Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and Hypnosis

A critical part of treating OCD is teaching the person how to handle their anxiety.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) makes people have unwanted or strange thoughts or feelings (called "obsessions") or feel like they have to do the same thing over and over again (compulsions).

Fear of germs is a shared obsession while having to keep things in a particular order is a common compulsion. If a person with OCD can't do a compulsion, they tend to feel anxious.

Like anxiety, obsessive-compulsive behaviour should only be considered a disorder if it makes life hard. A small amount of obsessive-compulsive behaviour can be good.

For example, if someone worries that they might not have turned off the stove and checks it twice, this would help keep them safe. On the other hand, a person might have a disorder if they can't go about their daily tasks without checking the stove several times. In the same way, accountants who check their numbers more than once are better at their jobs. But if they have to check a lot, it could be a sign of OCD.

Treatments for OCD

Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), certain anti-depressants, and a combination of both are often used to treat OCD (Hirschtritt, 2017).

Exposure response prevention therapy is a specific type of CBT. In this therapy, people with OCD are encouraged to face their OCD triggers and learn to deal with their anxiety when they don't do their rituals or act on their obsessive thoughts. After consistent therapy, the patient's anxiety goes down to a level they can handle, making it easier for them to avoid OCD behaviours and sometimes goes away completely.

OCD and hypnosis

There haven't been many studies on how well hypnosis works for OCD. But hypnosis seemed to help some of the people I saw in my practice.

Since the main focus of psychological therapy for OCD is learning to deal with anxiety caused by avoiding a thought or behaviour related to OCD, the hypnosis techniques used to treat OCD are similar to those used to treat anxiety disorders.

Patients can be taught to calm down, for example, by imagining that they are in their favourite happy place. They are told to use all five senses to guess what they might feel to help them relax more. Then, patients are taught how to start their relaxation response when they feel anxious because of their OCD.

Some people can picture putting their worries in a helium balloon and letting them go. The balloon can feel less anxious the farther away it goes. One more hypnotic metaphor that works well for obsessive thoughts is to watch them float by like clouds in the sky instead of engaging with them.

Patients can be taught to use their diaphragms to take deep breaths, which makes their abdomens grow with each breath. When you breathe for a few breaths, your body releases chemicals that make you feel calm. Patients can also get their minds off their anxiety by concentrating on breathing.

Hypnotic metaphors that help teach this kind of breathing pattern include imagining a sailboat at the lower tip of the breastbone that rises with each inhalation or imagining the belly button is tied to a yoyo string that grows every time a facilitator raises their hand in time with each inhalation.

As part of exposure response prevention therapy, patients can imagine being exposed to their OCD triggers in a hypnotic state. This helps them prepare for the real thing.

Using hypnosis to teach people how to talk to their subconscious can be very helpful for people with negative thoughts that come up repeatedly and cause them to seek comfort from family or friends. Then, patients can be told to ask themselves for comfort instead of relying on others. For instance, a girl who always asks his mother if he's going to get sick can learn to relax by hearing reassurance from his subconscious.

Using hypnosis to go back in time, people can remember the first time they did something obsessive or compulsive. Then, patients can be taught to imagine dealing with the cause of their behaviour when it starts. This can help stop the behaviour from happening again.

For example, a person who always washed her hands said that she started doing it because she felt terrible about having dirty hands at the dinner table and was made fun of for it. Her compulsion went away when she used hypnosis to imagine that she had stayed calm at the time and then washed her hands once (even though that had not occurred in real life).

Lastly, hypnosis can help people think about how they will feel and act when their OCD improves. This can be a helpful and encouraging goal for them to keep working toward in therapy.

Hypnosis can be used to treat OCD by teaching people how to calm the anxiety that comes up when they learn how to stop thinking and acting in ways that make them feel bad.

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