Coping with and Preventing Relapse:
Create Your Personal OCD Recovery Maintenance Plan
You can now download the following materials from our workshop at IOCDF. Thanks to everyone who attended!
Coping with and Preventing Relapse Slides
Jon and Shala’s Top 10 Tips for Coping with OCD
Trigger Sheet for Identifying and Planning for Red Flags
From Dr. Jonathan Grayson‘s years of experience helping people with OCD and my years of experience in recovery from the disorder, we both know that a big part of getting better is learning to embrace uncertainty. And even though we both know how unbelievably frightening and debilitating OCD can be, we thought that having a workshop about recovery at the 2015 IOCDF conference that was too serious was playing into OCD’s hands. So instead, we’ve been working on how to make our workshop on OCD recovery and maintenance entertaining and well … fun!
To this end, a few days ago we were talking about the numerous stories we plan to share in the workshop. I said, “I don’t know if it would be good to share this particular OCD story about my cat Murphie — it’s pretty graphic, but it would be a really good example of the whole ‘violent thought’ OCD thing.” (It is just dawning on me how many cat-related OCD stories I actually have: watch “Is Fred in the Refrigerator?” to see what I mean!)
Jon listened to my story and said, “Oh, no, that’s great. In fact, I know just what we can talk about after that. It’s just as gruesome and really illustrates the point we want to make.” He then proceeded to send me a slide that was … how should I put this? … an extremely creative and graphic take on these types of thoughts, which I have now added to our presentation.
Intrigued? I hope so!
Dealing effectively with OCD thoughts, including the graphic, violent, and horrific ones, is part of being in recovery from OCD. As I mentioned previously, Jon and I both get this, as Jon’s been treating people with OCD for decades, and I’ve been living with these lovely thoughts for just as long. Although now I manage them, as well as all the other OCD thoughts and compulsions, a lot more effectively using The Top 10 Tips we’ll be sharing during our program.
During our two-hour workshop, we’ll be discussing:
We hope you can join us on Friday, July 31 from 1:45pm – 3:45pm in “Venue 3” in the conference hotel. You’ll get to hear stories about vampires, and driving across Oklahoma, and the San Francisco Bay Ferry, and the bridge to nowhere. And hopefully take home some suggestions that will help you have a more resilient recovery from OCD.
Jon and I (and Murphie!) will see you there!