Why your OCD Therapy Didn’t Work
If you’re motivated to work on your OCD and willing to face challenges, your OCD is treatable. If you’ve gone to therapy and it didn’t work, there’s a reason for that which can be fixed. The most common reason for a lack of results is the use of a treatment modality that doesn’t work on OCD.
Why didn’t therapy work for me?
Talk Therapy: This is the most common reason for the failure of treatment that I’ve seen. Talk therapy is perhaps the most common form of therapy out there, and as the name suggests, it’s all talk. Sessions are mostly about a patient venting and receiving empathy from their clinician. Because venting can be cathartic and talk therapists provide tons of reassurance, the sessions can feel relieving but do not provide any long term change. In fact, because reassurance is such a huge component of talk therapy, it can often exacerbate the problem.
Psychodynamic/Psychoanalytic Therapy: A large part of this group of therapies focuses on exploring issues on a “deeper” level by analyzing the meaning behind a patient’s thoughts. As anyone with OCD has experienced, trying to “figure out” the thoughts often makes them more intense and harder to deal with.
Cognitive Therapy (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy/CBT): I included CBT in parenthesis because while the Behavior Therapy part of CBT is effective, many CBT clinicians just apply the Cognitive Therapy side of this treatment modality. Cognitive Therapy involves identifying illogical thinking patterns in your mind and challenging them. However, this often misused to try to prove that the thoughts are illogical and the fears won’t happen, which is just another form of compulsing.
Did my clinician treat me with an effective therapy in an ineffective way?
Did you undergo a gold standard treatment such as Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) or Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and not get the results you were looking for? The reason your treatment may have been ineffective is a more complex topic and will require an explanation of what effective therapy looks like. Let’s take a deeper dive in the next article.