ReImagine Therapy

ReImagine Therapy I'm Jessics Hayes and my company is ReImagine Therapy, where I provide Cognitive Behavioural Therapy

Free 15 minute phone consultation before any assessment appointment to make sure I can help with what you're looking for support with.

25/12/2025

Just a little message to anyone struggling with OCD and/or intrusive thoughts today.

23/12/2025

Exposure alert ⚠️

This one is for all of the parents out there that get scary intrusive s£%ual thoughts or taboo feelings about your own baby/child/children.

It is really common to be so panicked and disgusted by these thoughts that you try to protect them (because you love them and would never hurt them) by withdrawing from them, particularly whej it comes to affection.

Pr perhaps you are still affectionate but white knuckle it, monotor your hand placement, monitor every point of contact, monitor your own physical responses, and then ruminate and memory check after every occasion where a huge or time alone with them takes place.

This is a little video to prompt you to hug them anyway. Your thoughts and feelings here do not mean that you are a threat to them or a bad person, and I'll discuss that in another post or on a live if that will help.

For now, this is your prompt to go and cuddle your little ones and try to hold off on the extra compulsions if you can.

Save this video for when you need it, because these thoughts in particular seem to make people too scared to reach out for help, which means people suffer with them in silence for way too long.

21/12/2025

This OCD exposure is all about letting yourself watch things because you are interested in it, not choosing the things you what to avoid or check an OCD theme.

This can be relevant for harm OCD, pOCD, soOCD, and relationship OCD, to name a few.

You likely will get thoughts and feelings that you want to monitor. If you find it hard to notice the thoughts and feelings and redirect your attention to the show, check out my previous dropping anchor video and save it for reference. I will do a review of that technique soon too.

Save the video, follow along and have a go.

21/12/2025

So why didn't I throw my toddler across the room and scream at him? Did I get my husband to take him for his own safety? Or spend time ruminating over the thought to check what it meant? Or did i sit on my hands to stop myself from acting on the strong urge? These would be compulsions.

No. I didn't do it because those intrusive thoughts and urges did NOT mean that i was at risk of doing it. My system was just overwhelmed. And I love my son, I trust that and so know I wouldn't want to actually hurt him.

I may have held him a little less gently when frustrated and didn't respond as calmly, but that was because my whole body had tensed up. I could have drowned in mum guilt about that.

Instead of panicking about the thoughts and images I switched positions, standing up with him to try and reset us. I also got him to agree to medicine (finally) and used the trip to retrieve it to calm myself a little away from the noise and to go to the loo and brush my teeth. Then I came back in much less overwhelmed and purposely relaxed my body to cuddle him more. I put a barrier between him and parts of my body that it was overwhelming for him to touch.

And we did it. We eventually settled and slept.

I share this to try and show you how normal these things are and how even therapists get overwhelmed and react in non-ideal ways, and to show how i get back out of it again. The key point here is that although i know I could have done things differently last night to have prevented some of this from happening, I am not kicking myself and am trying to be compassionate about why it happened to be aware of making it less likely to happen next time.

Can you treat yourself compassionately too? When you react in a non-ideal human way, and when you get intrusive thoughts and urges that make you uncomfortable?

19/12/2025

Exposure of the day today is for anyone who checks things just in case.

This is to get you into the habit of only checking whether you have done something wrong if you have visible evidence in the here-and-now that you need to.

For the texts and emails, start off with ones to people that you feel rhe most comfortable with so it feels less 'risky' to make mistakes, then build your way up.

This can then help with checking urges for other OCD themes and help with bigger exposures for those.

What do you think?

15/12/2025

Today's exposure for your OCD is for those with fears relating to mental health or su***de.

The tricky thing about this theme is that the more anxious and overwhelmed you become about it, the more believable it feels that you are about to have a huge mental health crisis.

It really links into not trusting your ability to cope too, so we want to show your brain that;
1: You can cope with anxiety
2: You can keep yourself safe

This means confronting avoidance and sitting with the scary thoughts that your OCD wants you to delve into.

As always, the anxiety will likely rise at first and your intrusive thoughts might try to convince you to listen, but we want to sit with those feelings and not delve into the thoughts if possible. Notice that I tied this one to a potential value to help others, as values-based actions can be a good focus when you have OCD.

Can you think of any other compulsions for this theme that might be good to try?

15/12/2025

Send this to anyone on medication right now, especially if it helps their mental health or ADHD, and is necessary to get through the pressure and stress of Christmas.

Let me highlight this to you to try to give you a helping hand for your OCD, anxiety, sleep disorder, depression, or anything else that can make this time of year particularly hard.

Number 1 on the self-care list should always be taking care of our basic needs to give our body the fuel and energy it needs to feel safe and taken care of, which then makes it possible to add in things that allow us to regulate ourselves and have boundaries and feel joy.

Basic care needs involves eating, drinking, and sleeping as regularly as you can. It also includes taking any medication you are prescribed for your physical or mental health regularly.

So let's kick off this festive period by setting everyone's basic needs up as best we can, and then I will share more tips and tricks for this time of year after that.

For now, check your own medications before things start to shut over the holidays and send this to your friends and families to do too ❤️

11/12/2025

Health anxiety exposure idea for anybody struggling with breast cancer fears.

This is because a lot of my clients with this obsession start to alternate between obsessively checking and completely avoiding touching or looking at the area.

The aim is to sit with the discomfort and urge to check whilst letting sensations around rhe area happen on purpose.

People with this fear can also do things like avoid looking at their chests in the mirror, avoid looking down in the shower etc. and my perinatal clients who are breastfeeding can be really triggered by their feeding when they are so used to avoiding touching and looking at the area too.

Have a go if you think it will fit with what you need to do as part of your ERP work, and save the video for reference ❤️

10/12/2025

OCD can impact so many things that fall outside of that key theme.

The ability to risk assess can be one of them.

OCD intrusive thoughts often accompany big emotions such as anxiety or shame, and coupling a big emotion with a thought can instantly make a brain go into battle mode, kicking that fight-or-flight into gear.

When this happens, it is easy to fall into doing compulsions or avoiding things to try and feel safe.

A difficulty with this is that leads to that brain thinking that all of the 'threats' are immediate and dangerous, and treats them all just as vital.

This means thst thought that you might not really want to be with your partner, or the image of you harming someone with the kitchen knife, are treated the same as when you are about to fall off a huge cliff.

Over time, that same brain will build a shortcut (because brains are lazy and like to do that) where all potential risks are actively prevented.

So, we want to start by questioning this risk assessment. Introducing a pause before acting on those compulsions or that avoidance, to start to interrupt this automatic process.

When you have the pause, that is when it becomes more possible to choose an alternative response.

Save this little tip if you think it cam help you and pop me a like if you would like more tips like this ❤️

10/12/2025

Exposure example for your OCD ERP.

As promised, here's the first video with an idea for Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) starting points, or a behavioural experiment for your OCD if this is the approach you are using.

This can be helpful for POCD and SO-OCD in particular, if you have been avoiding looking at others in public because of a fear of intrusive thoughts or physiological responses when you do.

The idea is to observer everyone closely, no matter their age or gender, and to purposely have fun with using these observations too.

We want to send a message to your brain that noticing things is not dangerous, no matter what thoughts or feelings you have when you do.

It can also show you that you can cope with the anxiety of having these thoughts too.

Does this feel like something you can try? Let me know what you'd like to see next.

09/12/2025

Keep your eyes peeled: mixed in with my other content, there will be some videos you are going to want to watch, save and share.

I will include some of my favourite examples of exposures for Exposure and Response Prevention starters with my OCD clients.

I often hear that people aren't sure how to do exposure work for some types of OCD, from both therapists and people with OCD. So I want to help to inspire you.

These are some starting points for exposures you might do alone or in collaboration with a therapist.

You might have heard about how I usually work with OCD, that I first take the time to really understand my client's OCD specifically, to understand what is fuelling it and what fears and traits it links to, before doing ERP. I also often frame my exposures as more of a behavioural experiment to test out what the OCD fear is in contrast to what we think could be going on instead. So the exposures and experiments work best if tailored to your specific OCD, but I am hoping this can inspire people to adapt them to be relevant to what they need.

Let me know what you think and comment on here if you have specific themes or fears that you would like to see featured.

For some of the mental based fears and compulsions, exposures can often involve doing things you have been avoiding, and learning to drop anchor before doing these things can really help.

09/12/2025

I always say about waiting for evidence of risk that you can see and hear in the here-and-now before acting, but what if there is evidence?

Chances are, your brain will still push you to do more things than are proportionate to that risk. Your anxiety or OCD will try to convince you to do more and more to manage a risk or problem, and it will feel really tempting to do those things.

But the more you do, the more your brain loses sight of what the actual level of risk is, because you are treating it as a huge one. Not only this, but doing so much makes you lose sight of the things that are actually helping with the problem because so many other things are going on.

If I did more than I did in this case, I would forget that I am actually keeping him safe and preventing further harm coming to him by keeping up with his medication, keeping his donut on and getting him reviewed after a couple of days.

This can relate to any risk that your anxiety and OCD conjure up;

- Over-checking your chest and monitoring every physical sensation making you forget that you are staying safe by doing regular checks and noticing changes anyway in health anxiety. This might also come into play when constantly checking when you already have a scan or appointment booked and are therefore already sorting the issue.

- Saying sorry to someone if you upset them but then constantly ruminating and reviewing the memory makes you lose sight of the fact you have fixed the issue.

- Checking plugs making you lose sight of already having safe appliances and smoke alarms.

So this is why we want to pause and assess what logically matches the level of risk when it comes to these behaviours, even if we can think of more things that we 'could' be doing.

Can you think of times where your responses make even a current problem seem bigger?

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