( O2 ) OCD Gone in Seven Days Protecting Whats Important: You, your family, and most importantly your mental

health! Hi there, OCD is the fourth most common mental disorder and is diagnosed nearly as often as asthma and diabetes. In the United States, one in 50 adults has OCD. OCD afflicts about 3.3 million adults and about 1 million children and adolescents in the U.S. The disorder usually first appears in childhood, adolescence, or early adulthood. It occurs about equally in men and women and affects people of all races and socioeconomic backgrounds. My name is Derek Soto, and I was on the same side of the fence as you. I greatly suffered from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder that debilitated me so much that I couldnt keep a job and I alienated my family, friends, and love ones. My life was ruined. Does this story sound familiar to you? Well, it doesnt have to. Lets take the journey to mental freedom together!

You deserve happiness every day, and a life without OCD.

I have written this comprehensive manual for those suffering with obsessive compulsive disorder for the purpose of bettering the lives of others. My life and the lives of those closest to me were severely impacted in a negative way all because of this mental disorder. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder took over my life for too long, and I dont want others to go through what I went through. I have since overcome obsessive compulsive disorder and have dedicated my life to helping others overcome this mental disorder Life is too short to spend many years suffering with OCD. Today begins the road to mental freedom, and on this journey please know that I am right beside you ready to provide you with words of encouragement, faith, and guidance. Although the world doesnt always offer comfort and solace, there is one thing to keep in mindyou are not alone! I walked the very steps you have. Together we can do this, and you can overcome your obsessive compulsive disorder. Please find the comprehensive manual as a guide to help you though this. Remember that this manual is the jump start. It is the guide to help you overcome, but results wont happen overnight. Results wont happen without you doing the work! To beat this disease, there is one integral part of the equation: you!! You have to be willing to put forth the necessary work involved to make it happen. You need to find it within yourself and take courage

in the face of anxiety. This road will not be easy, trust me I know. In fact you will likely run into some bumps and roadblocks, but rest assurewhen you cross the finish line you can look back and remember that the journey was worthwhile. As I suffered with OCD, I saw many programs created designed to help people with OCD. I was glad to see that there were more people who knew what they were doing. However, I have found that many programs didnt work. Here are some things that Ive seen that DO NOT work for most. A.) Self hypnosis B.) Relaxation tapes and recordings C.) Brain wave audio programs D.) Surgery E.) Drugs F.) CBT G.) EFT H.) Therapy I.) Meditation J.) Exercise K.) Supplements L.) Prayer

Even if you combine any of the methods above, various combinations dont work for most. The methods above are not useless, they just dont work because most people dont do them correctly or the individual isnt persistent and patient with the techniques. I believe that all of the above things can help and contribute to making you OCD free but the most important part is to be persistent and patient. Have you ever worked with a professional in an attempt to stop your OCD? What kind of results did you get? Some have had positive experiences, while others had less than favorable results. Since youre reading this manual, Im assuming you didnt get what you wanted or you wanted additional resources to supplement your professional council. The problem with seeing professionals is that the sufferer from OCD does not apply what he or she learns. Be sure to look internally and examine yourself honestly. Are you the kind of person that follows through or do you tend to start many things and never really finish them? Its

important to discover what type of person you are so you can identify the habits and thought patterns holding you back from getting success with programs that have been proven to work. Sadly, many people purchase a program and do not follow through with the steps of the agenda. Because an individual doesnt follow through the plan, he or she feel would react with frustration by bad mouthing the program, therapy, teacher, book, forum, etc. They blame everyone except themselves. The real problem is none of the things stated above. The real problem is the person, its the individual. So take the initiative and take the necessary steps to move forward. Like I said earlier, you can do this. Just be sure to be dedicated, persistent, and hard-working. I never knew I could do it, but I did. I am free of obsessive compulsive disorder, and if I can do it, so can you! Lets get the party started .

To effectively combat Obsessive Compulsive Disorder you must first understand what OCD is. You may have some questions running in your mind. If youre reading this manual you either have OCD or you know someone who suffers from it. How can you be sure? Ask yourself Do I have OCD? Answer: If you feel like you need to do a ritual or compulsion to prevent something bad from happening i.e. I need to touch my purse five times to prevent my mom from dying, then you likely have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Obsessivecompulsive disorder (OCD) is a mental disorder characterized by involuntary intrusive thoughts that produce anxiety. When a sufferer begins to acknowledge these intrusive thoughts, the sufferer develops anxiety based on the dread that something bad will happen. Repetitive behaviors aimed at reducing anxiety, or by combinations of such thoughts (obsessions) and behaviors (compulsions) are done in association. So what is a ritual/compulsion? A ritual/compulsion is anything you do out of fear to smooth anxiety. Examples of compulsions include counting, checking, repeating mantras, washing, nail biting, swallowing, spitting, hoarding, etc. These are things people without OCD would not do out of fear. While some individuals with OCD perform compulsive rituals because they inexplicably feel they must, others act compulsively to lessen the anxiety that stems from particular obsessive thoughts. The sufferer might feel that these actions somehow will prevent a dreaded event from occurring, or will push the event from their thoughts. People rely on compulsions as an escape from their obsessive thoughts; however, sufferers are aware that the relief is only temporary and that the intrusive thoughts will soon come back. Some people use compulsions to avoid situations that may trigger their obsessions.

For those with OCD, these tasks, along with the anxiety and fear can take hours of each day, making it hard for the person to fulfill their work, family, or social roles. In some cases, these behaviors can also cause adverse physical symptoms. To others, these compulsions may appear odd and unnecessary. But for the sufferer, such tasks can feel critically important, and must be performed in particular ways. OCD sufferers are aware that their thoughts and behavior are not rational, but they feel bound to comply with them to fend off feelings of panic or dread. What Causes OCD?
Although the exact cause of OCD is not fully understood, studies have shown that a combination of biological and environmental factors may be involved. Biological Factors: The brain is a very complex structure. It contains billions of nerve cells -called neurons -- that must communicate and work together for the body to function normally. The neurons communicate via electrical signals. Special chemicals, called neurotransmitters, help move these electrical messages from neuron to neuron. Research has found a link between low levels of one neurotransmitter -- called serotonin -- and the development of OCD. In addition, there is evidence that a serotonin imbalance may be passed on from parents to children. This means the tendency to develop OCD may be inherited. In addition, certain areas of the brain appear to be affected by the serotonin imbalance that leads to OCD. This problem seems to involve the pathways of the brain that link the area of the brain that deals with judgment and planning, and the area of the brain that filters messages involving body movements. Studies also have found a link between a certain type of infection caused by the Streptococcus bacteria and OCD. This infection, if recurrent and untreated, may lead to the development of OCD and other disorders in children. Environmental Factors: There are environmental stresses that can trigger OCD in people with a tendency toward developing the condition. Certain environmental factors may also cause a worsening of symptoms. These factors include:

Abuse Changes in living situation Illness Death of a loved one Work- or school-related changes or problems Relationship concerns

How Is OCD Treated?

OCD will not go away by itself, so it is important to seek treatment. The most effective approach to treating OCD combines medications with cognitive-behavior therapy.

Cognitive behavior therapy : The goal of cognitive behavior therapy is to teach people with OCD to confront their fears and reduce anxiety without performing the ritual behaviors (called exposure therapy or exposure and response prevention therapy). Therapy also focuses on reducing the exaggerated or catastrophic thinking that often occurs in people with OCD.

Medication therapy : Tricyclic antidepressants, such as Anafranil, and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants, such as Paxil, Prozac and Zoloft may be helpful in treating OCD.

Now that I have provided a brief overview of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, you must understand the following to combat this disorder: A) Learn how to change your habits by changing how you think about things. B) Learn how to control your emotions and assign rational meanings to your thoughts C) Be persistent and patient while slowly building your belief that what you are doing is working. Chang the way you react to your thoughts, because if you dont do this nothing will work.

Next think about what you want to achieve. Ask yourself this: what do I want to achieve? What are the goals I want to achieve by purchasing this program? A.) Better life with my family? B.) Improved relationship with your loved ones? C.) Better job situation? D.) More friends? E.) Mental freedom? These are all examples of some goals you will need to write down. Having a journal to track your progress or state your goals is essential to achieving the maximum results. In your journal, feel free to fill in your own goals. You need to understand that if you dont have a strong enough reason, you wont succeed. Nothing will drive you. Now think about how do I get a strong enough reason to stop OCD? You must amplify the pain of what you are going through so that your brain will scream, This needs to change! Now I am of course speaking figuratively, but you really need the pain to be great enough for you to be motivated to do something about it! Consider touching a stove that is on a low setting thats warm. If you dont feel much pain or discomfort, you wont be that motivated to move away. However, if you are touching the stove and you turn the power on the highest setting, you literally have seconds before the coil will be hot enough to burn your hand, in which case you will be much more motivated to actually remove your hand from the stove. In this analogy you must apply it to your reasoning to stop your OCD. So what do you need to do to turn up the heat or increase the pain of the OCD so that you are motivated to take steps to get rid of it? You need to think about all the unpleasant things that occur because of your OCD. Maybe you get embarrassed because you feel like you have to do things that are unorthodox or your perform compulsions you try to hide so people dont think you are crazy.

An example would be that you feel like you have to point to the sky and say, thank you Jesus whenever you have a certain thought because you feel like something bad will happen if you dont do this. Think about how unusual this is and how not normal this makes you feel. Think about having to do this several hundred times a day for the rest of your life! See how the pain can quickly be amplified? To amplify the pain, think of these things and whatever else you equate pain to: A.) Your kids not wanting to talk to you B.) Your wife or husband leaving you C.) Your friends and family avoiding you D.) Feeling awkward because everyone knows you have OCD. E.) Feeling afraid to go places because of the rituals youd have to do F.) Having to leave your job because your OCD has taken over your life. G.) Etc. The statements above are dramatic, but they are things you may use as a reference when thinking about how OCD can impact you. Even if you think your pain is already high enough, you may think about these unpleasant things so you solidify a desperate need to take action against your OCD. Only then will you have the proper motivation and emotional drivers in place to do what is necessary to get rid of your OCD.

Subsequently think about the benefits of combating OCD Why do you want to achieve these goals besides avoiding all of the negative things above? Think about: A.) Your spouse feeling closer to you and proud of you for getting rid of your OCD. B.) Your kids wanting to talk with you again. C.) Getting a promotion at your job because you are clear and focused at work D.) Being able to go where you want knowing that you wont have to do any rituals. E.) Feeling free as a bird mentally, knowing you can actually enjoy your day. Feel free to think of other things you can do that OCD was preventing you from doing. Enjoy thinking about these things in your head. You should note that things usually does not happen unless it happens in your head first, so start fantasizing about how your life will be like when you are OCD free. Its one of the best feelings in the world being OCD free. I want this for you. You can earn it just like I have. Make sure that you duly note that becoming OCD free is something that is earned and not taken in the form of a pill or other short cut. There is no easy way to combat obsessive compulsive disorder.

Now, when you think of all the things you could do once you are OCD free, you will start to get excited and this will increase your motivation even more. It is important to note that you need to motivate yourself each and every day. You can motivate yourself by doing little mental exercises like asking yourself the questions earlier stated each morning. You can post little reminders in the bathroom, in the car, or on the refrigerator. Most people only motivate themselves a few times or just once and wonder why the program does not work for them. It does not work for them because they do not work the program. By doing exercises each morning you will greatly augment your success. Remember you must work the program if you want it to work for you! Motivation generation is a daily thing. Every day you learn how to generate motivation towards the things you want in life, the sooner this motivation generation will become a habit and the sooner you will get what you want.

What steps do I need to take to become OCD free? Realize that OCD is a habit. What do I mean by this? A person that engages in obsessive compulsive behavior does so out of habit. In other words, he or she doesnt know any better. Many people ask me, Why do I have OCD or why do I do these things? The answer is simple and complex. A simple answer is that someone has OCD because they are so used to engaging in the compulsions. In other words you have OCD, because you have trained yourself in this behavior. Each time you perform a compulsion, your brain sees you performing the ritual and says to itself, I guess this is what I do in this situation and any situation closely resembling it. Your brain learns its behavior the same way a child does. I have worked with a client who always worried about his finances and he would check his bank account every single hour. He would scour his bills and really drive his wife insane. This was really hurting his life and his family. There were times they were very miserable. He caused all this because he struggled with unwanted thoughts about finances and he would always analyze the what ifs. After working with him for a while we were able to help him reduce his compulsion to the point that it did not put him through a downward spiral of worry anymore. He learned that his OCD was a habit and he vowed to change the way that he thought about things and learned how to accept the world for the way it was. He learned how to notice and understand the things he could change he finally gained the wisdom to know whether he could change something or not. This is known as the serenity prayer. Everyone that has OCD should memorize the serenity prayer which is: God grant me the serenity to change the things I can, to accept the things I cannot change and the wisdom to know the difference. This prayer can help

OCD commandment one: Dont fight OCD thoughts or any thoughts for that matter. Recognize that the intrusive obsessive thoughts and urges are the result of the obsessive compulsive disorder. When you have an obsessive thought, dont try to avoid the thought. Allow yourself to keep the thought in your mind. Then realize that the intensity and intrusiveness of the thought or urge is caused by OCD; it is likely related to a habit of thought. When you focus on a thought, you make the notion stronger and more real. For example, when Im upset with someone and I focus on the thoughts about the person that angers me, my anger gets stronger and stronger. When you think about something because you are always thinking about it, you will then create a habit of thought. Instead of fighting the thought, refocus or reassign alternative meanings to your thoughts. You cannot control what thoughts pop into your head.

OCD commandment two: You cannot control what thoughts come into your head, but you CAN control what thoughts you focus on. There are many times we cannot control what thoughts come into our minds. Negative, fearful, thoughts can invade our intellects and we react to the thoughts with anxiety and fear because of the associates we assign to the thought. If you want to stop unwanted thoughts, you should note that one of the things that you cannot change immediately is what kind of thoughts that pop into your head. You should have the wisdom to understand and immediately label a thought as something that just popped into your head. Although the thought popped into your head, you dont have to dwell on it. All too often people feel that they need to dwell on something because they thought it and that is not the case.

OCD commandment three: introduce new thoughts, thoughts that are pleasant to you, thoughts that make you feel happy, more productive, and just overall better. I will provide another example. Lets say that Jim and Sally individually suffer with homosexual thoughts. They have been trying to fight these thoughts for so long that these thoughts are all they think about during the day and it drives them absolutely bananas. Jim and Sally can introduce new thoughts and focus on those thoughts all the while allowing the unwanted thoughts to be there. (Remember, you cannot fight a thought so dont waste time trying.) Lets say Jim and Sally individually have a homosexual thought on a separate morning. What Jim and Sally would normally do is start to ask themselves a series of questions that would perpetuate and build their anxiety and fear. When I go to work and suffer anxiety or feel tempted to perform a compulsion/ritual, I think about new thoughts that get my mind off of things. I think about my kittens or the feeling I get when I successfully finish a project before deadline. I think about other things apart from the things that bring me anxiety or fear.

OCD commandment four: Lead your thoughts with questions. Anxiety and suffering in this example is when you engage in actions or thoughts that you dont want to. So Jim and Sally start saying, What if I really am gay? I dont feel gay, but I must be gay because Im having these thoughts. You can start to see that Jim and Sally are individually over analyzing the thought that popped into their head. This line of questioning they are engaging in creates anxiety and fear and they keep asking themselves these questions and engaging in over analyzation (the very thing that is causing them to be miserable) and then they ask everyone why they are so miserable! This is like walking around all day with a tack and pushing it into your hand and then going to a therapist and asking them why your hand always hurts all the time! You see, you did not know that over analyzing these thoughts and asking yourself what if questions and jumping to conclusions was causing and perpetuating all of your pain. Now that you are reading this, you know better. So let me lead your thinking now by asking you a question. What do you do when you notice that you are causing your own misery and perpetuating your own OCD? Step one: Notice that you are engaging in over analyzing and leading your thinking with questions that cause you to continue focusing on your OCD thoughts.

OCD commandment five: Asking yourself questions about things you like, love or are interested in will take your focus away from OCD thoughts. Lets see this process in action: 1. Jim and Sally are straight, but they have a homosexual thought. 2. Jim and Sally realize they are focusing on the OCD thought and they immediately start to think of questions they can ask themselves to steer their thoughts away from these OCD. 3. Jim and Sally ask themselves the question, What can I do today to better my life?

Because our brains love closure, our brains will try to think of the answer. When someone asks you a question, it makes you think about what they are asking you about. Now that they have asked themselves, What can I do today to better my life? This may lead to another thought such as, Well, I sure could lose some weight, I could improve my relationship with my wife/husband, I sure could get more work done during the day. Now as they introduce these new thoughts, the unwanted homosexual thoughts pop up again, and Jim and Sally start to think, I think I need to get rid of these thoughts before I can do anything else. This is WRONG! Simply divert your thoughts again to more productive things.

OCD commandment six: You CANNOT get rid of OCD thoughts until you master diverting your focus manually like described above until it becomes automatic and your brain then does it for you without you even noticing. When you first learn how to drive, it takes a lot of practice and focus and it can be frustrating, but after a while, by continuing to practice it becomes automatic and you are then able to do it without much effort. You can drive and be lost in thought about what you are going to make and eat for dinner. You could be thinking about your favorite show that is coming on tonight, etc. So you can see by the real time example of the driving how by doing something over and over again, you get better at it and it becomes more of a subconscious effort. The same principle not only applies with everything in life, it also applies with OCD. Most people who have OCD are so impatient that if they cant master this process in one month, they start to lose hope, they then go and look for a magic cure, one which will allow them not to have to do any work!

OCD commandment seven: There is no magic cure and there is no getting around the work! The people who get rid of OCD the fastest are those who suck it up and actually work hard and master this process. Rememberothers believe in you! Consider this; Sally decides that she is going to practice this process until it becomes natural to her. After six months, she really has it down and the struggle with her thoughts is next to nonexistent. Jim on the other hand, does not get better in two weeks from trying this process so he foolishly tells himself it doesnt work and he goes and finds another OCD program, he gives that one another two weeks and again finds that it doesnt work for him either. He tells his friends its a scam and he starts to buy into the idea that hell have to suffer with OCD forever, all because he is just not willing to do the work until it works!

OCD commandment eight: work the program UNTIL it works for you. When you were a child did your parents give up on teaching you how to walk? No, they continued until it worked. All parents do not use the same method to teach their kids how to walk. In fact most parents do it much differently, however the reason why most kids learn to walk is because their parents believed that what they were doing would work and they stuck with it UNTIL it worked. Thank your parents the next time you see them for being patient and persistent. The same thing is true for athletes, the same is true for dating, and the same is true for OCD. You need to work at it until it works. You have before you a program that has been proven. You cannot think, Oh, this may just not work for me. No, the reality is that You will not work for you. There is no program that will do these things for you. If you do not succeed its because you did not try until. I know you can do this and I believe in you. The sad truth is that most people will never even make it to this page! They simply will never make it, but I am proud of you because you are one of the few who will succeed! You are one of the few who will do what it takes to get what you want. Its simple now, you know youve got a program that works and all you need to do is work the program! So in our example of Jim and Sally did these steps: Step one: notice the unwanted thoughts Step two: introduced new thoughts Step three: when the unwanted thoughts came in, they repeated step one.

Now there are three levels of people: The first level of person has a lot of knowledge about OCD; they know everything there is to know about it. Theyve researched Google like its their job and memorized and could write a paper about OCD, but they still have it. The second level of people The third level of people Why is this? Its because they lack the second part which is experience knowledge. See they know all the theories, but they have not done much to see what works in the real world. The things that are in this work right here have been proven time and time again in the real world. Forget about what you think you know about OCD, and listen and do what is in this work, which has been proven. Your theory will not stand up to proven facts. I thought I knew so much about OCD when I got rid of it in myself and then when I started to help other people I realized that everyone is different. Now that Ive worked with literally hundreds of people personally on their OCD and helped them to get much better than where they were, I can reveal what has worked for ALL of those people here. Please put the pride aside and allow the proven wisdom of what Im telling you to really sink in and make a home in your heart and your mind. If you do the things in here you will get better, if you dont you will not, its that simple. I will include many more examples so you can fully comprehend everything that is going on and Ill cover the mindsets that you need to have to really enjoy success with this program. I want you to understand that it takes time to get what you want and the most important two things you can possess are persistence and patience!

One of the most important things you can do is to make a schedule: The reason you need to make a schedule is that is the only way that you are going to do these things. You see, you are used to doing things a certain way and if you are not looking at something that will guide you, you will automatically fall in your default mode, (doing things the way youve always done them) This is a dangerous mode, since this is the mode which allows for you to give into rituals and to continue your OCD lifestyle. When you make a schedule, you want to make sure that you actually write it down. A lot people tell me that they have it memorized in their heads and I tell them to write it down and when they finally do, that is when they start to notice the biggest changes. Now that you have your paper out, you can write a schedule, go ahead and fill it with the things that you need to do to make a living and your family obligations. Now ask yourself, What are some of the things that I normally do that I can remove from my schedule? The reason why you want to do this is because you want to start making some changes in your life. Now that you have your bare essentials that you normally do on your schedule, now I want you to add the things that you wish that you did already. May that could be making your bed, or maybe that could be taking a shower or brushing your teeth more often. Maybe it can be to make sure that your house and room are clean every day. Maybe it is to spend more time with your husband or wife. What I want you to do is to put it down even if you dont know if you will be able to do it or not. The reason why you want to do this is because it will start to change the course of your thinking during the day.

OCD commandment nine: it is worlds easier to change OCD behavior when you are also changing other non OCD related behavior, because your brain will more readily process this as just one of the changes in your schedule. There is a reason to my madness and Im just going to need you to trust me at this point until you start to see results. Dont worry about thanking me, because I believe God put me here to help you and this is totally for you. My purpose on this earth as far as Im concerned is to help people with OCD, period. And most specifically, to help people with OCD who are willing to help themselves. One of the most important things that you can do to get rid of your OCD is to claim a passion for yourself. You really need to figure out what it is that God made you to do. If you dont believe in God, I aint mad at ya. You still have a purpose; you just need to figure out what it is. Once you do this, you will find that things will move a lot more smoothly for you. Most of the time what you will be doing is pursuing your passion. Most people tell me things like, I need to make money and that is my passion. Or they will tell me things like, My family is my passion. No, this is not your passion. Yes, you need money, yes you love your family, but your family is not something you can pursue that will fulfill you. Your family needs you to get a life; they need you to have a passion. What is it that you want to achieve in this world? What are some of the things that you want to be able to say that you did before you die? What are some of the things that you want to contribute to humanity and to God before you die? Do you want to be remembered for something productive or just another person that only thought about helping themselves? You see, most people out there really only care about themselves that is a shame. For me, my passion is helping others get what they want and in return my family will be taken care of. You cannot think about your basic needs as your passion, but something extra. For some people it is the guitar. Some others love to sing and this is their passion. Still others love the Lord and they become a missionary. What is something that you can do that is for humanity? What can you contribute?

Really take the time right now and think about things that you are passionate about that are not your job, money, family, friends, pets or anything else that does not really contribute to humanity in a meaningful way. Got that question answered yet? You can do two things, you can forget this program and go about your daily business because you are stuck on one question or you can answer it right now. Dont be worried about commitment, as you can change your passion anytime you want. I just want to get you in the habit of being able to make choices for yourself when you need to make them. One of the biggest problems of people with OCD is that they can never make a decision and they are afraid of commitment for fear of being trapped. No, instead embrace the fact that you have made a commitment because you can now have only one thing to focus on. Once you have only one thing that you are committed to you will focus on it and make it work. So again, what is your passion? Now that you have that answer, you can actually start to build up and get better at and more importantly, you have something to focus on more than OCD! This is really important because your passion will steal your mind away from OCD. Dont worry, most people who have had OCD for so long dont know anything else and so they get scared when they start to think about other things. Dont worry because this new life that you are choosing is exciting and you will be pleased to know that it will increase your happiness which will increase the happiness of your family and this will in turn increase your happiness which will cause you to have more drive to pursue your passion which will cause this happiness cycle to spin again. Ok, I think you get that you need a passion and do not read any further until you choose one for now, and dont wait more than 24 hours to choose your passion. Go ahead and choose one now, knowing you can change it at anytime.

Now having a passion wont necessarily make your life easier, but what it will do is give you purpose. It will give you a reason to get up in the morning. It is something that you think about when you get up in the morning and something that you think about when you go to bed at night. When you have a passion, other people notice this and they are inspired by it. They will be more respectful to you if you relentlessly pursue your goals and dont let anyone get in the way, especially yourself. Suffering is burning up your energy on the uncontrollable. Dont set your goals inside someone elses boundary like trying to get them to do rituals. This will cause suffering because you are hinging your goal based on what someone else does. I remember begging people to do things and this made me so miserable. I would try to get them to do things, whether it was repeating something they said or I would try to trick them by asking those questions that I knew the answer to get them to say it. Its better to shoot for the stars and land in mud, than to shoot for the mud and make it. You can set high goals but in order to achieve them you need to take massive action and you need to be willing to accept that there will be failure. Instead of avoiding failure, you should be ready to face it and push through it. People that aim for the mud just give themselves excuses why this wont work for them and they talk themselves out of doing anything. Im very glad that you are not this kind of person! Passive suffering is when you want to be someone or want to achieve something, but you never try because you are afraid you will fail or you are too lazy to try. You may want to be OCD free, but you are not willing to do what it takes to get there. This causes suffering by passivity or in other words, suffering by doing nothing.

So if you are going to suffer anyway, why dont you suffer for a short time and earn freedom from OCD, than to suffer with it for the rest of your life because you are trying to avoid the temporary suffering of facing it? There are many people out there that are so book smart and who think they know everything about OCD but they simply cannot get themselves to face their fears. They know all the theory behind everything but actually doing things is not their specialty. If this is who you are currently, what you need to do is get more experience under your belt by actually acting on some of the vast oceans of information you have rattling around in your brain. After all, knowledge without experience behind it is completely useless and lies dormant. In order to get that knowledge of how to stop OCD out of your brain and make it useful in reality, you need to be willing to fail and to take risks. What kind of risks have you taken lately? Do you find yourself always saying that there will be a better time to face your fears that cause your OCD? Do you find yourself saying, I cant do it now because Im already too stressed. Or Ill do it later when I feel stronger or have more time to really focus on it. This is the number one reason most people fail. They simply kill their chances of being OCD free with simple procrastination. Is your use of procrastination holding you back? Did you know that procrastination is just a fancy word for fear or laziness? Are you afraid to face your fears? Did you know that the only way to beat fears is to face them? I once was afraid of flying on planes. I was really concerned and I tried to face the fear in my head, I tried to talk myself out of the fear but I could not. In fact, the only thing that worked was when I got on the plane! I was afraid for awhile but then something wonderful happened and now I actually love flying! You see, the only way that I beat this fear is by taking a chance and getting on the plane. The fact remains, just face the fear as fast as you can and you will get over it sooner! I look back and

wish I had faced my irrational fear of flying a long time ago! I could have gone to so many places! What are some of the things that you could do if you only faced some of your fears? Would you be able to go places you used to be afraid to go to? Would you be able to work again? Would you have a new zest for life? Imagine that God Himself came to your house and said, hey so and so, I want to take all your fears and give you a new and exciting life! Would you give Him your fears or would you hang on to them? Would you let Him make your life new, or would you stubbornly hang on to the very things that are causing you so much grief? I invite you to let go of the fears that are causing and perpetuating your OCD and anxiety. The only way to let go of these fears is to face them one by one. Be bold and dont be afraid to fall flat on your face the first few times. It is only those who keep on getting up and trying again that succeed. It is only the people who build up the will to create a new better life for themselves. Again, the reason why you are doing this is so important, because it will drive you every day to take these actions. Do you have your reasons why written down and in front of you? If not, go ahead and do that right now, Ill wait Now dont read any further until you have written down your reasons why you are doing this. Now that you have written down the reasons that are motivating you to face your fears, such as a better relationship with your parents, spouse, friends, such as peace of mind, etc. Look at these every day so that they can give you strength to keep going. Every day you do one thing that you are scared to do toward facing your fears, you are that much closer to your end goal which is mental freedom!

Commandment ten: every day do something that scares you by facing one of your fears head on. An example of this could be going to the supermarket if you are afraid to go. If you are afraid to touch the cat, go ahead and touch the cat. This is a form of self Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. You dont need some therapist to tell you what to do. After all therapist is spelled (the rapist) Odd coincidence. What I would do is decide what your worst fear is and find a way to face it every day. Dont skimp on this part or be too easy on yourself. If facing your fear does not cause you any anxiety, then you are truly not facing it. You need to do something that actually is a challenge to you. You cannot cheat yourself on this because you know what is and what a challenge isnt for you. Lets say that Toby and Cynthia want to face their fear of germs. They both are afraid to touch the door knobs at work because they are afraid the germs on the door knobs will contaminate them and then cause them to contaminate others by transference. So Toby and Cynthia avoid touching door knobs or if they have to touch them, theyll wash their hands right away. They often carry hand sanitizer and their hands are often chapped and dry from excessive and repeated use. What can Toby and Cynthia do to face their fear every day? They can set a goal for themselves. Lets say that Toby and Cynthia tell themselves, I will touch a door knob at work today and not wash my hands or use hand sanitizer for five minutes. When they go to work and actually touch the door knob, they feel really anxious and they get a little sweaty and nervous and feel an extremely strong impulse to wash their hands. They look at the clock and it seems to creep by at the slowest crawl ever. However they hold out and right when it reaches five minutes, they both wash their hands. The anxiety starts to go way down but they start to have other fears such as. What if because Ive left the germs on my hands for

so long that they soaked into my skin and I am contaminated? Maybe I have to take a shower. Maybe there is nothing I can do because the germs are inside me now. They then have read my program, so they both catch themselves engaging in this over analyzing thought process and they realize that engaging these thoughts and focusing on them is what causes and perpetuates OCD in the first place. So they then introduce new thoughts into their head while the OCD thoughts are still there. Their anxiety level is still pretty high but they know that engaging in what if thoughts is what makes it worse. They think, What if Im contaminatedthen they catch themselves thinking this and say, If something bad happens, Ill handle it. Now what can I do today that will increase the quality of my life? What can I do that will help me get a raise at my job? or What can I do to do the best job that I can? Now Toby and Cynthia are starting a new habit of taking charge of their thinking. They are no longer a helpless spectator in their thought lives, but are now the captains of their ship. They are the boss of their thought lives and they realize that they have free will to focus on whatever they want and that they dont have to focus on OCD thoughts just because that is what theyve always focused on. Toby and Cynthia have realized that in order for the things around them to change, they had to change the way they looked at things.

OCD commandment eleven: If you change the way you look at things, the things you are looking at will change. I will go into more examples and will continue to build on what we have so far to increase comprehension and to inspire you through each page to take charge of your thought life! We all have free will to focus on whatever we want to! Neither God nor man, nor anything else can take away your free will to focus on that which you want. In reality, this is the only thing that we can control anyway. It takes work however to master focusing on that which you want to. People who master their focus are the most successful in their line of work, whatever it may be. People that master their focus can stop OCD and anxiety at will. You will be one of these people if you remain persistent and patient! Growing up mentally is what this really is about. See most of us grow up and think because we have a job, or make a lot of money, that its ok to be winey and complain all the time about things. We can tend to get into this Oh, poor me! attitude. We may tend to think that everyone in the world is only out for themselves and that we need to be selfish and greedy and lazy, etc. In reality, most people in the world are good people who care for their families and do good things. Because you may have troubles in your life psychologically such as anxiety and OCD thinking patterns, you start to view the world as a miserable place. You may even tell yourself that happiness if for some people but not for you. You may feel that happiness is something that you dont deserve because you have OCD or anxiety. Taking on grown up thinking means that you dont blame others for your problems, you dont take it out on the world but you actually look at yourself and take responsibility for your own feelings. Ive seen many people blame their childhood, blame their work, their spouse, their brain chemistry but most people never put the blame where it really belongs, on themselves.

Children blame, adults take responsibility. As long as you cling to child like thinking when it comes to responsibility, you will always suffer. You need to understand that the habits that you had developed when you were a kid will not always serve you well as an adult. In most cases, you need to change and reshape most of your learned behavior and take on a more mature, adult view on things. This involves taking responsibility.

OCD commandment twelve: Take responsibility for your actions and your thoughts. Many people blame their actions or behavior on a crappy childhood or fear. As a result they react to the thought based on how it makes him or her feel. So when we go around saying, Oh, you make me so angry! or I have OCD and it completely controls me, such statements are reactions to a voluntary choice. Simply put, you are angry because you have chosen to be angry, or OCD controls you because you choose the disorder to rule your actions. The key word is choice. You choose your behavior. You can choose to react to an obsessive thought by doing a compulsion or you can choose to no engage in your compulsion. Choose the later! When you make the choice to engage in OCD, it wont be long before you use your disorder as a crutch and use it an excuse to not do things you should do. I can attest to this. When I chose to engage in a compulsion, I used OCD as an excuse not to go out in public to avoid fear of incriminating myself with my fingerprints. I resisted doing normal daily activities because of the OCD. Soon the disorder ruled my every thought and every action. Derek J Soto was no longer Derek J Soto; instead I became Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Sufferer. I lost who I was through OCD. You may identify with my personal experience. In fact, many of my clients have admitted that they use OCD as a crutch and as a result they made it their identity. What does this mean? It means that an individual actually view OCD as part of who they are and they dont know what life would be like to not have OCD. Some may be afraid to let go of OCD because they have a fear of the unknown. This is totally understandable and in the same breath it is also irrational. Make the right choice not engage in compulsions, and most importantly dont allow OCD to be your identity. Simply put, to prevent OCD from being your identity, take responsibility of your thoughts and actions and choose to resist the compulsion.

OCD commandment thirteen: If you want to have true mental freedom, you must embrace the unknown. Some people would rather suffer with OCD than get rid of it, because they are afraid of how life would be without it. The unknown can certainly be fearful, or it can be something we embrace. Ill admit that I used to fear the unknown because I didnt like the unfamiliar. I liked things that were constant, steady, and stable, and because of this I chose not to step outside of my comfort zone. How did this affect me? My OCD was constant, steady, and stable, and I didnt get better. I only got better when I stepped outside of my comfort zone and embraced the unknown. I encourage you to embrace the unknown and take the necessary steps to stop OCD thoughts in your life so you can truly be free from it. Its a step by step process. Understand that OCD cannot exist without fear, so you will understand that to get rid of OCD you must develop a strong habit of facing your fears and doing things you are scared to do. If you fear touching a door knob because it would contaminate yourself with germs, its time for you to tackle your fear head on and touch the doorknob. When we face our fears and do things we are afraid of, our lives will turn in a positive direction, and you will soon start to create happiness. This is what creates the alive feeling. See, most people just go through life existing when some go through life feeling alive and are living fulfilling lives. These are people who pursue their dreams and are not afraid to take risks. These people are not afraid of failure and they really enjoy life. You can do this too; all you need to do is to choose to embrace the unknown and face your fear! I would like to challenge you right now to stop just existing but actually start to live life! You can do so by asking yourself what fears can I face today? Once you acknowledge your fear, face it! If you want true mental freedom, you must embrace the unknown which will bring excitement to your life. OCD Commandment: Dont complain about your situation, take action!

Designing both a passionate and OCD free life includes no complaining! Do you find yourself always complaining, moaning, whining, saying why me? Complaining drains your mental energy. Not only that but when you complain, you are playing the victim and you are conveying to your brain the message, There is nothing I can do. I am hopeless and I am pretty much stuck in this rut. This is not my fault, but it is because of other things in my life that I have no control over. Most people feel that theyve earned the right to complain and theyll actually tell others proudly by saying, I have issues. This type of behavior will not help you, but only serve as a hindrance. Instead you can take the approach of, I have issues, but Im working through them. Even if you feel like youve earned the right to complain, dont do it because your brain watches what you do and will learn this behavior. If you really want to evolve mentally, stop complaining, start taking responsibility, and then take action. Many people throw their hands up in the air and say, I give up! I challenge you to be solutions-oriented and ask yourself, What steps can I take to rectify this situation? Forgo the sulking and moping. Forgo the woe is me attitude. Instead have a positive attitude, and take responsibility for your actions. This is something you have complete control over. Once you do this even if you dont quite believe it, you will start to see some profound changes in your life. So what are some practical steps to stop complaining? 1. Notice it 2. Stop it 3. Switch gears Once you stop complaining, remember to fake it till you make it.

OCD commandment fourteen: Fake it till you make it. I once worked at a telemarketing company where we sold magazines. When I first started, I was not very good. In fact, Ill admit that I almost got fired. I then took a proactive approach and started to watch and listen to the experts. I surrounded myself with people who were good at their jobs and I started to take notes. With the notes I took, I applied the very principles every time I picked up a call. I wasnt entirely certain of what I was doing, but I pretended that I did. I pretended that I was very good until I actually became good in the long run. I faked it until I made it . Now I was not immediately better from the very start of when I made the choice to fake it, but I had more confidence and decided to be persistent and patient until I became the best salesman at the company. I soon moved more product than anyone else during a 30 hour

period. What did I do to achieve this? I simply faked it till I made it. I acted as if I was the best salesman and by doing so I became the best salesman. Lets see if this applies in other areas. People that want to become a great actor must first act as if they are a great actor. People that have become great singers first acted as if they were great singers. People that became OCD free acted as if they were OCD free. Faking it till you make it is not the same thing as lying. This is not a moral issue. What you are simply doing is showing your brain what you want to do, by doing it. Then your brain will say, Ok, I guess this is what we are doing. Most people make things much harder than they have to be by looking for the quick fix or the easy way out. I tell you truth the easy way out is to face your fears and challenges head on and creating steps to fix these fears and challenges and then following through with your steps, tweaking them along the way as necessary. One of my employees used to call me every time they faced a challenge. I needed to instruct them that they need to think for themselves and try to find the answer. Everything is not in black and white in this world and you really need to actually make yourself think if you are truly going to get what you want. Even reading through this program, you are going to have to do a great deal of soul searching and self help. No one can do this for you and there is not pill yet that can do this for you. Whats really cool about this is that by doing the work that it takes to better yourself, you are going to be learning a very valuable skill set that will serve you for the rest of your life. You will be able to solve problems and you wont always immediately look for someone else to solve them for you. The purpose of this program is to teach you how to be your own mentor, therapist, counselor, psychologist, etc. Im not saying that youll never need to go to one of these professionals again, but there is certainly no reason for 99% of you to actually see one of these professionals on an ongoing basis. You simply need to learn how to do these things automatically and youll not only save a small fortune, youll also save a lot of time and youll be

an all around better person. Would you like to have to go to a therapist every time you need to reenergize or would you like to be able to reenergize at will? I dont know about you but I find it exponentially more valuable to be able to reenergize myself whenever and wherever I am. There are times when it is ok to complain, but make sure that when you do to also offer solutions to these complaints right afterward. I would also make complaining sparing because people who have the best most fulfilling lives simply dont complain that much and when they do people listen because its rare. But if you are always complaining all the time, people tune you out and so when your complaint is really justified, there will be no one there to listen to you and you will truly be alone. You need to be courageous to do the right thing. Did you know that the meaning of courage is to do the right thing? Courage is a decision. The right thing to do is guided by your conscious mind and intuition. Sometimes people do rituals because they feel that if they dont, something will threaten their security. The fact of the matter is that security is not even real. It does not exist naturally in nature, we made it up.

OCD commandment fourteen: Take courageor be courageous!! Courage is the only way to defeat any addictions, including OCD. Having courage means to possess a quality of spirit that enables you to face danger or pain without showing fear. In other words, courage means doing the right thing. The right thing is to do things that scare you. By taking courage, you will advance and grow up and out of OCD. OCD is a state of mind that is not productive. It is an attempt to control that which cannot truly be controlled. Being mature means accepting that there are things that are out of your control and knowing that is ok. Knowing that you can only control how you choose to look at things. Mature people spend their time focusing on that which they can control, which is simply how they look at things around them or how they interpret the data around them. This is having true courage. How can you build natural courage in your life? What I mean by natural is courage that comes to you automatically, in other words, you simply just do it. It becomes a part of who you are. As you know, to make anything natural you must practice it until it becomes second nature to you, until it becomes automatic. Just like after youve driven a car for several years, the function of driving a car becomes natural for you or easier because you dont have to use as much of your conscious resources to do the task. The same holds true for courage, if you want to always do the right thing, which is to face your fears, you simply need to practice doing so. Day in and day out you need to work at that which you want to get good at. If you want to get good at controlling the way you think, you need only to practice until you achieve the results you want. When you first learn something, it is harder because it takes a lot of your focus and attention in your conscious mind to achieve the task. But as you practice over and over again, more of these

processes are relegated to your subconscious mind and it feels easier because you have moved these tasks more toward your subconscious mind. Picture your brain as like an ocean. Your conscious mind is the surface and your subconscious mind is under the surface of the water. The things that we notice more readily are those which are on the surface, the things occupying the conscious mind. If you want to make a task, such as controlling your thinking or driving a car more automatic, you need to simply submerge it into your subconscious mind. You can do this by practicing whatever it is you want to make natural to you. When you first learn something, it is on the surface and it takes more of your attention, but as you practice it, it starts to sink in as the expression goes, which means you start to get it and it becomes easier as it sinks in to your subconscious mind. Dont worry, if this was a head full for you, Ill go into more details in examples for you to increase your understanding and give you the tools necessary to accomplish anything you want, including the topic at hand which is stopping Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Your subconscious mind processes things exponentially faster than your conscious mind, that is why these tasks are easier to do and you are not conscious of the calculations taking place in your subconscious mind so you dont feel the stress of the process. However when you are just learning something such as learning how to control your thinking, you will feel extremely tempted to quit and just rely on what is already sunk in to your subconscious mind which is your OCD behavior. You can get rid of things that are sunk in your subconscious mind by replacing these behaviors with new behaviors. You simply need to be willing to be persistent and patient as it is not easy to sink something new into your head unless you practice it over and over again.

Did you know that scientists have proven that it is physically impossible for your conscious mind to hit a baseball thrown by a professional pitcher? Did you know that the only reason professional baseball players can hit 90mph fast balls is because they have sunk in the skill of hitting the ball by practicing over and over again that the subconscious mind takes over and when their brain sees the ball coming, it takes over automatically and hits the ball. Of course the brain is not perfect and you wont hit the baseball every time, but the more you practice, the better you will become at hitting the ball. So how can we apply this to OCD? When you practice the above examples that Toby and Cynthia were performing you will get better at them and you will start to make them sink in and that means that you will be pushing these new habits into the most powerful part of your brain, the mid brain, the part that controls your subconscious mind. It is also worth noting that the conscious mind speaks a different language than the subconscious mind. The subconscious mind is ruled by emotions and the conscious mind is ruled by logic. The third part of your brain called the old brain or reptilian brain controls vital functions such as muscles, heart, breathing, and millions of other processes that happen that are involuntary that keep us alive. When the mid brain panics with negative emotions, it will tell the reptilian brain that there is danger and the reptilian brain will instruct the mid brain to release chemicals that put in body in the fight or flight response and you may feel your heart beat faster, you may tense up and be more alert and worried etc. When your conscious mind notices the increase in heart beat and sweaty palms it may panic and tell the mid brain that something is wrong and the whole anxiety cycle begins again. In order to stop this cycle, you must say Stop! There is no danger here. If something bad happens I will handle it. The feelings that I have are just anxiety and they will go away.

Studies have shown that when you have an anxiety attack, if you give it between 30 minutes to an hour the worst part of the anxiety will go away on its own. Most people with OCD simply dont give the anxiety enough time to go away and they do their rituals right away. Notice that when you do rituals to satisfy OCD, you havent really done anything except make an if then rule What this simply means that you say to yourself, If I do this, then my anxiety will go down. You believe this and so you do your rituals and then because of your if then rule your brain lets your anxiety go down. You should note that you had control over your anxiety the whole time because you are the one that made the if then rule. No one said to you, if you do this, then the anxiety will go down, you came to your own conclusions! This is called a coping mechanism and your brain is good at creating these. What a coping mechanism is simply your brains attempt to deal with the stress that it is experiencing. Many times your brain will come up with irrational coping mechanisms such as OCD rituals because it does not have an accurate reference point to this new anxiety that you are experiencing and it will do whatever it can to deal with the anxiety associated with Obsessive thinking. Again, I apologize if that last part was a little brainy but I want to make sure that I offer everything that I feel will help a wide range of people. I could delve into how the brain works for hours and write a whole new program on how the brain processes OCD thoughts, but what you really need to know is that you need to change your if, then rules. Heres how you do it: When you first have OCD, you will come to your own conclusions and create your own if, then rules You may touch a doorknob and then your brain thinks of germs and it remembers watching a special on TV about how someone died of a certain germ so you may irrationally think that you

got that same germ and your brain justifies the fear saying that it is possible even though the odds are so small it doesnt make sense. Your brain wants to protect you so it will create an if, then rule right on the spot. You may think, If I wash my hands thoroughly, then the danger or perceived danger will go away and I will be responsible and be doing my part to protect myself and others. When you notice that your brain makes this if, then rule you can on the spot create a replacement if, then rule! You can simply say, No, if I run and wash my hands, then I will be creating a monster of OCD that I dont want to deal with so IF I wait until before I eat or after I go to the bathroom to wash my hands just like most people do, THEN everything will be fine. And you will find that it will be. All types of OCD can be avoided by the person simply WAITING before they rush and do something they feel they need to do. Most people justify their OCD actions by simply saying, Well, it makes sense to wash my hands and I am not a pig like most other people. You dont want to do that as you are not more special than anyone else and if you start to go down that road, you will start to make OCD part of your identity and then it will be harder to get rid of. No, instead, if you notice that you are being a little more careful than most people, STOP! Dont be more careful than most people. Be the same. If you touch a door knob, ask yourself what normal people or people without OCD would do. You know that most people would not wash their hands until before they eat or after they go to the bathroom. Wait until then. A lot of people with OCD also try to trick themselves by saying, ok, Ill eat now, so I guess I can wash my hands. Even though they were not going to go eat, because they touched the door knob, they made an excuse to do the ritual by finding a loophole and theyll go and wash their hands and then go eat all to just do their ritual. You are not fooling anyone except yourself my friend. You cannot trick yourself and by doing this you are only making it worse. This is actually a

form of giving into your rituals and avoiding doing what scares you, which is to NOT do the ritual. OCDs fuel is fear. If you are afraid and act out of fear, then OCD can survive. However, if you remove OCDs fuel, which is fear, then it dies. You need to allow OCD to die by accepting the consequences of not doing a ritual. You need to practice NOT doing a ritual and saying, I accept whatever happens by not doing this ritual, even if that means other people will die, or I die, or something horrible happens to me or others. Here is what Helen Keller has to say about risk taking: Security is mostly a superstition, it does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing. -Helen Keller Helen Keller could not speak, see, or hear and yet she came to this conclusion. How brave of her. How courageous. She did the right thing by looking at life in a positive way even though she did not have nearly the capacity that we do every day. I find that most people take what they have for granted. Are you one of these people who take what you have for granted? Are you a person that no matter how much money you have you are still not happy? No matter how many friends or blessing you have and you are still not happy? These types of people have a problem I call giving into their whims. I remember one time I was in the hospital and I was asking the nurses for all these things such as extra sodas and snacks and pillows, blankets etc. and I was not that happy. In the next room there was a man with a much more serious condition and he asked for absolutely nothing and guess what, He was happier than I was! How can this be? Because he was older and wiser than me and he knew the principle of not giving into your whims.

OCD commandment fifteen: Dont give into your every whim! In other words, dont spoil yourself. What does it mean to give into your every whims? It means spoiling yourself and giving yourself everything you want and never denying yourself of things. It means being tolerant with not having. If you deny yourself of luxuries that are unnecessary, you will bring happiness to your life. What I mean by giving into your whims is babying yourself and always trying to reach the ultimate comfortable state. No, instead forget about always being comfortable because your pursuit of this will blind you from what you need. Again, if you are always focused on what you feel like doing at the time or what you feel like you want all the time, you will be blind to what you actually need. People with discipline live happier lives. People who have learned how deny themselves of things that they do not need. People that have learned discipline actually are not afraid to be uncomfortable and they can withstand more challenges and come out the other end stronger. However, the man/woman who always gives into their whims is fragile and at the slightest challenge backs down in fear. In essence, if you always give into your whims, you will not have enough strength to face challenges and you will box yourself in to your own little world where you avoid every discomfort and ironically in doing so, are more uncomfortable than those who do not give into their every whim. When you stop giving into your every whim, you will become more mature and you will be stronger to do what it takes to get rid of OCD. The bottom line is that people who give into their every whim will never become OCD free. Just before the moment of courage you are utterly alone. Strangely after the moment of courage, you are a leader and everyone wants to follow you. This happened for me when I first started to have courage with OCD and actually started to face my rituals, I felt completely alone. However, once I beat OCD, everyone with OCD came to me for help and followed me and

wanted to be like me. I only hope that what I am telling you will help you. I know it can but my real hope is that youll actually use it. Lets go over what courage is again. Courage is when you do the right thing and in the case of OCD, the right thing is to do that which you are afraid to do, which is to NOT give into your rituals. You will notice that no one has ever died from not giving into their rituals, I certainly didnt and I really felt in danger when I said no to my whim or (the feeling like I had to do a ritual) I also want you to understand that giving into your whims means giving into your rituals, you are trying to be comfortable instead of becoming stronger. This principle works everywhere in life. Lets say that you want to lose weight and be healthy, can you do it by doing what is comfortable all the time? No, cause the couch is ALWAYS more comfortable than doing thirty minutes a day of cardio! However, the person who does not give into their whims and faces the uncomfortable challenge, in this case its the cardio workout, he/she reaps the benefits and becomes stronger and more healthy than the person who just relaxed and was comfortable on the couch.

OCD commandment sixteen: A path with no resistance leads nowhere. In order to grow you need to work. In order to get rid of OCD, you have to do the legwork or put the time in and you need to get real uncomfortable. I would even go so far as to say; the more uncomfortable you make yourself by having courage (doing the right thing) the faster youll get rid of OCD. In other words, the less you give into your whims, the faster you will get rid of OCD and the faster you will start to experience the rewards of your labor. See laziness and giving into our whims seldom ever rewards us, no, instead its being uncomfortable that rewards us. So get used to being uncomfortable because if you are uncomfortable for a time now, you will be exponentially more comfortable for the rest of your life. However if you choose comfort now, you will be uncomfortable for the rest of your life. Which one seems more worth it to you? Getting your needs met is assertiveness

Barely squeaking by is not courage. Courage is when you go after it with all you got and whatever happens happens. When you go to do the right thing, in this case to face your fear by not giving into your ritual, do it with all you got. Dont try for five seconds or five minutes and say, well I tried, I guess this just doesnt work for me. No, you have not tried. You have not truly tried until you have given it your all. You need to put 100% into whatever it is you want to get good at. I told you earlier that if you practice something you will get good at it. Well its not true if you do it half heartedly. This only works if you give it all you have. You know that you are giving it all you have when you feel the burn but do it anyway. Again it is a false attempt and you are only deluding yourself if you try something for five seconds and then quit because you got to uncomfortable, no what it means to really do it is to face the uncomfortable feeling head on and to actually face your fear and not give into your ritual and follow through and notice how you dont die! Notice how your fears seldom ever happen. This quote comes to mind: I have gone through many hard times in my life, most of them however never actually happened. -I forgot I dont know who said this quote but I like it because it reveals the fact that most of the fears that we have in life never happen, yet when we react to fears with anxiety and worry, we still experience the pain that comes with the fear as if it already happened. See how destructive this can be? See how as you have gone through suffering with OCD you were experiencing all these negative emotions about a fear you had that had not actually occurred? Here is an example: You are deathly afraid that you hit someone while you were driving; however you never actually hit anyone. But you go home and you start to worry, you may even drink to drown out the anxiety. All the while, this event actually never happened, but because you are reacting like it did, you actually felt the pain as if it did happen. Do you understand?

Dont do this to yourself. My brother would often ask me this question, Why are you doing this to yourself? Good questions huh? Think about this the next time you are suffering because of your fear of something that has not actually happened, ask yourself this question, Why am I doing this to myself? Then say to yourself, I will not react to this until it actually DOES happen. Then save your reaction until then. I know that your first thought must be, What if it does happen? My response to you would then be, What if the world burns up with fire? What if every country sent all of their nuclear warheads to your city? What if this, what if that? Only worry when it actually happens, period. When you catch yourself worrying about something that has not happened yet, tell yourself, I will reserve this reaction if it happens because if it does happen and Im acting like this before it happens, what would I do if it actually did happen? So save your reaction for when or if it does happen. What you need to understand that it is pointless to worry about things that you cannot control. As you know now that control is but an illusion. You cannot look at your life and your body or your possessions or your family as something you are entitled to and that are yours. No, instead all of these people and these things are borrowed. You do not own your life. Can you change increase the number of years you live? Can you choose when you will get sick or when you will die or when your kids or spouse dies? These things are just borrowed and are not in your control. Worrying about them will not control what happens. God gives and He takes away. I would suggest that instead of wasting your time worrying, why dont you enjoy the time that you actually have with them! Save your mourning until after you lose them and do not mourn while they are still with you! Let me ask you a question, what has worrying ever done for you? It has done nothing except cause unnecessary stress. This is what causes suffering, when you burn your energy on things

that you cannot control. When you notice that you are worrying or burning your energy on things you really dont have control over, wait until you lose them to worry. Just like the Bible says, that there is a time for everything, a time for laughter and a time for mourning, etc. When the bad thing that you are at first worrying about has not happened yet, this is the time to laugh and rejoice. When they are gone, or when something bad happens, then you can mourn. Otherwise what good is it if you mourn while you have something and nothing bad has happened yet and then you mourn when something bad does happen and you are like, See, I told you! You gain nothing and you only cause misery and pain in yourself and everyone around you. No, instead if you actually want to be happy and be a source of happiness to those around you, I would encourage you to react according to what is going on now. You need to have observing ego, which means that you look at yourself and police your own thoughts and actions. What you want to do is to watch yourself and ask yourself if what you are doing or thinking is productive or not. You can ask yourself, Is what Im thinking right now constructive or destructive? In other words, is what you are thinking or doing right now going to help to make your life to better or is it going to bring you down. Make sure to understand that when you are sitting there worrying or acting out your worry, this is not productive and it will bring you down. No, instead those who when they feel like worrying actually become proactive and do something productive instead, they are creating for themselves a better quality life. Also it is worth noting that when you create a better life for yourself, you are actually creating a better life for everyone around you and anyone who comes in contact with you. Not only that, but you will also more easily attract the things that you want in your life, whether its success, a mate, a certain type of body, a new skill, etc. Good personalities are developed when the majority of your thinking is about how you can better your life and the lives of the people around you. Bad personalities are created when people focus on negative thoughts, such as, oh, poor me. Ill never make it, Im a loser etc.

When you make a conscious effort to create a great personality for yourself by always choosing to think constructively, and you keep repeating this type of thinking, you actually start to make it automatic and it starts to sink in to your subconscious mind and before you know it, you will seem to others as naturally having a good personality. When people start to view you as a natural that is when you know youve done a good job. So when you use your observing ego which means actually noticing what you are thinking and doing and taking a step back and thinking about whether it is constructive or not, I want you to consider choosing the constructive thoughts and the constructive actions. The level of difficulty to do these things at first is harder because you are not used to doing them, but as you continue doing them they become easier and you will start to actually see your life miraculously change right before your eyes over a relatively short period of time. Ive seen this happen literally in a few short months. Commitment: You need to be committed to this. You should as you are reading this right now, commit that you will work this program until you get the results that you want. If you actually take the time to write out your commitment, you will find that the likely hood of you succeeding will improve dramatically. I really find that the results are in the details. It really is the little things that matter and a little extra effort goes a long way. If you actually take the time to write your goals down and to write your schedule down, you are ten times more likely to do what is on it and that will make you ten times more likely to get the results that you actually want. People who have become OCD free have made a commitment to themselves, to their loved ones and to God that they will stick with it until it works, that they will do what it takes. Are you willing to do what it takes? You may be asking, Well, what does it take? It first takes a commitment that you will do whatever it takes to get rid of OCD. Now Im going to cover some specific tactics that you can do

now that you have the basic mindset that is necessary for these techniques to work for you. I promise you right now, if you dont have the correct mindset, which is the one described above, these techniques will not be as nearly as effective for you as they will be for someone who has the correct mind set. Here are some strategies you can use when being courageous (doing the right thing, which is not giving into your rituals) One of the things you can do is write down on a piece of paper what you want your life to be like. Envision it without OCD but instead filled with things that you want it to be filled with. When you do this, you will actually be doing the first step to bring change in your life. You need to visualize it so that you know what it is supposed to look like. Think about every detail. When you do this, when you open your eyes again, you know what you are going for, it has been quantified and it is not just some vague hazy vision. The more concrete you make your future in your mind, the more control you will have over your future. Another strategy that you can do is when you feel like you have to do a ritual, ask yourself, What would someone without OCD do in this situation? Be even more specific than that and think of someone that you look up to that does not have OCD, what would they do? Now when you do this, you are in effect borrowing their strength until you practice enough to make it your own. Another strategy that you can use is to make sure that you keep track of where you are. Dont worry that Joe down the street is further than you in life. You need to really focus on you, watch how far you make it along the way and measure your success by your own progress and not by the progress or successes of others. When you do this, you will start to feel your due reward for all your efforts. But when you are looking at other peoples successes, its easy to lose hope, so you start to feel that your progress does not warrant a celebration and you will always be miserable. No, instead rejoice in your successes and keep challenging yourself. Dont try to keep

up with the Joness, instead, try to always improve yourself and measure where you are now from where you were and make your goals based on this. Beating yourself up because you have not made it to the level that you feel like you should have by now is not going to help you. So this strategy is to look at yourself and measure your success by where you were to where you are now. Dont even worry about where you want to be, just making sure that each day that goes by, you are a little further than you were yesterday will help you grow nicely. This does not mean that you are not going to have setbacks. What this does mean is that if you do have a setback, you can look at the lessons and learn from it and dust yourself off and try again. If you have been able to go three days without giving into your ritual and then the fourth day you let your anxiety get the best of you and you give in several times that day, dont be yourself up over that. Dont worry if other people would have had this set back or not. Instead, what you want to do is accept the failure and understand that there will be many more along your journey to mental freedom. Dont waste your time beating yourself up from it. What you need to do is say, ok, what did I learn from this? Then write down the lessons and try again.

OCD commandment seventeen: Whenever you fail, learn what you can and try again. Those that never quit and always try again ALWAYS make it eventually. When you correct the way that you think about things by applying the principles above, you will find that as your thinking straightens out, so do the things that you used to have such a hard time with. An example of this is if you learn how to be calm where you used to panic, not doing the ritual you used to always feel like you had to do is pretty easy. So make sure to understand that improving your thinking will eventually fix everything outside of you. When you fix your thinking, it greatly improves your capacity to fix things in your life that were once impossible for you. If you were able to look at your future self now, you would think that you could perform miracles because you will literally be able to handle things that you cannot handle right now. Get excited about the prospect of being able to handle things that used to give you such a hard time. I remember when I used to struggle with OCD and it was such a bully in my life. Now its been many years and a long time ago I stood up to that bully until it backed down. If ever that bully ever tries to come back, I am so strong that it quickly dies back down again. The purpose of me teaching you these things is so that you will develop a thicker skin and be a stronger person who is able to handle changes in their life. When you learn this essential skill, not only will you be able to quickly eradicate OCD from your life, but you will also be able to literally improve every aspect of your life. One of the most fascinating things about this is that once you learn this and own this knowledge, it is yours and no one can take it away from you. Sure there are people that their OCD simply goes away, but if it comes back, they dont know how to handle it so they are victim to it. You on the other hand will possess the knowledge and have a paradigm that does not allow for OCD to exist in your life. Another technique that you will want to have in your arsenal is to learn how to take your minds focus and direct it toward what you want. For example, think of your focus as this big giant

search light. Now what you have been doing up until now is taking all that powerful focus and pointing it toward OCD. What you want to do is actually grab that powerful focus and point it toward something that you would rather look at, even if you cannot see it physically right now, start to teach yourself how to see what you want to see and by doing so, you will make it true in your life. What I am asking you to do is to look at things that you would rather look at, would you agree that this will make you happier? Would you rather look at a brick wall or a beautiful sunset? How are you looking at things in your life? Can you see the beauty in things or is everything always grey? My dad once told me this story when I was a kid: There were two men in a hospital and one of them had the luxury of being near the window. These men never saw each other because there was a cloth divider between the two of them. However the man by the window would tell the other man what beautiful things he saw out of his window. The man who was not by the window loved to hear these stories. Then one day the man by the window was wheezing loudly and calling for help. The man not by the window did not call for help because he wanted to have that mans part of the room so he could see all the beautiful things he was describing to him. Sadly the man by the window died. Then the nurses came and moved the man not by the window into the part of the room with the window. To his dismay when he looked out, he did not see any of the beautiful things the man who just died had described, no; instead he saw a big brick wall only twenty feet from the window. The man who had died looked at life in a different way, a beautiful way and because of this; he lived a much brighter life. However the man who let him die, always took things at face value and he died the next day miserable and alone. So which man had a better life? Which mans life would you want to experience? Life is truly what you make it. Dont you think its time that you start to look at things in a different way, a more beautiful way? Dont you think its time to change how you look at things so that you can experience the blessings that life has to offer? I

know you do because you have made it this far and I am proud of you! This shows me that you are committed and you want to make a change. So why should you focus on things that you may not already be experiencing? Youve heard of athletes who will close their eyes and picture themselves winning the gold medal before they even step foot into the arena. Are they being delusional? No, they are directing their focus and they are preparing their brains to make room for what they want to happen in their lives. They are preparing themselves to win. How can we apply this to OCD? If you want to be OCD free, you need to focus on that which you want instead of that which you dont want.

OCD commandment eighteen: you get whatever you focus on. If you focus on OCD that is what you will have, if you focus on a life without OCD that is what you will have. You attract whatever it is that you focus on, so this strategy is telling you to focus on those things that you do want and when OCD tries to take your attention, introduce thoughts about the things that you want in your life. If you are having unwanted thoughts about germs, tell yourself, If I focus on germs, I will be living in fear for as long as I focus on them, however if I focus on my vacation with my family, this will set off a chain of events that will make this happen for me and my family. The Bible says that as a man thinks, so he is. Whether you believe in God or not, this holds true. Its simply a universal principle. What you need to realize that you cannot get rid of OCD before you can focus on something else. No, instead, you MUST focus on something else BEFORE you will ever get rid of OCD.

OCD commandment nineteen: You MUST focus on something other than OCD in order to get rid of OCD. Whatever you focus on is what you will attract into your life. The things you focus on are the things you will make a reality in your life. Another strategy is to build congruency in your life. Here is how this process works: On your schedule, you put wrote things down that you want to do such as make sure your house is clean etc. I remember putting on my schedule to make my bed in the morning. When I did this, I saw that my house was a mess; well I thought to myself, Well, it doesnt make sense to make my bed if the rest of the house is a mess. So what I would do is clean the house. Then I would go and sit down and realize that I was being lazy and I wanted to lose a little weight, so I said to myself, It doesnt really make sense to have such a clean house and I myself be a slob. So I started to work out. When you have OCD and you start doing these things, what happens is that it no longer makes sense for you to have OCD as part of your life, because you have improved every other part of your life and you have built up a standard that now you feel obligated to live by, so it is ten times easier to face the fear that causes and perpetuates OCD because it just makes sense. So what this principle is to improve other areas of your life that you want to see

improved and when you go to improve your situation and stop OCD, you will find that it is easier because it fits with the rest of your life. Conversely, if you dont change anything else in your life and then all of a sudden try to change something as big as OCD, you will find that it is nearly impossible because this sudden change does not match anything else in your life and you havent built up that congruency that you need to propel you to face your OCD. When you have built up congruency and you repeat these new good behaviors, you start to build up momentum and as you know, when you get something going, it builds its own force and it becomes easier to keep it going because of the law of momentum. The only way to build up momentum is to continue pushing or practicing the new habits that will improve your life until they sink in and become more automatic and you will have built up a powerful momentum in your life that will serve as an extremely powerful motivator for you to make sure that you dont quit this program. People that dont do the above techniques of creating congruency and building momentum in their lives find that they struggle uphill all the way trying to stop their OCD and few make it. However those who have followed the above strategies of creating congruency and building momentum of good habits in their lives find that it is magically easier to face the fears that cause and perpetuate OCD. Another technique that you can use is to create for yourself some preferences and standards. What this means is that there are boundaries that you will not cross and that you will not allow other people to cross. Heres how this works with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder: Lets say that you know that you have a fear of hurting someone else. Maybe when you see a knife on the table in the kitchen, you may have the awful thought of hurting someone else with that knife. Now you would never do this and the thought scares you and you allow it to cause a lot of stress. Looking at this situation, you can know what kind of boundary to create for yourself and you can also now create a preference. You can say to yourself, Ok, I dont like

feeling this way when I have this thought. Since I cant control what thoughts pop into my head and I can only control what I focus on, I will focus on the fact that the knife is an essential part of kitchen hardware and that I dont have to do anything I dont want to. What you are telling yourself is that you are creating a preference by saying to yourself that you dont like to feel this way. This is your preference; you simply dont like feeling this way. Then you create a boundary where you say to yourself, When the thought of me hurting someone with the knife comes to mind, I will remind myself of my preference that I dont like the feeling of thinking about hurting someone with the knife so I refuse to focus on it. What you are doing is instead of being lead by any thought that comes into your head; you are now using filters in your mind such as preferences and boundaries which serve to give you freedom from suffering. Again suffering is when you burn energy up on something that you cannot control. So your boundary in this case is that you refuse to burn up energy on a thought that you had no control whether it came to you or not. In other words, you are making a conscious choice to not worry about it because you know you cannot control what pops into your head. Some people with OCD come to the conclusion that if they think something, it must mean that they would do it. Nothing could be further from the truth. Have you ever thought about killing someone because they made you angry? Most people can honestly say yes. Did you actually do it? No, otherwise you most likely would be reading this from a prison cell. So this is one example where you had a thought but did not do it. Here is another one, have you ever thought about telling someone off because they were mean to you and instead of actually doing it, you simply fantasized about doing it? Sure, again most people can say that they have fantasized about getting revenge on someone who they feel has wronged them but they never actually followed through with it. Have you ever thought about doing something but never got around to it? The fact of the matter is that most of our thoughts that pop into our head, we never do. There are only a small percentage of thoughts that we have that we actually carry out in reality.

People with OCD would then look at this and say, but if there is even a small chance that I would do it, I should be worried. Remember how we talked about earlier where worrying has never got anything done or prevented anything bad from happening? You know that worrying is suffering because worrying is you burning your energy on something that you cannot control. Remember how I told you to wait until something bad actually happens before you worry and mourn? So in the mean time rejoice that you have not actually used the knife to hurt someone and rejoice in the fact that you actually care enough about that person that you worried just because you had the unwanted thought of hurting them which is not your intention at all. Did you know that intention means that you have actually done many physical actions toward whatever it is you intended to do? When you have a thought of you hurting someone else with a knife pop in your head, you did not sit there and make plans and preparations to hurt them with the knife, no, instead the thought just popped into your head, therefore by definition, we can see that you did not intend to hurt them. Take comfort in that fact! If you really want to care for others, you need to care for yourself first, because if you are in bad shape, then how can you help someone else? You need to care enough for yourself that you wont worry about things that you cannot control, such as a thought popping into your head. You can make yourself not worry by immediately recognizing the fact that you did not actually intend to use the knife, but that it was only one of millions of thoughts that popped into your head that youll never do. To put it another way, if your initial reaction is fear, you would probably never use the knife for that purpose, people who do these things arent worried about the thought. A quick note, if you have thoughts about hurting yourself or others, and they dont concern you, I would go and see a professional as soon as possible. It does not necessarily mean that you would do it; it just means you need a little more help than the scope of this course. So what you need to understand is that you need to first care for yourself by not allowing yourself to focus on worry about the thought of the knife, instead, now that you have

recognized that it was just one of many thoughts that popped into your head, you dont have to react out of fear anymore, because you now know that you have free will and that you dont have to do anything you dont want to. Now I must be careful as people with OCD tend to derive irrational meanings between every line I write. I know because I used to suffer with OCD myself and I can see the things that many OCD sufferers would see by reading some of these things. What I am doing right now is calling you out on that and telling you point blank that you dont have to worry because I can tell you from experience that if you are reading this now, you are one of the people who loves yourself and others and you simply want to get better and you are showing your intention to do so by having purchased this program. The Bible says something many times that sticks out to me. The line is fear not. I have seen this many times throughout the Bible and there is good reason for it. Fearing will not help you in any way. You must learn that you are created by God and that you cant control most things that go on around you, but the one thing that you can control is how you interpret the data around you. In other words, you can only control what you choose to focus on. So the next time you have an unwanted thought, ask yourself, What would I rather think about?

OCD commandment fifteen: When you have an unwanted thought ask yourself, What would I rather think about? This statement reminds you that you have a choice or free will to focus on whatever you want. When you have an unwanted thought, dont fight it; simply allow it to be there while asking yourself the question, What would I rather think about? Once you do this, you will see how you have a whole new world of possibilities open to you that you didnt even know where there. Lets say Paul and Katrina has an unwanted thought of dropping their baby. The thought of dropping their baby is terrifying to them, so they have built up a habit of being overly cautious with the baby and barely ever lifting him/her out of the crib for fear of dropping him/her. When they have this thought, they ask themselves, What would I rather think about? Then they say to themselves, Id rather think about the beach and the waves crashing against my ankles and the water is warm. I can see kids making sand castles; I can see still others enjoying a good bar-b-que.

Then all of a sudden, the thought of dropping their baby invades their new focus and that is when they allow it to be there and yet ask themselves another question. What do I love about the beach? Now they have the distressing thought occurring but they also have used a question to introduce a new thought, now there is another thought that is now competing for their focus. Before, however, they did not know this technique so OCD got their full attention and they have made OCD thinking into a habit so it will not be easy or fast to un sink this habit. However, through repetition, perseverance and patience, they will slowly replace their OCD thinking with thoughts that actually make them feel good because they are now aware that they can actually choose what they focus on! This technique is called customizing your thinking. I want to introduce you to a technique that I think youll have fun doing. Think about someone that you look up to and think about how they act around situations that scare you. How would they do things? How can you borrow their courage to do the right thing and not tolerate giving into rituals? When you start to act more like this person that you look up to, you will feel more confident and cool in front of your friends and others as long as they dont know that you are trying to act like this person. I want to make sure that you do not misunderstand this exercise with actually trying to be like someone else to the point where you are mimicking everything they do. No, instead copy only the things that you like and things that you can integrate with who you are. This is a fast and easy way to learn how to react in certain situations. What you want to do in essence is to shed the parts of you like a snake does its old dead skin so that you can take on traits that you desire and as you repeat this, youll make these new borrowed traits your very own and no one will ever be able to take them away from you.

Another technique that you can use is exact decision making. Leaders of fortune 500 companies do this. The people that you look up to do this to some degree. Here is what exact decision making looks like. Lets say that someone asks you to go to a party but you dont really feel like going. You would have normally said yes just to not disappoint the other person. What you would do in this example is to say, No. You are actually making an exact decision where most people would waver. A lot of people would start to weigh out the pros and cons and try to talk themselves in or out of something. What I am suggesting that you do in this example is to answer according to your first gut feeling about the situation. If you dont feel like going the moment they ask you, simply say no, then stand by your decision even if you change your mind later. What will happen is that you will start to get more respect from other people and oddly enough they will be more grateful the next time you go somewhere with them because you have made yourself scarce and therefore more valuable. You will also look at yourself with more respect and you will hold your head a little higher. This builds confidence as you do this courage (doing the right thing) which means not doing things that you dont want to do unnecessarily just to please other people. In order for you to truly create a win-win situation for everyone, you need to make sure that your needs are met first and then care for others when you have enough to give. A lot of people with OCD operate in a space where their own needs are not being met and yet they are giving of themselves of the little that they have. This is what people who have OCD do because most people with OCD have low self esteem. In order for you to raise your self esteem, you need to put yourself first for a while until you have enough to give to others. You do this by saying no to things that you dont want to do. How do you know when you have enough to give? Youll feel it because you will be feeling blessed and generous.

I also believe in things like karma where you get what you give. Once you have enough to give, I recommend that you do so and in some way or another it may come back to you when you need someone to give to you. Another side to this is that you also want to not be selfish which is very different than putting your needs first. Being selfish is when you purposely deny others of their needs to fill your own. What I am talking about by putting yourself first is to say no to people who are trying to deny you of your needs. Many people with OCD are very selfish where they will put their needs first and they think that what they are going through is so important that other people should understand and put their own needs away to care for them. When you do this to people you start to drain them and eventually you will empty them of their self esteem and they will flee from you so that they can get reenergized. They will even avoid you in the future because they look at you as like this emotional leech that drains them of all of their energy. You need to be mindful not to be selfish by asking others to do rituals for you or expecting them to drop everything they are doing so you can talk about your obsessions again and again. No, instead you need to create a win-win situation by saying no to things that impede on your preferences and by allowing others to say no to you. You can do this by not talking to them about your OCD unless they ask you and even when they ask you, refuse at first. If you do this, when there comes a time where you really need to talk about something, people will be more open to listening to you because you have shown strength by respecting their boundaries. Part of putting yourself first is to respect other peoples boundaries even if they dont clearly define what these boundaries are. Simply think about how the other person would feel if you said or did something and be mindful of their feelings. If you actually do this, you will be adding to your character and your self esteem will grow.

This will also force you to actually use your own energy to face your fears instead of trying to use other peoples energy by draining it from them. In fact the only way that you can really beat a fear completely is by at some point using your own energy to face it. Your brain will see that you are doing it on your own without the help from others and this will increase your confidence which will make courage a lot easier to do! I have developed a skill set that allows me to display and practice courage when unwanted thoughts happen, whether they are scary or sad, Im able to deal with these because of the skill set of learning how to change the way I look at things. This is strength in me. What you need to understand is that this strength is also in you. Yet most people come to me as if I have something they dont and they hand a bucket to me and say, Fill me up with your strength. The bottom line is that if youve got holes in your bucket, you are going to have to keep coming back to me again and again to get that strength. Instead, fix the holes in your bucket by becoming stronger by facing your own fears and as you get stronger, the holes in your bucket start to patch up and then the strength that you have, you can actually grow and eventually become the source of your own strength. The point is that Im not all that special as we are all equal and your value is equal to mine. I am here to tell you that you have everything you need to achieve anything you want right between your ears. Have you ever heard the expression that the universe is between your ears? This means that everything you need and every skill set you seek is available to you in your mind and the act of educating yourself will help to put these pieces in your mind together to create an ah ha moment in you. This is when you learn something new and you are like, ah ha, I get it now! Man I should have known that! See that feeling where it was almost right under your nose but you really couldnt put your finger on it. The act of educating yourself with my materials and other peoples materials is that you get to see how we put these pieces in our heads together to get the answer we sought. Now you can come to the same conclusions in

your own head much faster because you have seen how someone has done it in their own head. The point of all this is to tell you that you need to give yourself permission to try to solve your own problems. You need to give yourself permission to say what you know in this moment with authority. It is better to do what you think is right and be wrong, than to do nothing at all. So if you want confidence, you first have to act as if you are confident and this confidence will drive you to do courage and face the fears you have by not giving into your rituals.

OCD commandment nineteen: it is better to what you think is courageous (that which is right) even if its wrong, then to do nothing at all. When you live by this principle, you will start to develop a doers mindset and you will then transform yourself into someone that actually gets things done. If you really want to get rid of OCD, you need to be a doer. Stop researching OCD and actually start doing the things that are outlined in this book and to start building up your experience knowledge which is the only way to grow confidence permanently. If you learn something new you can feel more confident for a while, but if you learn something new and go apply it until you master it, you will have grown your confidence permanently. Many people with OCD keep looking to fill their buckets with strength but they have so many holes in their boundaries that they can never quite seem to get filled with confidence enough to take off the training wheels and starts being confident in their own abilities to do the same things our heroes have done. Your heroes in this case would be the people that you look up to. You need to start becoming your own hero and start building up your self confidence and start increasing your own value in your mind. The reason you want to do this is because if you cannot increase your own confidence on your own and self esteem, you will always suffer with OCD because OCD is a self esteem and confidence issue in your life. It does not matter what kind of OCD you may have. That is why all the medications that you have taken have not cured you of it, because in order to get true results, you need to go out there and do the things you have learned. On the left hand your knowledge is really high and on the right hand your experience level (actually using what you know) is really low and that is why you are reading this today. I would encourage you to decide that you are going to do courage at least once a day until you get what you want. What I mean by doing courage is to go out there and do something that you are afraid to do but something that you know will help you, such as refusing to do a ritual. Through pain and hard

work do we learn some of lifes biggest lessons. The real world is a hard teacher because it punishes you first before it shows you the lesson. I would say dont wait until this happens, instead face your fears your way right now in an environment of your choosing and keep pushing yourself. This will help you to learn the lessons before life punishes you much worse. When you start to ask too many people advice about your OCD, you start to get conflicting information. This will only serve to confuse you more. You cannot place your destiny in someone elses hands. If they give you advice and you take it and fail, it is not their fault, it is still yours. So when you are faced with a problem, learn to first ask yourself what you should do. Learn to think for yourself and practice making your own decisions on a daily basis and this will make you stronger so when you are faced with an OCD problem, you will have conditioned yourself to have enough faith in your decision making that you can come to your own answer and then follow through with it. Again it is important to remember that it is better to do what you thought what was right and be wrong, then to do nothing at all or wait for others to tell you what to do. The fact of the matter is that no one knows your situation more than you do. So you in fact, are the most qualified person to answer your own question. If you get used to the idea that you can make your own decisions, you will find that OCD gradually starts to lose its foothold in your life and youll actually be able to graduate from OCD and grow up as an adult. Giving into your whims and doing rituals is very child like because you are still being lead by your emotions and not what is right or courageous. When you catch yourself being childish and running to do a ritual to make the boogie man (your anxiety) goes away, say, STOP! and simply flat out refuse to give in. You can also use this technique which is to defy your rituals. What this simply means is that if you feel like you have to do a ritual, do the opposite. I used to feel like I had to point my shoes in a certain direction or something bad would happen. When I stopped giving in and started to choose to defy this ritual, I would kick off my shoes and wherever they landed that was it. It was very annoying at first and troubling, but after a while as I actually gave the anxiety of this OCD

ritual a chance to go away on its own, I realized that I was starting to loosen the shackles of OCD rituals. I actually started to see myself get better and I started to enjoy mental freedom. One of my buddies in college once told me that if he could levitate just a half an inch off the floor that he would spend all day practicing until he got better at it. Let me ask you this: If you could resist not doing just one ritual one time and feel stronger and more energized by your refusal to do the ritual, would you not also practice all day until you mastered this skill? To be able to refuse doing rituals and to be ok with it is to be OCD free.

OCD commandment twenty: To refuse rituals and to be ok with it means to be OCD free! Why not practice as much as you can so that you too can be free of OCD? I got rid of my OCD myself; I did not have help from therapists and doctors or pills. So I am showing you how I did it on my own so that you can too. Whats great for you is that because I have made this my lifes work, I can show you the ah ha moments I have right now that way it wont take you several years like it took me to get over my OCD. Shield yourself against OCD and you will not use up your energy on something you cannot control such as worrying about what could happen. The people that fight OCD get very tired and worn out quickly and they have expended all of their strength onto something that they could have never controlled in the first place. The problem with OCD is that people are too quick to fight and dont use their observing ego to step back and realize that they can pick their battles and that they are not going to start a fight

that they cannot win. It simply is a waste of time to them. These types of people live exponentially more fulfilling lives because of their willingness to work smarter and not harder mentally. You can shield yourself against OCD by not engaging in its tempting thought processes. If at the first sign of an OCD thought you simply state that you will handle whatever happens and that there is no point in worrying about something that probably wont ever happen you would have just saved a lot of energy. This energy you just saved can now be spent on focusing on something that will benefit you such as focusing on something special that you can do for your significant other. Another strategy that you can use is to create in yourself a stronger frame. For example, have you ever met anyone that when they are in the room, they dictate what happens and they lead the group in most places they are at. What is it about them that they can do this and everyone just accepts their self assumed leadership? Its because they have a stronger frame than anyone else in that room. If they were to be in a room with someone with even a stronger frame than them, then they would be more likely to submit to the self assumed authority of this person. A frame is a vibe that you give off by your body language, tone of voice and words that conveys that you have it more together than everyone else in that room. These people are also more vocal about how they feel and they are not afraid to have people disagree with them. These people are less likely to have OCD because they simply wont tolerate something so unpleasant in their lives. How they got this stronger frame is by being vocal about how they feel and what their preferences are and they have mastered the art of saying no to things that dont match with their preferences. They dont base their worth on how other people think about them; instead they base their worth on how they think of themselves. They do not have a fear of loss of someones friendship and because people are attracted to someone with a stronger frame than

they have, this person with a strong frame makes more friends as a result. People like to be friends with other people who have a strong frame because subconsciously or consciously they want to have that same frame and they are subconsciously or consciously hoping that they will somehow acquire this strong frame by hanging out with this person. The reason why increasing the strength of your frame is important is because when your frame is strong, you tend to get followers and you are now an example to them. Even though you dont base your worth on what they think of you, you still care how they think of you to a certain degree so you are now in a mode where you need to be a role model to them. This means that you know that they are watching you and you dont want them to see you as weak and this perpetuates your strength and will help you not give into OCD rituals because people are watching and looking up to you and you dont want to lose your high status in their eyes. This principle is called the role model principle.

OCD commandment twenty one: People are always watching you; therefore act according to how you want them to look at you. If you want them to look at you as a strong person, act like a strong person. If you dont want to be seen as someone with OCD, act as if you dont have it. When you do this, you are actually not giving into OCD and in effect beating it when others are watching you.

Live as though someone is always watching you, and you will see huge improvements in your life. You wont give into rituals in secret and this will start to build up a congruency in your life. Have you ever noticed how even young celebrities speak so maturely, (most of the time)? Its because the more people you have watching and following you, the more you are aware of your actions and the more likely you are to make sure you think about what you do before you do it.

Whats interesting to note is that not everyone around you has to even like you in order to be submissive to your frame. They will give in and submit to your frame because they see their peers submitting to your frame. So how can you apply this to OCD? Lets say that you are with your friends and you feel like you have to do a ritual, remember that you need to fake it till you make it so act as if you have a strong frame and act as if these friends of yours are following you and look up to you and be an example for them even if they dont yet look at you in this way. Did you know that by doing this and repeating it time and time again, you will eventually have these people following and looking up to you and everyone else you meet that you act this way towards will then follow you as well. When you notice that your frame is strong, you take on more responsibility and you become more mature. Mature people dont have OCD because they simply will not tolerate something in their lives that is clearly hurting them. Also part of having a strong frame is knowing when to say no to yourself. Many people tell me a situation they are having then theyll ask, Is this OCD? The general rule that I tell them is this, If you have to ask if its OCD, and then treat it as OCD. If you suspect that a dilemma that you might be facing is OCD, say no where you can to it. You will be tempted at times to give into the grey areas of OCD where you arent quite sure if its OCD or not. In this case, simply treat it as OCD because it is better for you to learn the skill of saying no if something doesnt feel right than to just give in. Since saying no to yourself is one of the hardest things that you can do, you can imagine how much strength this gives you. If you really want to get to the point where you can easily say no to others and not be lead by peer pressure, then you first must master saying no to yourself. Say no to rituals, say no to drinking alcohol or taking drugs to deal with your stress. Instead find out the source of the stress and change or eliminate that. When you take drugs or drink to suppress stress, you at that moment have stopped growing as a person and once you actually face your fear, that is when you start to grow again.

Another technique that you can use is to plan in advance what you will think when you are faced with an OCD situation. Many people try to plan what they are going to do, but I want you to consider planning what will you think when you experience the temptation to give into a ritual. You can say to yourself, the next time I feel like I have to do a ritual, what I will automatically think is that Ill handle it if something bad happens and I wont worry about preparation because OCD is no longer my life, but pursuing my passion is now my life. Most people with OCD look at facing OCD from their view of their own weaknesses. They often tend to start off by listing all their flaws to themselves. No, instead when you catch yourself doing this, start to list all of your strengths. Remember that whatever you focus on in life is what you attract in your life. Continue choosing to focus on your strengths which will help change the way you naturally think which will help the way you naturally react to thoughts, which will create more happiness in your life. A lot of people I come in contact with have a nasty habit of focusing on other peoples strengths and then when they look at themselves they only focus on their weaknesses. A quick trick is to turn this thinking around, when you look at other people, think about their weaknesses and your strengths, it will put a whole new spin on how you view the world and will aid in increasing confidence. Do this of course realizing that you are no more valuable than they are and that all people are equal in Gods eyes. The purpose of this exercise is to reveal to you that you have just as much importance as anyone else and that your needs are just as important. Another technique that is important to apply is always keeping your composure no matter what stresses are in your life. The act of doing this will actually keep you calm and able to think clearly. Think about what kind of composure that you would like to be known for. Would you like to be known as someone that always panics or would you like to be known as someone that always keeps their cool and handles situations confidently when they arise. Apply this to your OCD. Vow to yourself that you will keep your composure when an OCD situation arises and

when the situation arises, stay true to your vow and this is yet another way to build up your strength and another way to give you control of your own thinking. Most people with OCD go through life as a spectator and not a participant. Start to get in the game by taking risks, such as not giving into your rituals. Remember that without taking risks, youll never grow; youll never truly experience life and will die lonely and sad. However if you suck it up and take a risk and face your fear, you will attract happiness and fulfillment in your life that you once could only dream of before. Dont spend any more time seeking approval from others. I have many clients ask me if this is ok, if that is ok, etc. Dont ask me if its ok, simply decide what is ok for you and do it. Asking someone if something is ok is telling them that you are afraid to fail. Yet, when you fail you gain the most knowledge and grow the most so why are you afraid to gain the most knowledge and grow the most that you can? If you look at it this way, you would be out there failing as much as you can and watching yourself grow at an exponential rate. The next time you are wondering if something is ok, just make a decision and go with it and handle whatever happens. Just like an athlete takes the time to practice to master their craft, you too as well need to take the time to master controlling your focus. This means practicing everywhere you go. Look for ways to defy your OCD by doing the exact opposite in most cases of what it wants you to do. If you feel like washing your hands, go and shake someones hand or touch the bathroom door handle. If you feel the need to go back to check and see if you ran someone over, drive away from that area on purpose. If you feel like you need to get someone to say a certain word, walk away from them on purpose. Practice saying no to yourself which builds character, maturity and confidence. Simply refuse to do things you dont want to do, period. If you keep practicing this craft, you will master it to the point where no type of OCD or anxiety can ever touch you. When it comes to OCD, you will be invincible. I am speaking from experience.

Another powerful technique that you can use is to learn how to take the word no. Sometimes people with OCD feel so strongly to do a ritual that involves getting someone else to do something. Theyll worry themselves to death hoping and praying that a person will do something and they refuse to take no for an answer. This will cause a lot of suffering in your life. What you need to do instead is go out into the world and start to condition yourself to the idea that being told no is actually a good thing because if you can take it and not be affected by it, you will start to live life according to your boundaries and what you think and not being negatively affected by what other people do. This is part of the principle that you need to be ok on your own and not need anyone to complete you. You dont need your spouse, you dont need your therapist, you dont need me, you dont need your mommy, you only need you. This does not take away from the fact that people need people, what it simply means is that you dont need certain people to be there because you have mastered the skill of always getting more people in your life where you need them. That way if one or more of the people in your life let you down and obviously dont care about your needs, you can cut them off and still be ok because you have created the skill to go and find people that do care about your needs and your feelings. What I really want to drive home for you is the fact that you can only control what you focus on. Therefore, focus only on that which you can control. If you are focusing on something that you thought you could control but you realize that you really cant control it, take your focus and put it on something that you can control. Very often you will find that in order to truly get control of your mind, you have to let go of the things that you cannot control. Let go of the fact that your wife will not wash her hands before she hugs you. Let go of the fact that your husband or kids will not put baggies on their feet before they walk around in the house. It is not their problem that they dont do these things and you should not blame them. This is your problem. It does not mean that they dont love you; it simply means that they are not going to let you trespass in their boundary and make them do something against their will.

Pretty understandable isnt it? If you are married and you have OCD and you are always asking your spouse to do rituals for you, they may do them for a while because they feel bad for you, but then there will come a point where enough will be enough and they will get sick of it and refuse to give into your rituals anymore. This is a time when you will be glad that you mastered the ability to take the word no and to not take it personally. When someone says no, it means that what you are requesting of them is against their predetermined preferences and you must respect that just like God respects that. He has a desire for us to serve Him, but He does not make us serve Him, He gives us the choice to choose if we will serve Him or not. So the technique here is to get used to being told no and not taking it personally and understanding that when someone says no to you, it is because they feel that saying yes in this instance would violate their boundary. You can be happy when they say no because you know that you have shown them respect by respecting their boundary. Youll find that if you respect peoples boundaries, youll start to learn how to create your own boundary and say no to others when you feel their requests would be trespassing in your boundary as well. Learning to say no and to take no are equally important and will serve you for the rest of your life and is just another tool in our toolbox that will help you get rid of OCD permanently. I say permanently because once you master these tools and own them, they are yours for life and that is why OCD can never come back, because you will forever be equipped with these tools for the rest of your life and these tools keep OCD away. Here is another technique that you can use. What you want to do is make a new future and your past wont matter. Decide today that you will make a new future for yourself and design your life without OCD and dont include any room for OCD in this new future so that way when it tries to come back, you will feel like its invading your life and its easier to get rid of something that is invading instead of something that you claim as part of you. So with this technique, you make OCD the invader and youll start to even get offended if it tries to come

back. All you got to do is let it mill around while you focus on something else that IS part of your new planned future and eventually this OCD will fade away on its own. Once you increase your maturity to the point where you naturally dont tolerate OCD anymore, there is never going back and you will truly be free from OCD forever. You increase your maturity by learning how to take no from others and by learning how to say no to yourself and to others. You train yourself to say no to your fears and whims and you learn how to only do the things that you want to do by expressing your free will. Never again will you allow OCD to invade your boundary. As you put into practice the principles above, you will become free from OCD for the rest of your life. If you understand that all of your problems and challenges and constraints are all just figments of your imagination and truly have this revelation, your view of how life works will truly change. I remember playing chess with my fiancs brother and we were in this position where it looked like I was going to lose my queen. Her brother taunted me a bit and said, Im going to take your queen. I said, hold on lets see here Then after about ten minutes of staring at the board there was one move I did not see and then my sadness quickly turned to happiness. I moved my queen one space forward and looked at him with a smile and declared, Checkmate! If I had reacted to the seemingly losing chess position without thinking about it, I would have quit and I would have lost. However I quickly found out that the loss was in my head because that is how I perceived it at first. I had emotionally experienced the loss before it even happened! Thank God I learned to use my observing ego and step back and look at the position a different way and look for the good in it, I found it! The lesson here is that most problems that we have are truly just in our heads because we are interpreting what is around us as a losing position. If you will just take a second and step back and look for the good in your position in life right now, you will eventually find the winning move that will turn it all around in your mind, which will turn it all around in reality.

By far, the most powerful technique that I used to get rid of my OCD permanently is to defy my rituals. I remember when I was afraid to touch something because I thought it had germs on it. I would touch it more than necessary on purpose. If I was afraid to touch things, I would go out of my way to touch them just to show myself that I could rebel against OCD and as I did this, OCD lost its strength and as I kept repeating this defying of my rituals, no matter what they would morph into I became stronger and stronger until they stopped morphing because my brain was conditioned to realize that I would just defy any ritual anyway. It is like a bully who picks on you for many years and then one day you decide that you will not take it and you attack the bully back and even if the bully beats you up, you keep getting up and attacking him to the point where he flees from you. Today is the day that you need to decide to attack the bully that has been picking on you all this time by simply and elegantly defying your rituals. Yours for mental freedom, Derek J. Soto

Congratulations! You completed reading the manual, and now its time to apply it! Walk out the practical steps and you will protect whats important: you, your family, and most importantly your mental health!