Hey guys and welcome to episode 114 of the OCD stories.com

podcast.

And this episode I got on Catherine Benfield.

Catherine is behind the project Taming Olivia.com. Now Catherine talks and blogs about her experience

with Perrinatal OCD. So that's the word perinatal basically means a few weeks

before or after giving birth to a child.

So she's had OCD, the majority of her life from what she explains,

but it really kind of hit home literally when she gave birth to her son and

things kind of went down from there and that kind of led then into her recovery

which she gets into in this show. Although Catherine mainly shares her story as a way of spreading awareness she spends most of her time focusing on recovery.

Taming Olivia was set up as a way of documenting the strategies that have helped her

on her road to recovery with a special focus on creativity, self-love and self-compassion.

She now counts herself as about 90% recovered from OCD.

And the reason I share that is because in this episode,

we get on quite a bit on self-love and self-compassion.

And, you know, when I was at my, doing my talk at Chrissy's event in

Denver you know I asked Catherine if I could share a bit that she said on this

podcast just about self-love and how it was so important in her recovery. Obviously the things like

ERP a little bit of mindfulness and act helped stay with like the core tools and

without them you know she wouldn't be where she is today but she first

needed to learn to love herself again because she obviously going through the

things she was thinking she felt a lot of shame and just didn't really like

...