Hey guys, welcome to episode 67 of the OCD stories

dot com podcast.

Now in this episode I got Professor Paul Gilbert on the show.

Now Paul is not an OCD expert, however he is a mental health expert, he's a clinical psychologist, and he's worked within the NHS for his entire career, I believe,

although he started out as an economist and he retrained.

And he's written and edited about 20 books, including one book which I'm reading at

the minute called The Compassionate Mind. And he's been looking at compassion for many years and he created the compassion

focused therapy a CFT and this isn't used for OCD I believe believe Professor David Ville is looking at doing some studies around it

and how it could be integrated with OCD treatments such as CBT and ERP and I thought this is interesting because I'm always looking at other things that people can bolt on to their exposures or the CBT.

Whether that's accepted the commitmentT, whether that accepts therapy or compassion in this case.

And compassion is a life skill that I think we all need as human beings, we all need to give to others and we all need to give to ourselves, you know,

part of struggling with any kind of mental illness or any mental difficulties

is that we can be tough on ourselves.

And if we can be real compassionate

and kind of, as we talk about in this episode,

nurture that compassionate voice,

because the voice, the fearful voice is always

something bad's gonna to happen if we can

nurture a compassionate voice of saying come on you've got this you can do this

exposure they're kind of an internal cheerleader you know we might just find it easier to be OCD.

And general life issues, which is what this podcast is about as well.

So we get into kind of compassion, what it is, why it's helpful. Paul shares his story and yeah, he gives some good exercises that I believe you guys can implement to help be more mindful and more compassionate towards yourself and others

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