabled me to use my own experiences to work out what did and didn't work therapeutically. When Jon Kabat Zinn introduced the concept of Mindfulness I took it up and then later when Acceptance and Commitment Therapy developed I felt I had come home.I am about to retire from my NHS post where I have most recently been helping to launch the primary care mental health service in the area I work by developing psycho-educational courses among other things. I will be sad to leave as it will be the ending of another chapter in my life. But I will continue to offer my expertise to a wider audience through my website —what-to-do-about-anxietyOn the other hand the change is exciting because I will then have time to devote to my other passions. First there are the other self-help titles which are desperate to escape from my head, along with my digital magazine, “U Can Just B”. But I also have itchy fingers just waiting to make more of the necklaces, knitted baby garments, dolls, photography and other more artistic ventures which I have only had time to dabble in up to now.

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      Book preview

      The Blackmailer in Your Head - Sue Breton

      THE BLACKMAILER

      In Your Head

      What To Do About Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

      Sue Breton

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright © 2014 Sue Breton

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Publisher’s Note: All examples contained in this book are the experiences of real people but the names, sometimes the gender, and other details have been changed in order to protect anonymity.

      This book is available in print at most online retailers

      Dedication

      This book is dedicated to all those who have inadvertently been blackmailed by the OCD habit but who have then had the will and determination to show it the door.

      Table of Contents

      Preface

      1 – What Will This Book Do for Me?

      Why Are You Reading This?

      Why Are There So Many TV Programmes About Severe OCD?

      How Common Is OCD?

      What Makes Me an Expert on OCD?

      Why Hasn't Therapy or Medication Worked?

      OCD As a Psychiatric Disorder

      Three Facts About OCD

      2 – What Exactly Is OCD?

      Compulsive Behaviours

      Obsessive Thoughts

      3 – Do You Understand Your Brain?

      How Does the Survival Instinct Work?

      How Does the Survival Instinct Decide What to Warn Us About?

      How Our Brains Deal with Information

      4 – Why Don’t Dogs Get OCD?

      5 – Why Do We Do What Our Thoughts Tell Us?

      Five Important Facts About Thinking Which We Ignore

      6 – Who Gets OCD?

      7 – How Brains Learn Things

      Skilled Behaviour

      8– How Does OCD Develop?

      The Value of Routines

      Is There an OCD Personality Type?

      Overview of OCD Development

      9 – Your Brain and Your Body Are in It Together

      Medication for OCD

      Contagious Emotions

      PET Scanners and OCD

      Self–Directed Neuroplasticity

      10 – How To Learn To Control Your Thoughts

      How To Learn To Be Mindful

      11 – Should You Keep Trying To Overcome OCD?

      Recognising OCD Thoughts and Behaviours

      What If You Didn't Have OCD Habits?

      Who Is the Real You?

      Final Points

      12 – Stopping the Struggle

      What Are You Afraid Of?

      Three Simple Steps to Start With

      13 – Where To Now?

      Appendix

      Preface

      After treating many people with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder over the years I have come to the conclusion that for you, the sufferer, it is very much like living with a blackmailer. Once he has you in his clutches, and you start paying him by doing what he demands, he finds all sorts of other ways to hold you to ransom as well. And the more he asks the more you pay in terms of giving in to the ever–increasing demands.

      I don’t think I’ve ever come across anyone who only had a single obsessive thought or compulsive behaviour. It all starts innocently enough. One day you felt a bit anxious about something so you touched something, checked something, repeated something you really knew you’d done, just to be sure . . .

      And that was it. The blackmailer had his first payoff. So, like any blackmailer worth his salt, he tried his luck and asked for more . . . And got it.

      Once he has you in his clutches you keep paying the money or, in this case, carrying out the compulsive behaviour, because you are afraid not to for one reason or another. And like any good blackmailer, the more you pay, the more he demands.

      In the case of a real blackmailer the victim could go to the police and have the blackmailer arrested—but that would probably mean that whatever secret they had would come out in court. Maybe this is why in fiction at least, the blackmailer often ends up as a murder victim.

      Another alternative is for the victim to say to the blackmailer, Go ahead and tell the world my secret then! This instantly removes the hold they have, but the world finds out whatever it was the victim was paying to keep secret.

      Fortunately the comparison with OCD is not complete.

      With OCD there is no terrible secret you are keeping from the world. So what are you being blackmailed with? You are being blackmailed by your fear of the feelings you will have, or that something bad might happen often to loved ones, if you don't do what the blackmailer wants.

      I often ask people whether they truly believe that by not doing a certain thing that they have some sort of magical power to determine what happens to others, that they can actually make something bad happen. It is a very rare individual who believes that to be the case.

      So, if you were to call the OCD blackmailer’s bluff and not pay up, what’s the worst that could happen?

      In the main this would be that you’d feel very anxious, at least to begin with, but anxious about what?

      That feeling of anxiety, however intense and unpleasant, is only there because, without meaning to, you have taught your brain that this situation is to be feared. You are holding the gun to your own head. You are blackmailing yourself!

      Because brains are trained to react the way they do to everyday life, they can be untrained. This book describes first how this OCD training happened to begin with and then how to go about retraining.

      It is possible to get rid of the OCD blackmailer, or at least reduce the payments, but the victim is the only one who truly has the power to do it.

      This book will show you how to go about it but you will still need to do what it says for it to work.

      1 – What Will This Book Do for Me?

      Why Are You Reading This?

      Most probably because you have OCD yourself or someone close to you does.

      If you have OCD you will be well aware that it rules your life so you want to get rid of it. You may have tried and tried only to find that, if anything, it got worse.

      Why Are There So Many TV Programmes About Severe OCD?

      TV programmes have been made showing sufferers who hoard so much stuff in their homes that they can neither get in nor out any longer. Others feature people with

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