Research increasingly shows that in OCD, obsessional doubts form, not from irrational fears, but from faulty reasoning that rises from a combination of obsessional reasoning and narratives connected with your feared possible self which is like being trapped in your own personal horror movie.

Whether you’re a therapist or not, you’ve probably experienced this: no matter what, there’s always something else to worry about. It feels impossible to truly settle in or land. You spend your life searching for something that could be big enough, safe enough, calm enough, to let you TRULY relax. 

“Parts” are the specific stories (thoughts) our brain tells in response to the signals it receives from our nervous system and emotions.

“Attachment” is the language we use to describe connection and how the connection we form with something outside of ourselves impacts our physiology.

Co-dependency represents the moment where you allow someone or something “out there” to become bigger, more important, or more powerful than your own sense of yourself, your needs, and your boundaries. 

Our “boundaries” are communicated to us through our own awareness of our internal experience as we respond to the outside world.

The first step to being able to regulate yourself consistently and reliably, is to understand what your specific experience of each of these states looks like. What we can track, we can work with.

Our nervous systems first learn to regulate in the context of a caregiver. If there aren’t reliable and sufficient experiences of safety while we’re developing, if our experiences of life are ones of misattunement, threat, or actual danger and our nervous systems aren’t able to complete the cycle by returning to safety and social connection, then we may begin to get stuck in states of hypervigilance or immobilization.  The first step to changing this is learning what your individual system feels like when it’s activated.