In short, yes. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is an extremely common and effective way of treating Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), and can account for the short and long term benefits felt by those with OCD. However, before going into any treatment option it’s important to have a good understanding about how it works and why it can work for your concern. Once you have a plan created with one of our qualified professional therapists, this will be thoroughly explained to you. However, as a broader starting point, here is a bit more about OCD and how CBT works to treat it.
What is OCD?
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, much like a lot of mental health conditions, does not have one single road map to demonstrate what it’s like to experience it. The term ‘OCD’ gets thrown around a lot. We all know someone (or maybe say it in jest to ourselves) who references it to describe their preference for very clean spaces, or having certain things in order. While these are components to OCD, the actual condition is generally a lot more severe than wanting your shoes to align in the cupboard. With that analogy, however, it could be OCD if having a shoe sit askew, even marginally, can disrupt your ability to function through your day.
OCD creates intrusive, distressing negative thoughts that are often incessant and damaging to functioning through life. There are multiple forms of OCD that fall into these main categories (however, they can overlap):
- Overchecking various things (such as lightswitches, power switches, appliances)
- Contamination (believing things are dirtier or hazardous beyond rational concern)
- Symmetry and order (believing objects, or even your person – eyebrows, hairline etc. must be symmetrical or in order to avoid something bad happening)
- Hoarding (visceral inability to throw anything out)
What is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy?
When it comes to OCD, the treatment draws on two evidence backed techniques, Exposure and Response Prevention Therapy (ERP) and Cognitive Therapy (CT).
Exposure and Response Prevention Therapy
Exposure is a therapy strategy focussed on having you face your fears through habituation – repeated exposure to a stimulus that typically produces a behavioural and sensory response in someone. The idea is that this exposure will lessen the response over time until the feared object or situation is neutralised to the point of no longer creating a response.
This is effective as a treatment in a controlled and managed environment of a professional, and not as a DIY option. In fact, if not approached through a professional lens, the method can be counterproductive and produce a stronger fear or response to the object or event. The fear exposure can, but does not necessarily need to, be done through tactile or physical means, it is just as effective through imagining a given object or situation.
The ‘Response Prevention’ component of ERP is to address the anxiety or emotional response to an event, that is most helpful for people who engage in ritualised, repetitive and compulsive behaviours. The compulsion is a common ‘remedy’ to the fear and anxiety, where you believe these behaviours will neutralise the response and so repetitively completes certain behaviours or tasks. Response Prevention works on removing the ‘reward’ (taking away the fear and anxiety) of the action, and so making it redundant and unnecessary to you.
For example, the ‘reward’ of flicking a light switch on and off is that the action stops the fear and anxiety of what will happen once you walk in or out of a room without doing it. Once you no longer fear the ‘bad’ that might happen by doing an ordinary action, there is no reward in doing the repetitive action.
Cognitive Therapy
Cognitive Therapy helps identify and change behavioural and mental patterns that cause anxiety, negative behaviours and distress. It aims to challenge unhelpful thoughts through learned practical strategies to help you work through intrusive thoughts that make you believe in heightened responsibility, with undue importance and significance, to stop often unlikely catastrophic events. CT helps rewire these thoughts and recognise them as irrational or unrequired, and confront the compulsive behaviour by responding in more balanced ways.