Justin’s Blog: “The Jog”

Your best treatment is closely connected to how closely you stick to the evidence base.  However, you as the client always need to advocate for your best treatment.  Successful clients are assertive for their treatment, ask good questions, and sometimes even disagree with their professional.  This is healthy.  Client involvement and assertiveness is a fundamental […]

Two OCD Specialist colleagues (and friends) just having fun on how to write exposure scripts in OCD. Exposure Therapy, in a phrase, is the systematic and intentional triggering of fear while minimizing- and ideally eliminating- all pathological responses.  Imaginal Exposure accomplishes this with thoughts and ideas. It is done in the context of addressing unhelpful/pathological responses […]

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a mental health psychological treatment, or psychotherapy. The range of problems it treats is broad, from anxiety and depression to substance abuse and relationship problems.  It is considered gold standard treatment. Let’s nerd out and understand a bit more about where it comes from and ideas on how it works!

Imagine intentionally telling yourself- again and again- “Maybe I’ll get sick and die.”  Or, “I’ll have a sudden urge to kill someone.” Or, “Maybe I blasphemed God and will go to hell.”  What if your therapist asked you to repeat these things to yourself?  Does that sound like negative self-talk?  A cause for grave concern?  […]

One of my first questions to a professor in my earliest IOCDF BTTI (Exposure Therapy training) at Massachusetts General Hospital was, “What happens if someone actually gets sick after a contamination exposure?”  I haven’t forgotten the simplicity of the answer that went something like this: “People get sick all the time. Yes, that might create some additional […]