Your Anxiety Toolkit

Welcome back to another episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit Podcast. Today I would like to discuss with you a question that comes up quite a lot when I am starting with a new client. So often my clients will say to me "What can I expect during my first session?" I want to share with you what I tell my clients about the things to know when starting therapy. The first thing I say to my clients is that your brain can change. You may have a disorder that was inherited or triggered by a certain event, but the good news is that by changing your behavior, you can actually change your brain. The second thing I say is that no matter your mental health struggle, there is a science proven way to treat that disorder. We have evidence based treatments and you can absolutely can get better. Thirdly, I tell my clients that no matter what struggles they are going through, it is not their fault. This is not something they asked to have happen. We are going to move away from assigning blame and move towards self-compass

Welcome back to another episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit Podcast. Today I am so happy to have Jon Hershfield on with us. Jon is an author and the Director of the Center for OCD and Anxiety at Sheppard Pratt. The second edition of his book, The Mindfulness Workbook for OCD, has just been released and his new book, The Mindfulness Workbook for Teens, is scheduled for release in March. We had a great conversation about both books and Jon shares many of the OCD mindfulness tools that he describes in his books that are used to enhance treatment. In this interview, Jon explains why he wanted to write a book for teens and how he decided to approach the topics of mental health, OCD, and mindfulness in a way that would be relatable to teens and young adults. He discusses in more detail some of the topics in his book including how to understand your diagnosis, how to respond to intrusive thoughts, and how to incorporate meditation and mindfulness into your daily life. Jon also shares some OCD mindfulness tools

Welcome back to another episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit podcast. It's a new year and as we settle into 2021, I am actually going to ask you guys to set a little bit of a goal. Not a resolution, a goal. I am so excited to talk with you all today about this topic because I really hope that this will be the goal you set for yourself this year.  I would like for you to start the year by setting boundaries with fear.  Now why do I think setting boundaries with fear is so important? Think about it this way, if someone came into your home, you wouldn't just allow them to behave any way they wanted. Right? No, you set boundaries in your home about what kind of behavior is going to be allowed and we know that those boundaries must remain consistent. I want you to try setting those same boundaries when fear shows up in your life. I would encourage you to sit down and actually write out what boundaries are you going to set with fear this year? And then the work begins by holding those boundaries consistently.  Yo

Welcome back to another episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit Podcast. As you all know, I traveled back to Australia to visit family last month. The Australian government requires a 14 day quarantine for any visitors coming into the country. When my plane landed, I was escorted by police to a hotel in Sydney. I was then taken to my room and told that under law, I am not allowed to leave or even open a window for 14 days. Now that I am home and reflecting on my time in Australia, I really want to share with you some of the skills that I had to practice all day every day to get me through that quarantine. I hope some of these skills can also help you when you are facing a difficult situation. The first skill was to become an observer to my thoughts. It is quite common to be feeling fine and out of nowhere this overwhelming sense of panic takes over and you start to think "Oh my goodness I can't handle this." When this happens, you really have to recognize that you are not in danger. This thought can be so powe

Welcome back to another episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit Podcast. Today I am so thrilled to share a fantastic interview I did with Sommer Grandchamp. Sommer has OCD and anxiety and she, just like so many people, went through some not so great therapy until she found the gold standard treatment for OCD, Exposure and Response Prevention. However, along the way she found that she needed some additional skills to help with her mental health. With her therapist, she learned a type of therapy called Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). Sommer is here today to talk with us about DBT and mindfulness and how these complements to ERP have been so useful in her recovery journey. I am a huge DBT fan and I actually use it a lot with my patients and clients, even though I tend not to discuss it too often. It really is so helpful to many people especially as an addition to ERP. Sommer not only shares some of her OCD story with us today, but she also shares the tools and different DBT skills that she uses to complime

Welcome back to another episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit Podcast. I am so excited because today we are so lucky to have with us again Dr. Jonathan Grayson. Dr. Grayson is a psychologist who has been specializing in the treatment of OCD for more than 40 years. He is also the author of Freedom from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and founder of The Grayson LA Treatment Center for Anxiety and OCD. We did an episode a couple of weeks ago that I hope you all were able to hear and at the end of that conversation we both really felt that we needed more time to talk about acceptance. I first want to ask you all how often do you get stuck wrestling with the way things are? Feeling that you don't really like the way things are, that you're sad about the way things are, that you're anxious about the way things are. Maybe you feel anxious or uncertain, or you are beating yourself up because you do not feel that you are good enough or smart enough or well enough? If that sounds like you then you are going to really lo

Welcome back to another episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit. Today on the podcast, I am so thrilled to have such an amazing and talented guest, Georgia Lock, on with us. Georgia is an actor, presenter, OCD advocate, and poet. She lives in London and has so much wisdom and beauty to share with us. Georgia is here to share how she has used poetry to turn the pain of her experience with OCD into beauty. Georgia shares her OCD story and recovery journey with us. We also have a great conversation about shame, guilt, and grief. Georgia shares several of her poems with us and you will see why she is an award winning poet. Her poetry explains so well what it is like to live with mental illness, anxiety, and OCD. I just love when people can use words to perfectly describe what it is like to experience something, whether that be really joyful or really, really painful. Her poetry takes the pain that she has experienced and wraps it in such beauty. I truly hope you enjoy this conversation. It is a lovely story abou

Welcome back to another episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit Podcast. Today I wanted to talk to you about something that I have been struggling with recently. So you all know that I made the decision to travel back to Australia to visit my family. This decision caused a good deal of anxiety initially, but I also soon recognized that feelings of hyper-responsibility, such as am I being irresponsible by going home, were popping up as well. I had to break this down. Why do we have this sense of hyper-responsibility to always do things "right"? That level of responsibility can cause us a tremendous degree of anxiety.  We tend to put expectations that are unrealistic on ourselves to be perfect, good, the fixer of all things broken. So how can we take a step back from that? We actually exist on a spectrum. When you are anxious, maybe you need to recognize that so much of that anxiety is driven from these feelings of hyper-responsibility, from this fear of being irresponsible. That's key, my friends. Just because

Welcome back to another episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit Podcast. As I am working on this podcast, I am about to embark on an international trip where I will be gone for a long time, away from my family, and part of the time isolated, in a quarantine hotel for several weeks. My emotions, I'm not going to lie, are all over the place. I swing from being grateful to angry to sad to happy to fearful. So I thought this was actually a perfect time for the subject of this episode which is your feelings are meant for feeling. Right now, I am having all of these different feelings, opposing feelings. Some of them are pretty strong and aggressive. Some will cause me significant discomfort and pain and some will be new, and I'll be curious about them.  We tend to get into trouble when we start to believe that we are supposed to control our feelings and be the gatekeeper of them. We allow some feelings and push others out. I want you all to know that you are supposed to feel your feelings, all of them. When you f

Welcome back to another episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit Podcast. On today's episode I am so excited to have Sean Shinnock with us. Sean is an amazing artist and mental health advocate and he is just one of the sweetest souls that I know. I am so thrilled to have Sean with me today to talk about the monsters that live inside us.  Now, for those of you who have heard Sean speak before, you know that he has a project called Draw Your Monster. The idea is for you to draw your monster, personify it, and actually bring that monster to life. You can then begin to have a conversation or a relationship with your monster which actually helps you with your recovery.  In our conversation today, we talk about our own monsters and what they look like, but we also go on to discuss the stigma and shame that lives within us and the pain that we go through when living with a chronic illness as well as a mental illness. We discuss the importance of accountability and strong support systems and we also have a beautiful

Welcome back to another episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit Podcast. Today we are going to be talking about a subject that I hope will resonate with a lot of you. We are going to be discussing the stages of grief because I really want to normalize the experience of grief and give you all permission to grieve what we are collectively going through right now. The stages of grief were first identified by psychiatrist and researcher, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. The first stage is denial. You may deny that the event happened, or deny your feelings, or you isolate away from people so that you don't have to talk about your feelings. The second stage is anger. You are grieving the loss of something and that makes you angry because it feels unfair. You may be angry about coronavirus or the loss of a loved one or maybe even your mental illness. The third stage is bargaining. You may do an analysis of the event and then start to go into a negotiation process in your mind. "If only I hadn't done this, it would have been be

Welcome back to another episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit Podcast. Today on the podcast we have a wonderful interview with OCD and mental health advocate Mimi Cole. Mimi is currently working on her graduate degree in counseling and she is here to talk with us today about her lived experience with OCD, scrupulosity, and an eating disorder. Mimi so beautifully states that she wants to share her story in order to increase awareness, education and resources while decreasing the shame and misconceptions surrounding OCD. Mimi shares her OCD story, specifically her struggles with scrupulosity. She describes how her religion and her religious upbringing became intertwined with perfectionism and OCD. She shares a bit about her exposures for scrupulosity and what motivated her to begin ERP. Mimi also describes her experience with orthorexia and her obsessions surrounding clean eating and how she feels this became a link between OCD and an eating disorder. We discuss that intersection between body image, clean ea

Welcome back to another episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit Podcast. Today's episode comes out of a conversation I had with a client and I thought you all might need to hear this as well. Today we are going to be talking about guilt and this idea that feeling guilty doesn't mean you have done something wrong. I know that idea might feel strange. When we are feeling guilty, we usually assume that means we have done something wrong. Try thinking of guilt as an intersection. When the feeling arises you can chose to take the road that you have done something wrong or you can go in a different direction and try asking yourself "Is this real? Is there actually evidence that I have done something wrong? Is there a chance that my brain has made a mistake and set off the guilt alarm without there being a problem?" If you see that there is no evidence that you did something wrong, you can try practicing compassion and mindfulness and just allow those feelings of guilt to be there. If you recognize that yes you made

Welcome back to another episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit. Today on the podcast, I am so excited to interview Dr. Jonathan Grayson, a psychologist who has been specializing in the treatment of OCD for more than 40 years. He is also the author of Freedom from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and founder of The Grayson LA Treatment Center for Anxiety and OCD. In this interview, Dr. Grayson discusses the power of embracing uncertainty in the treatment of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. In the beginning of our conversation, Dr. Grayson discusses how he explains OCD to his new clients. He shares that the core of OCD is trying to be absolutely certain and that the goal of treatment is to learn to live with that uncertainty in the same way that we live with all of the many uncertainties of life. We then go on to discuss the ways he helps motivate his clients to do ERP and to begin embracing that uncertainty. He has his clients fill out a form that asks certain questions including the one that he finds most critic

I know it continues to be a really tough time for everyone. I am definitely not immune to those struggles. In taking time off, I came to a realization about why I was having such a hard time. It wasn't about COVID or anxiety or stress. I was struggling because I had been having a mental tantrum inside my own head 24/7. My mental tantrum sounded something like this "It's not fair. This should not be happening. I'm supposed to be healing. This isn't the way it should be. It's not fair." I had no idea I was even doing this. I was having an adult sized tantrum in my head that no one else could see. Now it is important to understand that all of these thoughts are valid. It is a tough time and people are suffering, but the way I was saying it was definitely not validating. I approached this by turning back to what has been the foundation of my recovery, something I learned about 15 years ago. It is rooted in the principles of Buddhism and that is 'in life there is suffering. It is not the suffering that caus

Today on Your Anxiety Toolkit, we are joined by Gelong Thubten, a Buddhist monk, meditation teacher and the author of A Monk's Guide to Happiness. He is here to discuss how mindfulness and meditation can help us understand the power of our own minds. This episode is not about religion, rather, it is a beautiful message of wisdom and compassion. In this beginning of this episode, Gelong Thubten spends some time discussing happiness and how this desire to be happy really drives everything we do in life. The search for happiness can get us caught in a loop where we ultimately end up feeling more and more dissatisfied. He points out that the goal is to learn that true happiness is already inside each one of us. He goes even further to say that we can actually learn to be happy. It is a skill that we can practice. He explains that meditation can help us learn to be kinder to ourselves by teaching us how to transform our relationship with our thoughts. We become an observer of our thoughts during meditation

Hello everyone!!! I am so grateful that I was able to take some time off, but I am so happy to be back and I am excited to talk to you today about a really important lesson that I have learned and that is this concept that self-respect is not optional. Let me share a little bit about what this means. So many times, especially during COVID, I have been faced with the question: am I going to be respectful or disrespectful to myself right now? We are all actually faced with this question everyday, multiple times per day. Your responsibility is to show yourself respect every moment of every single day. Why? Because you are a human being and you get to have respect simply for being human. It is not something you earn. It is unconditional. This can be really hard for a lot of us, but self-respect is not optional. You deserve self-respect no matter what simply for being you not because of something you have done. How do you go about showing yourself respect? First, start by setting boundaries. It is respect

Hello everyone! We have some very EXCITING news today here at CBT School. We are so happy to announce that ERP School is being relaunched today, September 14, 2020! And we are so excited to say that it is now CEU approved!!!! This means that it is now an accredited course for therapists and mental health professionals to take towards their continuing education credit hours. This is so special to us because it has long been a mission of CBT School to educate as many clinicians as possible about OCD and Exposure and Response Prevention. ERP School is jam packed with the same tools and information that Kimberley uses with her own clients to help them learn to manage their OCD. And now if you purchase ERP School between September 14-28, you will receive 2 FREE bonus materials that will be emailed directly to you! You will receive a free checklist of the important things you need to know as you practice ERP and a free audio training from Kimberley about things that may be getting in the way of your recovery. Yo

Welcome back to another episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit. I wanted to take some time today to let you know that I am going to be taking a break. I am going to take a couple of months off to heal, to replenish, to restore and to rest. I want to share with you how I came to this decision about taking a break because I am wondering if you may be struggling with the same feelings. Over the past several months, I have found that I have not been slowing down enough to replenish. I haven't been listening to my body which has been saying to me "rest, please take some time." What has been so hard for me and may be hard for some of you as well, were the feelings I had that "I should be able to handle all of this and I'm weak if I can't." I was really judging myself for having those feelings. When I finally stopped and accepted that my body was trying to tell me something, I was able to recognize that now more than ever, my body, as wise as it always is, was telling me to slow down and take more time. So I wa

Welcome back to another episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit. Today on the podcast, we are so lucky to be able to talk with Dr. Dennis Tirch, the founder of The Center for Compassion Focused Therapy and the author of six amazing books including, The ACT Practitioner's Guide to the Science of Compassion and The Compassionate-Mind Guide to Overcoming Anxiety. Dr. Tirch is here to talk with us about learning to embody self-compassion. In the beginning of this interview, Dr. Tirch spends some time discussing the definition of self-compassion and why self-compassion is so important for our mental health, especially for those struggling with anxiety.  Dr. Tirch says that learning to embody self-compassion involves “grounding ourselves in a sense of emotional safeness, meaning and purpose.” By practicing self-compassion and mindfulness, Dr. Tirch says we can “gradually train the mind to rest in an awareness of compassion and care.” He so beautifully tells us that if people can learn to embody this self-compassi