Danielle Thornton, an OCD recovery coach, identifies three ways therapy can become a compulsion: endlessly discussing intrusive thoughts without doing exposure work, seeking reassurance that feeds OCD, and involving your partner to resolve doubts that are actually OCD symptoms. Real treatment means practicing ERP, not talking about the thoughts.
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Welcome back. My name is Danielle Thornton. I'm an anxiety and OCD recovery coach who has recovered from multiple OCD subsets, and I've been helping others get to the lifetime recovery stage since 2018. So today we're going to talk about three ways to know that therapy might be a compulsion for you. So the first one is that you're going to the therapy session and you're talking about your intrusive thoughts and doubts the whole time without doing any erp. Now, this isn't your fault. You may not realize that this is a compulsion or that this is making things worse. But if you're spending any amount of time talking about your thoughts or your obsessions, but you're not learning how to respond to them with exposure and response prevention, which the response prevention would be to stop giving them attention, then, then it's likely making your OCD worse. The second problem with therapy and how it might be feeding into your compulsions and your OCD is that your therapist is giving you reassurance. So anytime that you're getting reassurance for your doubts and thoughts, meaning the person's trying to make you feel better or give you reassurance for that particular thought or theme, that is a problem. Outside of ocd, there's nothing wrong with reassurance. We all need reassurance sometimes. But giving an OCD intrusive thought reassurance is only going to feed the ocd. And OCD needs more and more and more reassurance. So it's going to make OCD stronger and you're going to get more intrusive thoughts. This is why ERP works so well, is because when OCD is trying to give you thoughts and doubts, when you respond with uncertainty and not needing to know the answer, the thoughts go away. Because this part of the brain no longer has to warn you or give you the thoughts because you're not engaging with them. That is the simple answer. And the third sign that therapy is a compulsion is if you struggle with relationship OCD and you are taking your partner to therapy in order to fix your relationship, but when the problems really are stemming from OCD and your doubts, which are often highly exaggerated and sometimes unrealistic, because OCD is making you look through a lens of negativity, essentially, then this may be feeding your OCD and making it worse. This is really common for people with relationship ocd. They think that if we go to therapy and fix the relationship, fix those things that you think are incompatibilities or that you need to change about your partner, it's actually typically going to make OCD worse. It's going to frustrate your partner because the problem is ocd, it's not necessarily your partner, and could lead to problems. Now, I'm not saying that nobody who has relationship OCD ever needs couples therapy, but the really important thing is you've got to take care of the OCD first. You've got to work on yourself and eliminate the OCD from your life before you can actually see clearly, which when we get to the recovery stage for ocd, all of our thoughts and doubts fade away and they don't bother us anymore. Then we can see what's truly an issue and what was OCD making things bigger than what they really are. It's really important to understand that when you're going to get help, it's important to get the right help, because if we're not getting the right help, then we're usually contributing more to the OCD and making it worse. And the right help for OCD is exposure and response prevention. So in the next video, we're going to talk about seven signs that you're actually recovering from ocd, that you're on that recovery journey. So check out that next video. And if you are looking for help with ocd, please check out the link in my bio or in the description below. And I have several programs, a bunch of new programs coming up in the next couple of months to help you get to that recovery stage. And not only get to the recovery stage, but stay in that recovery stage for life. Okay, I've done it. You can, too. And I hope to talk to you very soon.
