Schematic Model of OCD's Cognitive and Physiological Processes
*Click on the green areas of the diagram to learn more about each process.
Instinctive Response
- Relief Seeking
- Exerting an effort, cognitively or behaviorally, to neutralize the threat
- Reassurance seeking
- Reacting with intolerance toward being anxious
- GET AN ANSWER!
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Sub Conscious Mental Processes
- The brain's natural tendency to process information on a sub conscious level and send this information to conscious awareness when a significant association is made
- Internally or externally triggered automatic thoughts
- Unanswered and/or ambiguous information tends to be identified and prioritized
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Anxiety Center of Brain
- Affective experience of tremendous jeopardy and imminent threat
- Physiological processes are preparing for potentially life threatening situation
- Fight or flight response activated
- Emotional mayhem
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Extinction Response
- Choosing to accept the possibility that the risk is valid, yet not seeking escape
- Making an allowance for one's own brain to create these upsetting ideas
- Creating mental space and tolerance toward the persistent nature of the unwanted thoughts and experience
- "Letting it be there"
- Focus on management strategies
- Not relief seeking!
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Conscious Awareness
- Becoming unavoidably aware of a threat which experientially and viscerally demand immediate attention and resolution
- Being aware that the threat has a thought component
- The mind is highly motivated to find resolution
"Spike"
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- Pay more attention to this spike and related themes
- Biochemically reinforces hyper-sensitivity to this theme
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- Lessening the brain's sensitivity to these and related thoughts
- Reduction of bio-chemical sensitivity to this theme
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Automatic and spontaneous cognitive associations are linked with physiological experience of distress.
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- Choosing to go against one's own natural instinct
- Turn your back on greatest temptation
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Option of greatest temptation. Follow most basic reflex or instinct
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