The Complete Guide to Overcoming OCD by David Veale

Author:David Veale
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472106452
Publisher: Constable & Robinson

A cognitive behavioral model for the maintenance of OCD

The key to overcoming your OCD is to understand what’s keeping it going. The more you can understand the psychological mechanisms behind your OCD, the better equipped you will be to conquer it. Think of yourself as a scientist trying to cure a disease. You would need to learn a lot about the nature of the disease to find an effective cure, and then to stop it coming back. The problem for so many people suffering from OCD is that their ideas about the nature of the problem, and the solutions that follow from these ideas, are largely different from those of individuals without OCD. This is a critical point: the way you have understood your OCD so far, and the solutions you have applied, may well be a cause of your problem, actually be keeping it going.

Look at it this way. If you view the intrusive thoughts and urges that you have as the heart of the problem, it is logical for you to try to solve the problem by making efforts to respond to the intrusion and to stop or neutralize it until you feel comfortable. But intrusive thoughts, doubts, images, and urges are entirely normal; so trying to blot them out is something like trying to cure a physical illness by removing a healthy organ – a drastic ‘remedy’ that is highly likely to make the person less rather than more well.

The rest of this chapter is therefore about developing a good psychological understanding of how your symptoms of OCD are maintained, and then of the implications for treatment. Note the word ‘maintained’: we are not saying that OCD is caused by these processes, but rather that the processes are what keeps your OCD going in a series of vicious circles. As we have noted earlier in this chapter, there is a lot of controversy in medical circles about what predisposes individuals to OCD and about biological models of the disorder; but, conversely, there is a lot of agreement among researchers on the maintaining factors, and that is what we are concentrating on in this section. Breaking out of these cycles is crucial to overcoming OCD.

The first step is to understand why the self-help program being offered in this book, and the treatment model on which it is based, can help to overcome OCD, and why your solutions of avoidance, safety-seeking, and compulsions, and the meaning you attach to your intrusive thoughts, are not solving your problem, but maintaining it.

We would like to thank Steve Hayes for a good metaphor for OCD. Imagine you are placed in a field, blindfolded, and given a toolbox to carry. You are told your job is to run around this field, blindfolded. Now, unbeknown to you, in this field are a large number of deep holes. You don’t know that at first. So you start running around and sooner or later you fall into a large hole. You cannot climb out and there are no escape routes you can find.

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