It is not really what you might think! It is not NLP (neuro-linguistic programming). NLP is used by professionals to change your thinking patterns in such a way that you cannot fear what you may have feared before. However this process usually not permanent and to ensure longevity, the person needs to do maintenance work.

I'm also not talking about flooding. Flooding is when you subject yourself to the thing that you fear the most or the stimulus that you associate fear with.

The problem with NLP is that you have to find someone who knows how to do it and the problem with flooding is that it's too painful a process. The problem with CBT or cognitive behavioral therapy is that you really can't talk someone out of having OCD. So what is it that we are discussing then?

I'm talking about a process where you don't need a therapist of any kind, you don't need any special skills. I'm talking about a process which you can learn and use every time you feel fear towards anything. It's a method that once you learn, you will have for life and you can apply it not only to OCD but any other fear or anxiety.

Again, so what is it? It's simply retraining your mind to think like someone that doesn't have OCD. You could call it OCD-gone-in-seven-days. but naming this process would give weight to OCD and we want to get to a point where we don't think about it at all. So what we are learning is the skill of how to retrain the way that we think so that we can lead happier lives!

It's something that you can do consciously without having to trick your mind. You talk yourself consciously through the things that you fear, but there is a special way to do this. Here are some of the things that you can do right now to get started.

When you feel like you need to perform a ritual, tell yourself this consciously. for example, if you feel like you have to keep touching a door knob because you fear that if you don't your mother's going to get sick, tell yourself, "I feel like my mother will get sick if I don't touch this door knob a certain amount of times." What you are doing is bringing out the subconscious thought into a conscious thought, where you can process it logically.

Now you may laugh at that statement and be like man, something must be wrong with me if I fear that and think like that! It's not true, you just realized that you made a faulty association, now what about the problem of you know that it doesn't make sense but you feel like you have to do it anyway?

You can't will yourself not to care, you can say to yourself, I know that this is bothering me, but I also know that if I don't touch the doorknob nothing will happen to my mother, anything in my mind that tells me it would is not logical and therefore is wrong, so I choose not to do this ritual.

Here's where you will feel anxiety, then you say to yourself, I will let this anxiety wash over me knowing that it cannot hurt me, it's just a set of feelings and if I perform the ritual, I will get worse and if I don't perform the ritual, I will be getting better and become OCD free.

When I am not performing rituals, I am OCD free! Here's why it's important to start like this, because with the other types of treatments, you need other people's skills, or you need to trick your mind, or you need to go through painful exercises not knowing why, it's hard for people with OCD to trust people and especially harder to trust someone to cure you when you don't fully understand how the process works yourself.

By starting this way, you will command control of your own mind and learn this skill that can be applied to anything and you will learn how to be independent and it will save you a fortune. Of course this is not everything you have to do, but it's a good start that you can do right now that will bring results that will last a lifetime!