https://www.drcelingelgec.com.au/

Dr Celin Gelgec, 685 Burke Road, Camberwell (2026)

28/01/2026

These routines and superstitions that athletes can have are often just a habit. It’s a way for them to focus and settle nerves. But sometimes… these routines, beliefs, and habits stop being helpful and start to become more stressful. They start feeling rigid. Such as : “I have to do this perfectly, or something bad will happen”. Or “If I don’t do my routine before I take this shot, I won’t win the point/score the goal”.

This is something I see a lot in people with OCD and high anxiety. Not because they’re not great athletes. Not because they’re dramatic. But because their brain is trying to create certainty… in an uncertain moment.

The problem is — performance doesn’t come from controlling every feeling. It comes from learning how to show up… even when you feel uncomfortable.

There’s a big difference between a routine that supports you… and a ritual that traps you. And you can’t always see the difference from the outside.

If this resonates, you’re not “weird”. You’re human. And support really can help. Get in touch with our team for support- admin@melbournewellbeinggroup.com.au

24/01/2026

Here’s an example of an extinction burst in action. Let’s say you have OCD with health related themes. This part of ERP (exposure therapy) can feel terrifying. To help resist compulsions……

You stop googling symptoms.
You resist checking your body.
You don’t ask for reassurance.

And suddenly your anxiety explodes! You experience new sensations.
scarier thoughts, and a crushing sense of dread and urgency.

You think: “What the hell have I done? I’ve made a mistake”.

But here’s the thing… you haven’t.

This phenomena is called an extinction burst.

When OCD stops getting fed by checking, scanning, seeking reassurance, Googling, or spending hours on forums and chat GPT,, the brain panics. It turns the volume up in one last attempt to get you to go back to the old safety behaviours.

OCD thinks: “If I make this feel serious enough, maybe they’ll check again.”

Feeling worse in this moment doesn’t mean ERP isn’t working.
It often means it is working and you’ll be on your way to freedom if you hold the line and stay consistent.

What keeps recovery moving is…
• Not checking your body “just once”
• Not Googling “to be sure”
• Not asking for reassurance when the fear spikes
• Letting uncertainty sit there — loudly, uncomfortably
• Repeating the same response even when your brain screams

Giving in during an extinction burst teaches OCD that escalation works. Holding the line teaches your brain that checking doesn’t work.

The last ditch spike in discomfort isn’t danger. It’s your nervous system learning a new rule. And that learning phase is uncomfortable, but it’s also temporary.

So next time you’re in a spike of anxiety, ask yourself, could this be an extinction burst and do I need to just keep holding the line?

13/01/2026

I’m going to start the new year by calling this stuff out. It’s posts and memes like this ⬆️ that cause so much distress for so many people. This post was liked and shared over 40,000 times. We need to call this out more and more. This is NOT OCD. It might be perfectionism but it’s not OCD. People with OCD experience so many different themes and struggle with their intrusive thoughts. They don’t want to engage in their compulsions, or feel they have to in order to prevent harm or unwanted consequences etc. Pictures like this that depict extreme perfectionism are a far cry from the debilitating nature of OCD. Perfectionism in its own right can also be debilitating, but we really need to stop calling it OCD. Let’s do better

21/12/2025

OCD convinces you that one more thought will fix it.
One more answer. One more check. One more moment of certainty.

And for a split second, it works.
The anxiety dips. The body exhales.

But that relief is short-lived — because OCD isn’t a problem of insight.
It’s a problem of how the brain has learned to respond to threat.

Thinking harder doesn’t weaken OCD.
It trains it.

Every time you analyse, reassure, mentally review, or seek certainty, the brain learns:
“This thought mattered. We did the right thing by engaging.”

Treatment works differently.

ERP isn’t about getting better thoughts.
ACT isn’t about feeling ready.
Both are about changing your response — allowing uncertainty, resisting compulsions, and letting anxiety rise and fall without fixing it.

That’s how the loop loosens.
Not through control.
Through willingness.

Save this if you keep trying to outthink something that was never meant to be argued with.

19/12/2025

When traumatic events happen in the world — like the tragic Bondi shootings — it’s common for OCD symptoms to flare.

Not because you’re failing treatment.
Not because you’re “going backwards”.

Because OCD is highly sensitive to threat, uncertainty, and moral danger. When the world feels unsafe or unpredictable, OCD often tries to regain control by turning the volume up on intrusive thoughts, hyper-responsibility, checking, reassurance-seeking, or mental reviewing.

For people with harm OCD, responsibility OCD, or trauma-linked OCD, these events can feel intensely personal.

The work here isn’t to make the anxiety disappear, consume more news, or prove you’re a good person.

Sometimes the most therapeutic response is noticing what OCD is doing, and choosing not to respond to it by using the exposure therapy tools you have to help you resist.

If your OCD feels louder right now, that doesn’t mean you’re weak.
It means you’re human, responding to a confronting and oftentimes messed up world. And this is often where the real work begins.

11/12/2025

Harm OCD—especially the hit-and-run type—isn’t about danger on the road. It’s about the mind demanding certainty in a world that doesn’t give any. A tiny bump, a shadow, a noise, and suddenly you’re replaying the last few metres of your drive as if you’re responsible for every possible outcome.

The urge to circle back, check mirrors, slow down, replay every moment in your head—these aren’t signs that something happened. They’re signs that OCD has hijacked your sense of responsibility.

The real work isn’t proving you didn’t hit someone.
It’s learning to tolerate the discomfort of not knowing for sure.

That’s where ERP changes everything.
Not by offering reassurance—
but by helping you build confidence in the face of uncertainty.

Harm OCD is treatable.
And you don’t have to keep turning the car around.

08/12/2025

What if OCD’s acronym has been misleading us all along?

Not the disorder.
The treatment.

Try this instead:

O — Opposite Action
Doing the thing your fear tells you to avoid. Not to feel better… but to expand what you can tolerate.

C — Consistently
Not perfectly. Not heroically. Just repeatedly — because rewiring a brain is a volume game, not a vibe.

D — Discomfort Means Change
If it feels easy, it’s probably maintenance. If it feels uncomfortable, it’s probably therapy.

So next time your brain screams for certainty, remember:
OCD isn’t just something you have. It’s a roadmap for how you heal.

03/12/2025

We don’t treat taboo-themed OCD by chasing certainty. We treat it by learning to stay with the thing your mind insists you shouldn’t feel, think, or be near. ERP isn’t about proving you’re “safe” or “good.”
It’s about practising the skill your brain avoids: sitting with discomfort without fixing it. That’s why exposures for taboo themes often look like:

1. Write and reread a detailed “intrusive thought script.”
A deliberately uncomfortable narrative describing the feared scenario as a thought (not an action), read daily without neutralising. This directly targets mental avoidance, rumination, and the urge to check for “rightness.”

2. Consume media that triggers the theme — without checking reactions.
This might be watching certain TV scenes, reading confronting storylines, or viewing age-appropriate images that evoke discomfort, while dropping all checking (e.g., “Did I feel aroused?”, “Did I want that?”, “Did I react wrongly?”).

3. Attend triggering locations or be near triggering cues.
Examples include parks, shopping centres, churches, bystanders, or specific people categories — with strict response-prevention: no scanning for urges, no monitoring your body, no avoidance of eye contact, no self-interrogation.

4. Practice “letting thoughts sit” during daily tasks.
Rather than distracting yourself when a taboo thought pops up, you intentionally continue what you’re doing — cooking, feeding a baby, talking to someone — while allowing the thought to be present without analysis.

5. Delay compulsions that feel ‘urgent.’
If your usual reaction would be to seek reassurance, confess, mentally review, or check your internal sense of morality/intent, you experiment with delaying the compulsion by 10–15 minutes. This builds uncertainty tolerance and disrupts the reassurance loop.

None of this is about morality. It’s about rewiring a brain that has mistaken discomfort for danger so as to learn that alternative pathways can exist.

The work isn’t clean or pretty — but it’s freedom-giving. And the goal isn’t certainty. It’s capacity.

01/12/2025

The most controversial thing about OCD? It forces you to face the questions the rest of the world spends its whole life avoiding. People think OCD is about germs, harm, s*x, morality, identity. It’s not.

OCD is about existence. About the unbearable weight of being a conscious human who knows that nothing — absolutely nothing — comes with guarantees.

Most people get to wander through life half-asleep, pretending they know who they are, what’s safe, what’s real, what’s right. People with OCD don’t get that luxury. They see the cracks in reality too clearly.

The mind asks:

What if I’m not who I think I am?
What if I can’t trust myself?
What if life is fragile, random, uncontrollable?
What if everything that matters could shatter in a second?
What if there is no final answer?

These are not “intrusive thoughts.”
They’re ancient, human questions — the ones philosophers have wrestled with for centuries.

The controversial part?

OCD doesn’t create these questions. It simply refuses to let you look away. And recovery isn’t about silencing them.

It’s about learning how to live alongside them without collapsing into analysis or avoidance.

To let the questions exist without demanding a resolution.

To let uncertainty simply be part of being alive.

To realise that freedom doesn’t come from finding the right answer —
it comes from discovering you can live fully even when the answer never arrives.

There’s nothing pathological about wondering who you are or what it means to be a good person or whether life is safe.
That’s humanity.

The work of OCD treatment isn’t to “fix your mind.” It’s to help you stop arguing with the universe.

25/11/2025

People with *P-OCD don’t usually walk into session and announce it.
They circle it and dance around it.
They test the waters.
They wait until the relationship with you as a clinician feels steady enough to hold the worst thing their mind has thrown at them.

Because this theme comes with a cocktail of emotions no one warns people about the guilt they feel that feels radioactive, the shame they experience that clamps their throat, and often the anger that comes up, anger at their own brain for producing something so misaligned with who they are.

And that silence?
It isn’t secrecy for secrecy’s sake. It’s fear. Fear of being misunderstood, judged, mislabelled, or dismissed by a professional who doesn’t understand OCD at this depth.

When someone finally shares this theme, it isn’t because the fear has gone. It’s because the trust has grown. And the work from there isn’t about proving anything. It’s not about proving right or wrong. It’s learning how to stop analysing the thought, stop policing bodily sensations, stop replaying memories, stop asking “What does this say about me?” It’s learning to tolerate uncertainty instead of chasing safety.

P-*OCD isn’t a moral diagnosis. It’s a fear disorder with impeccable aim. If you’re a clinician, remember, people disclose this theme only when they genuinely believe you won’t flinch. Meet it with clarity, not reassurance. And help them take back their lives by changing what they do, not what they think.

If you work with OCD, this is one of the themes you must know how to hold. If you’re needing support and supervision, follow the link in my bio to reach out.

24/11/2025

When OCD grows out of relational trauma, it doesn’t look like “just anxiety.” It looks like a nervous system that never learned what safe feels like.

For some people, OCD doesn’t begin with a random intrusive thought.
It starts much earlier — in the childhood moments where connection felt unpredictable, love felt earned, or safety depended on being watchful, perfect, compliant, or hyper-responsible.

When the people you relied on were inconsistent, critical, unavailable, chaotic, or easily overwhelmed… your brain didn’t learn “I am safe.”
It learned “I must monitor, prevent, fix, anticipate, and protect.”

And that’s a perfect recipe for OCD.

Not because trauma causes OCD. But because relational trauma wires the system to expect threat — especially threat from the self.

So checking becomes “Don’t let anyone down.”

Reassurance-seeking becomes “Please don’t leave.”

Perfectionism becomes “If I get it wrong, the connection is gone.”

Intrusive thoughts become “I must control myself to stay safe in relationships.”

And suddenly the compulsions aren’t rituals…. They’re survival strategies you learned decades ago.

Here’s the truth:
You’re not “doing OCD wrong.”
You’re reenacting an attachment style in the language of symptoms.

The work isn’t only ERP.
It’s learning how to feel safe in your body, safe with others, and safe without. It’s repairing the internal template that taught you your worth depends on getting it right.

When we treat OCD and the relational wounds underneath it?
People stop surviving… and start living.

22/11/2025

Why does contamination OCD feel so powerful?
Because the brain isn’t actually terrified of germs… it’s terrified of uncertainty. The more you wash, check, clean or sanitise, the more you teach your brain that the danger is real.

ERP flips that script.

Swipe to read about five exposure ideas that help retrain the brain to tolerate the feeling of risk without performing compulsions. Alternatively keep reading for a brief summary below ⬇️.

Touch a “mildly dirty” surface and delay washing.

Handle something that feels contaminated and eat a snack with the same hands.

Use a public toilet without excessive precautions.

Drop an object on the floor, pick it up, and keep using it.

Touch a trolley, petrol pump, cash, or bin lid and resist sanitising.

None of this is about proving it’s safe. It’s about building your tolerance for uncertainty, discomfort and the urge to neutralise.

If you’re a clinician wanting to improve your ERP work—or someone dealing with contamination OCD—start small, go slow, and be consistent. Your brain learns through repetition, not reassurance.

Dr Celin Gelgec

28/01/2026

24/01/2026

13/01/2026

21/12/2025

19/12/2025

11/12/2025

08/12/2025

03/12/2025

01/12/2025

25/11/2025

24/11/2025

22/11/2025

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