Today on the podcast we’re talking about recognizing and recovering from all or nothing thinking. This is very common in OCD, and so I want you to learn how to think more flexibly.
Hello and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD with Carrie Bock. I’m a Christ follower, wife and mother, licensed professional counselor who helps Christians struggling with OCD get to a deeper level of healing. When I couldn’t find resources for my clients with OCD, God called me to bring this podcast to you.
With practical tools for developing greater peace, we’re here to bust through the shame and stigma surrounding struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories of healing and helping you replace uncertainty with faith. I’m here to help you let go of the past and future to walk in the present abundant life God has for you.
So let’s dive right into today’s episode. If you’re gonna learn to think more flexibly, first of all, you have to recognize when you’re in all or nothing thinking. Oftentimes, people who struggle with OCD will think in terms of extremes. There’s only one way I can think about this and everything else is wrong, or it just feels like this is true, even though I know it’s not.
It’s something that’s really, really stuck in your mind. So if we can practice different ways of being with your thoughts and different ways of approaching various life circumstances and problem solving. That will help your thinking to become more flexible over time. This will allow you to take different perspectives.
Mindfulness is a really great way to become an observer of your own thought process. You can practice mindfulness in many different ways, and it might be helpful to practice it in a way that doesn’t have to do with your thoughts specifically, such as going outside, taking a couple minutes and just counting the different sounds that you hear.
Maybe just noticing the colors that you see outside and the variation in all of those different colors. If you don’t have breathing obsessions or don’t get really weirded out by focusing on body sensations, you can do things like count your breaths or noticing the air coming in and out of your body.
Mindfulness just means that you’re focusing on the present moment with a sense of intention. In order to build awareness and acceptance. When it comes to mindfully noticing your thoughts, you can do something called a thought diffusion exercise. This allows you to just slow down and notice some of the thoughts as they come.
You can utilize visualization exercises such as noticing each thought go by on a cloud in the sky, or noticing each thought individually on like the leaves on a stream. And as you notice those thoughts, what you’re trying to do in this exercise. Is to not judge it and not really latch onto it, but more of a stream of kind of letting the thoughts go in and out of your mind, resisting that immediate urge that we have to judge a thought as good or bad, like it’s just a thought and you get to decide if you want to entertain it further or just let it pass by.
So that’s a piece that’s within your control. We don’t control every thought that just pops into our head as you notice that in the ability for you to detach from that thought to let it go, understand. That’s not something that comes easily to us, especially if we’re used to managing thoughts differently.
If we’re used to just latching onto them or judging them or doing something about them, really taking this detached approach is very different, and it will take a lot of practice and intentionality. But the idea behind mindfulness is that it lets us know more about what’s happening so that when you’re in a space of clear headedness, you can make positive change instead of.
Trying to do so much when you’re in a frantic state or a non calm state. That’s usually what gets us into trouble, right, is when we start making all of these decisions, when we’re in a heightened emotional place or a place of mental stress. I’ve incorporated a little bit of mindfulness into Christians learning ICBT, because so much of what we’re doing is just teaching you to slow down and to really notice the process of how you’re getting latched into the story that OCD is telling you and the demands that it’s making on your time and energy.
Now I’m going to give you a list of ways to practice flexible thinking. Number one is take a different perspective. You can do this in several different ways, such as when you watch a movie or a TV show, you may find one character that you really like or really identify with. It’s easy to think through what their perspective on the situation, but maybe you can take a minor character or a different character such as a villain and try to think through what is their process, what is their perspective on this situation in this movie or TV show.
What’s interesting is that when I was younger, I used to really like the movie Sleepless in Seattle, and I watched it from the perspective of somebody who is looking for love. It’s a story about two people who are looking for love, but the man in the story is coming from a place of having lost his wife.
When I was younger, I had always identified with Meg Ryan’s character who was. Young and looking for love. But now that I was older and had experienced grief and loss, there was something really touching about Tom Hank’s character and watching that movie, again, almost through his eyes of grief and loss.
It was just a very different experience. So I encourage you, maybe you wanna even watch something that you haven’t watched in a little while and see if you have a different perspective or different reaction to it. So that’s number one. Take a different perspective. You can also do this when you’re reading the Bible.
You can look at the lens of different Bible characters views on a particular event that happened. What was John’s view of the last Supper? Versus Judas View versus Peter’s view. Three completely different perspectives on the same story, and I think they all have something to teach us, right? When you’re looking at your own experience and trying to take a different perspective on it, you might ask yourself, is there only one way to think about this issue?
Would someone of the opposite sex think the same way that I’m thinking about this issue? What would an older person say, or what would a younger person’s perspective be? What would the perspective of someone outside of my family be? I wanna say that what we’re talking about here is not about moral issues, not about right or wrong, clear moral issues, or things that we don’t agree with what we’re talking about are those more gray areas that may feel right or feel wrong because that’s the way the family’s always done it, or that’s what we’ve always been told is correct, even though it’s not a moral issue.
The importance of taking different perspectives too is that it really enhances our problem solving ability. Typically, when we have a problem, whether that be an interpersonal relationship problem or a financial problem, there’s often more than one solution that will get us to where we need to go, and our job is to think through the options, pray about it, and use wisdom to find the best solution for us.
The second tip on developing more flexible thinking is to ask yourself the question, what if it went well? Typically, we often think in worst case scenarios, if you’re dealing with any type of anxiety or OCD, you are convinced that a certain situation or outcome is going to be bad. But by asking yourself, what if it went well, you’re actually tuning your mind to a different perspective to say.
A, maybe it could go well, and maybe that’s a new thought to your brain, and B, what would I want that to look like? So if I want to have a calm, interpersonal interaction with somebody that I might be in conflict with, what would it look like if it went well? Well, I got enough sleep the night before. I didn’t have too much caffeine.
I was feeling optimistic going into it. I was able to remain calm, regardless of if the other person remained calm. And that also allows you to notice those different things. That are in your control that might be able to help you set up for success on a particular interaction or situation with someone else because we can only control the variables that have to do with us, right?
We can’t control how that other person is gonna respond. Or react. Oftentimes when things don’t go well, we go into a situation already anxious that it’s not gonna go well, and so then our brain is already shifted in that particular direction of something not going well. So it will play out that scenario that it’s already told itself.
It doesn’t always happen that way. Sometimes we think very negatively about something and we get surprised and it’s better. Oftentimes people will say, oh, I don’t wanna be blindsided. So I don’t wanna think super positive about the situation if it’s not gonna be positive. But we have to recognize like what we’re telling ourselves.
That story that you’re saying within your own thought process is really, really important. Something that we do in EMDR therapy is called like a future template, and what we do is we basically train your brain of how we want you to be able to respond to the situation. So it may be that you have a person that you need to have a confrontational conversation with and we might run through.
Okay. How would you like that to go? People will say, well, I’d like that person to not raise their voice, or I would like that person to not argue with me. And we say, well, we can’t really control that here or when you’re actually there, but would you like to be able to be calm if they do start to raise their voice?
Or would you like to be able to set a boundary if they start to raise their voice and ask them to lower it? Those are things that we can actually work on and sit with and imagine those positive things happening and kind of train your brain in that direction. So it really helps you be able to find those situations that are in your control and priming your brain to move towards the positive of what if this did go well?
The third way to increase flexible thinking is to intentionally do something that you’re not good at. This is really, really great for perfectionist, finding some type of creative outlet or new activity that you haven’t done before, and allowing yourself to struggle through that. Not to beat yourself up, but to let your brain and your body know, Hey, we can try new things.
They can be different. We don’t have to be perfect at it the first time. It is going to be very uncomfortable. I had a client a long time ago that decided to pick up a particular creative project in order to work on some of this flexible thinking and comfort with trying new things. It was hard. It was uncomfortable, but also this client found out that helped them overall in the grand scheme of things.
Trying new things may be something as small as writing with a different color pen or trying something new on a restaurant menu that you’ve never had before that you aren’t sure if you would like. Taking these small risk may help you take bigger risk in the future. Which might be really healthy for your OCD recovery.
Number four is to list all the solutions to a problem, even the ridiculous ones. Now, this one, you’ll need your sense of humor for and it make you laugh along the way, but what it does is it helps you find creative solutions to a problem. So for example, you could look at what are all of the different ways that I could use in order to get to work?
I could ride a unicycle, of course, that’s really silly because A, I don’t own a unicycle BI don’t know how to ride a unicycle, but theoretically I could ride one to work. I’m not exactly sure the logistics of that, how long it would take, et cetera. But that’s the point. You see how initially when we have a thought, we often limit ourselves.
We’re like, no, that’s ridiculous. Whereas if we write down some of these other things, like probably more common options would be, I can get in my car and drive. That’s how I normally get to work. What if my car broke down? I could catch a ride with someone else. I could use Uber. I could ride my bike theoretically.
I could check to see if there’s a bus route near me. I don’t think that’s logistically feasible in my particular city, but maybe I could put it on the list and just make just a gigantic brain dump of everything. Then you can always reevaluate the things as you go, right? Oh, okay. Unicycle wouldn’t work very well, not practical, and I don’t own one and I don’t know how to ride one.
So that’s off the list. And by marking off some of like the silly options that may create some thinking flexibility. Creativity in your brain. You might even think of a way to solve the problem that’s different than you had originally thought. Maybe you only thought there were two to three reasonable ways to make this decision, but maybe you open up your mind and find other ones.
Number five is choose your own ending. This would be really great if you’re watching a show. And you know how sometimes on the season finale they’ll really leave you at a cliffhanger or something will be unresolved or unfinished. Take one of those type of episodes or maybe you pause a show halfway through and just write down.
Three different ways that it could end. Okay, this person and this person could fall in love and run off and get married, or this person and this person discover that this big secret comes out. The main character decides he wants to quit his job and move to Bora Bora. There are actually books that do this, I think they’re called Choose Your Own Adventure and they’ll give you different forks in the road and you can kind of skip to different pages depending on where you want characters to go or what you want them to do.
There might be different options. I’m sure the internet has probably added even more opportunities to choose your own adventure. This will probably really help you if you ever do ICBT, because essentially we’re looking at what is the story OCD is telling you, and then what if some potential alternative stories that you could write surrounding this.
I hope this episode has helped you really work on all or nothing thinking and creating thinking, flexibility. It’s a really important skill to develop. Stay tuned. Next week we’re gonna be talking about is it time to get a new therapist? See you then. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.
Christian faith and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area.
