Ep. 289 Whack a Mole Obsessions Your Anxiety Toolkit - Anxiety & OCD Strategies for Everyday

In This Episode: What is whack-a-mole obsessions?  Why do my obsessions keep changing?  What is the treatment for fears that keep changing? 
Episode Sponsor: This episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit is brought to you by CBTschool.com.  CBTschool.com is a psychoeducation platform that provides courses and other online resources for people with anxiety, OCD, and Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviors.  Go to cbtschool.com to learn more. 
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION 
This is Your Anxiety Toolkit - Episode 289. 
Welcome back, everybody. I am so happy to be with you again. I won’t lie. I’m still on a high (that rhymed) from the managing mental compulsion series. Oh my gosh, you guys, I am so proud of that series, that six-part series. If you didn’t listen to it, please do go back. I’ll probably tell you that for the next several podcasts, just because I am really still floating on the coattails of how amazingly, so wonderful that was. And it really seemed to help a ton of people, which is so fulfilling. 
I do love-- it’s not because of the ego piece of it, I just do love when I know I’m making an impact. It’s really quite helpful to feel like you’re making an impact. And sometimes when I’m putting out episodes, I really don’t know whether they’re helpful or not. That’s the thing about podcasts compared to social media, is with social media, if you follow me on Instagram @youranxietytoolkit or Facebook, I can get a feel based on how many comments or how many likes or how many shares. But with podcast, it’s hard to know how helpful it is. And the feedback has been amazing. Thank you, everyone who’s left reviews. What a joy, what a joy. 
What the cool thing is, since then, it’s actually created this really wonderful conversation between me and my therapist. So, for those of you who don’t know, in addition to me owning CBT School, I also own a private practice where myself and nine of my therapists were actually, now 10 extra therapists, in the process of hiring a new person. We meet once a week or more to discuss cases. And the cool thing about the mental compulsion series is it brought the coolest questions and conversations and pondering, what would this help this client? How would it help that client? These are the struggles my clients are having. Because as I kept saying, not every tool is for everybody. Some you’ll be like, “Yes, this is exactly what I needed,” and there’ll be other things where they might not resonate with you. And that’s totally fine. It doesn’t mean anything is wrong. That’s because we’re all different. But it’s really brought up a lot of questions. And so, now I’m actually going to hopefully answer some of those questions in the upcoming podcasts. 
Today, we’re actually talking about what to do when your obsessions keep changing. Because we’re talking about mental compulsions and reducing those, and that’s actually the response prevention part of treatment, what’s hard to know, like what exposures do you do for somebody whose obsessions keep changing or their fears keep flip flopping from one to the other? One week, it’s this. Next week, it’s that. And then it’s funny because a lot of clients will say, “What was a 10 out of 10 for me last week is nothing now. And now all I can think about is this other thing. I was really worried about what I said to this one person. Now, all I can think about is this rash on my arm. And the week before that, I was really upset that maybe I had sinned,” or there was another obsession. Again, it’s just what we call Whack-A-Mole. We’re going to talk about that today. 
But before we do that, we are going to do the “