Clinical Hypnotherapy for OCD

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is characterized by recurrent thoughts, images, or impulses that trigger anxiety and oblige the person to implement materials or mental repetitive actions.

What are Obsessions?

Obsessions are thoughts, images or impulses intrusive and repetitive, perceived as uncontrollable. The obsessions of the OCD trigger unpleasant and really intense emotions, such as fear, disgust, guilt, with the consequent need to make every effort to reassure themselves and manage their own discomfort.

What are Compulsions?

Typical compulsions of OCD, ceremonial or ritual, repetitive behaviors are also called (controlling, washing, cleaning, organising) or mental actions (praying, repeating formulas, counting) aimed at curbing the emotional distress caused by the thoughts and impulses that characterize the obsessions detailed above.

If OCD is not properly cured, first of all with a specific behavioural therapy, it tends to become chronic and worsen over time.

Symptoms of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

• OCD from contamination. The symptoms are obsessions and compulsions related to improbable (or unrealistic) contagion or contamination (i.e. dirt, blood and syringes, raw meat, sick people).
• OCD from checking. The symptoms are prolonged and repeated checks to repair or prevent severe misfortunes or accidents (i.e. checking if the doors and windows are closed, lights switched off, nothing is lost before living a place).
• Obsessive thoughts. The symptoms are thoughts or, more often, pictures of scenes in which the person carries out unwanted and unacceptable behaviour, inappropriate, harmful or meaningless (i.e. having homosexual relations, pedophile, betraying the partner)
• Order and symmetry. Sufferers cannot tolerate objects positioned even slightly asymmetrical, this causing an unpleasant feeling of lack of harmony.
• Accumulation. It is a rather rare type of obsession that characterizes those who tend to stor insignificant and useless items (magazines and old newspapers, empty cigarette packs, empty bottles, used paper towels, food packaging), because of the enormous difficulties they have to throw them away.

Hypnotherapy treatment for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) have a tendency to become chronic, along with a general resistance to the usual drug therapy and psychotherapy. The use of hypnosis can represent, in some cases, a tool that is decisive, especially when associated with the therapies with drugs acting on the serotonergic system.

The hypnotic state allows a therapist to implement a series of effective behavioral techniques, merely at an imaginative level, without concrete actions. Mental execution of these techniques often allows an individual to achieve results comparable to those performed in the traditional chemical cures.