Brain Lock: Free Yourself From Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior by Jeffrey M. Schwartz, Beverly Beyette Page A

broke down and cried. Back home, these blasphemous thoughts piled one on another. He began having thoughts that the holy water is “shit water,” the Bible a “shit book,” the churches “shit houses.” In Mass, he would imagine the holy statues naked. In his OCD-invaded brain, priests had become “scoundrels.” The mere sight of a church made him cringe.
    In desperation, Christopher checked himself into a psychiatric hospital, where he was diagnosed as paranoid psychotic and questioned about being “demonically possessed.” It would be two years before he was correctly diagnosed as having OCD.
    Christopher is one of the patients who has found the use of taperecorded loops a useful tool in performing the Relabel step. This simple and effective technique was developed by Dr. Paul Salkovskis and Dr. Isaac Marks in England. Anyone can practice it at home. All you need are answering machine tape loops—thirty seconds, sixty seconds, and three minutes—a cassette player, and headphones. The idea is to record the obsession, repeating the thought over and over, and then to listen to it repeatedly, perhaps forty-five minutes at a time. The tape will keep relooping over itself, so there is no need to rewind.
    Christopher suggests writing complex obsessions down in shortstory form before taping, creating a scenario in which the dreaded consequences actually come true. For example, “If you have scrupulosity and religious obsessions, have God strike you dead and throw you into the fire at the end. If you obsess about committing a crime, have the police arrest you and make you spend the rest of your life in jail. If you fear dirt and germs, make yourself look like you fell in a pool of mud or came down with a deadly germ-spread disease and died. The important thing is to make the obsession look as stupid and ridiculous as possible.” On a scale of one to ten, playing the tapes should cause anxiety in the five or six range at the beginning of a forty-five-minute session.
    Another tip from Christopher: “I prefer using one of those bigboom boxes. I found that, with the small players, I would often be tempted to get up and do things because it’s very easy to carry those things around. That’s not very effective for behavior therapy. A big boom box kind of makes you sit there.” When privacy is important, of course, you can use headphones.
    The idea of the tape loops is to create anxiety that will peak and then ebb. The person listens to the tape perhaps twice a day for several days, perhaps as long as a week. “Eventually,” Christopher promises, “you’ll get to the point where you can’t stand even listening to it, not because it’s too anxiety-provoking but because it’s too boring. That’s why it works.” It’s also helpful, he believes, to keep a chart of your anxiety levels at ten-or fifteen-minute intervals. After some days have passed and the anxiety level is at zero, it’s time to rerecord the tape, this time in more anxiety-provoking language, and then do another tape, working toward recording the most anxiety-provoking aspects of the obsession.
    Christopher cautions, “Don’t expect that after these sessions you will no longer have the obsessive thought. It’s just that you will more easily dismiss it from your mind and, eventually, it should decrease.”
    Before behavior therapy, Christopher had literally dozens of obsessions, including violent thoughts about flying knives. “I used to have these horrible, wild fits where I would take a pillow and hit my face into it really hard and scream at the top of my lungs, punching the pillow or punching the couch. The OCD was so bad. It was terrible.” At first, working out his anxieties with the tape loop was no picnic. “There were times when the anxiety shot through my body so bad that I felt like a woman giving birth…that much pain. I would be sweating, and my arms and hands would be tingling. That doesn’t happen anymore.”
    “DEAR