Episode 5: Talk Therapy & OCD: Paying to Ritualize.
https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/simone-aliya/episodes/5--Talk-Therapy-and-OCD-Paying-to-Ritualize-e3095ro
Today I want to discuss “talk therapy” for OCD and how it can end up being an expensive form of ritualization. Saying the words “talk therapy for OCD” feels a little weird because, in my opinion, it doesn’t exist. This kind of therapy doesn’t treat OCD and can even make symptoms worse by reinforcing rumination, confession, reassurance-seeking, and the endless need to figure things out. If you have OCD, you’re doing some or all of this anyway, so why pay to do it and amplify your obsessions?
I’ve been there. It was 2017, and I sat on a couch in the office of a very well-meaning therapist I’ll call Penny. Like Penny’s socks, the decorative pillows on her couch were neon and sequined. I ran my fingers back and forth over the sequins on one of the pillows. How absurd, I thought. Who wanted a pillow like that? I distinctly remember shifting my focus from the pillow to Penny’s bookshelf, where I saw a small statue of a vagina and books like David Friedman’s A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis. My partner at the time had recommended I see Penny because I was tormented by disturbing, intrusive thoughts about things like death and sex. Primarily a sex therapist, Penny had also listed that she works with OCD on the long list of things she claimed to treat. At that point, I had decent insight into my OCD, and my logical, rational self already felt pretty sure OCD was responsible for my preoccupations with the idea that I might be a sexual deviant and with the existential question of what happened after death. But “pretty sure” is about as sufficient for OCD as it is in a court of law, right? I’d determined that if Penny couldn’t confirm that what I was experiencing was OCD or treat me on that level, she could at least help me figure out if I was normal and somehow help me restore my inner peace. Or maybe she somehow knew what happened after we died, and she could reassure me that it wasn’t just nothingness forever. Nothing to lose, right?
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