Real and urgent
A fire in your kitchen.
Act now.
The Wider Life Model™
Wide life, quiet mind.
The Wider Life Model™ is the framework I use to organize treatment. The idea is simple. OCD shrinks your life, and treatment widens it again, so obsessions lose their grip and there's more room for what you love.
It's a framework, not a new therapy. It draws on evidence-based approaches like ERP, I-CBT, ACT, DBT skills and mindfulness, and it gives us a shared language for the work. I built it around OCD first, and I adapt it for health anxiety, panic and phobias.
At the centre
The wide state.
OCD narrows everything: your attention, your mind, your body, your time, even your sense of who you are. The wide state is the opposite. It's a felt sense that life is okay enough right now. You feel safe enough, you trust that you can handle what comes, and you're present in your life instead of stuck in your head.
“Things are okay enough, and so am I. Whatever comes up, I can deal with it when it's time.”
In everyday words, it's feeling content, settled and able to breathe. Normal, reasonable worry can still be there.
Felt safety
The world feels safe enough. You're not on guard.
Self-trust
You trust your senses, judgment and resilience, and you remember who you are at your core.
Presence
You're out of your head and in your life.
These three feed each other. Feeling safe lets you be present, being present lets you use your senses, and your senses are the evidence that good enough certainty relies on.
| Area | Narrow | Wide |
|---|---|---|
| Attention | Locked onto the threat or doubt | Open to what's around you |
| Mind | Up in your head, overthinking | Present, using your senses |
| Body | On guard, dysregulated | Settled, able to breathe |
| Urgency | Everything feels like it must be solved now | Problems can wait their turn, and many aren't problems at all |
| Self | Doubting who you are | Remembering your values and history |
| Time | Hours lost to rituals and rumination | Time and energy free for living |
| Life | Shrinking through avoidance | Room for people, plans, travel and meaning |
What the wide state isn't
- Not happinessIt doesn't need joy. It's the floor joy grows from.
- Not certaintyIt makes good enough certainty feel good enough.
- Not freedom from all worryNormal, reasonable worry can coexist with it. You can have a real problem and still be in the wide state, because you can hold it without false urgency.
- Not reliefThe calm after a compulsion is borrowed: it depends on having checked, and it makes the next doubt stronger. The wide state is something you rest in, not something you earn through a ritual.
- Not calm inside a shrunk lifeCalm that depends on avoiding every trigger is avoidance. The real wide state holds when triggers are present.
- Not permanentPeople move between narrow and wide all the time. The goal is making the wide state easier to reach, quicker to return to and harder to knock over.
Good enough certainty
Chasing a guarantee that doesn't exist.
People with OCD and related anxieties can spend hours trying to reach guaranteed safety and certainty. Neither exists. Very little in life is certain.
Good enough certainty is how most people live. It means reading your actual situation with your senses and common sense, then acting on what's in front of you instead of on “what if.” It also means noticing real danger when it's there.
The bridge. It looks sturdy, people are crossing it, it was built a few years ago, and there are no warnings. That's good enough. If there were a warning sign, not crossing would be good judgment, not OCD.
The key questionAre you anxious because there's a fire in front of you, or because a fire is possible and you can't guarantee it won't happen?
Real but not urgent
A bill to pay. A conversation to have.
Deal with it in its own time, without dropping everything.
Not actually a problem
Germs on your phone. An intrusive thought. A normal body sensation.
Recognize there's nothing to fix.
OCD's trick is taking something from the third group and making it feel like the first. Real urgency comes from evidence in front of you, and one action settles it. False urgency comes from a possibility, and no action ever settles it, which is why checking leads to more checking. It's not a problem until it's a problem.
Self-trust
Remembering who you are.
Self-trust has two sides. The first is trusting your toolbox: your senses, judgment, common sense and coping skills. “I could get lice. It's unlikely. And if I did, I know what to do.”
The second is remembering who you are. Most people with OCD live careful, values-driven lives. That's exactly why obsessions feel so disturbing: the thoughts go against everything you value. OCD makes you forget your values, your character and your history, and therapy reconnects you with that evidence.
Access, not possession. You usually still have self-trust. What you lose is access to it when you're stressed or depleted, and the wide state helps you get that access back.
Your wide mind
The true you
Your wide mind is aware, secure and present. It uses your senses and common sense, and it remembers who you are, what you value and how you've actually behaved throughout your life. It's the voice of the wide state.
Naming the OCD
“That sounds like Bob.”
Give your OCD a name, like Bob or Karen, to create distance from it. The thoughts become Bob's, not yours: “Bob is loud today.” “I don't take orders from someone who has lied to me time and time again.”
In the moment, the question becomes: is this Bob talking, or my wide mind? Naming works by refusing to engage, not by arguing. We don't debate Bob. We stop negotiating.
How recovery moves
Three steps, in order.
Each step needs the one before it. The questions below are the ones we come back to in session.
Tolerating
Stop avoiding, do the thing, and learn you can get through the discomfort.
“Can you do the thing and get through it?”
Right-sizing
Check the threat against what you know about yourself, your senses and the context, so it shrinks to its real size.
“Is this threat as big as it feels? What do you know that argues against it?”
Not worth it
The obsession may still show up, but obeying it isn't worth what it costs you.
“Given how big it really is, is obeying it worth what it costs you?”
Why the order matters. “Not worth it” only lands once the threat is right-sized. And underneath all three steps, we check whether something in your situation is making the threat genuinely real right now. If so, that's a real problem to solve, not OCD to argue down.
The loop
A wider life quiets OCD. A quieter OCD widens life.
The wide state and OCD feed each other in both directions, and you can enter the loop from either side. ERP and I-CBT work from the OCD side, freeing up capacity. Widening works from the other side, loosening the obsession's grip. Doing both at once is what makes the work integrative.
The downward loop
OCD shrinks life
- OCD takes hours of checking, worrying and ruminating.
- There's less time and energy for connection, rest and meaning.
- You narrow.
- OCD grows louder.
The upward loop
Let's widen it
- Being in the wide state quiets OCD.
- Quieter OCD frees up time, energy and capacity.
- That capacity goes into widening further.
- OCD quiets further.
Many people notice their OCD gets quieter when they travel. There's less load, more connection, a slower pace and more ease. Then it often comes back with the usual stress at home. That's the loop at work.
Four conditions make the wide state easier to reach.
Body
Sleep, eating well, rest, and treating physical illness and pain.
Connection
Love, friends, reciprocal relationships and people who feel safe.
Meaning
Hobbies, effort that leads to reward, and things you care about.
Manageable load
A job that isn't overwhelming, downtime, and a life with room in it.
The goal isn't a perfect score on all four. It's building a buffer, so the wide state is easier to reach and harder to knock over.
The WIDER pathway
A simple way to organize treatment.
WIDER is the “how” of the Wider Life Model™. It maps out how treatment usually unfolds, and it gives us a structure to come back to, whichever approaches we're using. The wide state and good enough certainty are the “why.”
“The goal is not a perfectly certain life. It's a life you can show up for, even when uncertainty comes along.”
Work out the pattern
Map out the cycle of fear, doubt and rituals, what keeps it going and where you're chasing guaranteed safety or certainty.
Identify what matters
Reconnect with your core values and your history, and picture what a wider life looks like for you.
Do the brave practice
Face feared thoughts, sensations and situations step by step, practicing good enough certainty instead of checking, reassurance or rituals. With OCD, that includes naming it and listening to your wide mind.
Expand into real life
Widen your life through your body, connection, meaning and a manageable load, in the places and moments where freedom matters most to you.
Reinforce the learning
Protect your progress when life gets stressful, with steadying skills and support between sessions.
The steps overlap and repeat. Most people move back and forth as new themes come up, and that's part of the work, not a setback.
Beyond OCD
Adapted for what you're facing.
I built the model around OCD first. The same ideas carry into the other things I treat, adapted to what each one needs.
OCD
The full model: your wide mind and naming the OCD, good enough certainty, exposure and response prevention, and widening your life.
Health anxiety
Health anxiety runs on doubt, checking and reassurance, so the model fits closely. We add one trusted doctor and scheduled check-ups instead of symptom-driven visits, and agree on when a symptom really needs attention.
Panic disorder
CBT and interoceptive exposure do the core work: safely bringing on the sensations that feel dangerous until they stop setting off panic. The wide state helps you keep the gains and widen back into what panic took away.
Phobias
Exposure does most of the work. The model supports it by right-sizing the threat with your senses and the facts, then widening back into what the phobia shrank. Emetophobia often behaves like OCD and can follow the OCD plan.
Ready to take the first step?
Request a free 20-minute consultation. If I'm not the right fit, I'll help you find someone who is.