Damián Ruiz
When a person suffers from an obsessive disorder, of whatever type (contamination, sexual orientation, fear of harming someone, paedophilia, cleanliness, etc.), depending on the degree of intensity with which they are affected, they usually have a very high level of psychological suffering and worry.
Therefore, the first and most important thing is to accept that obsessive symptomatology does not arise voluntarily from the person, nor from conscious thought, but is an irrational element derived from a high level of unchanneled anxiety, a kind of autonomous and unconscious factor.
Because beyond the possible genetic predisposition, what I do know, after years of therapeutic experience, is that there has been a trigger at some point in the patient’s life, usually in childhood or adolescence, a specific traumatic event or one spaced out over time that generated a blockage of instincts and emotions. This blockage led the person to an excessive level of repression and adaptation to circumstances in order to avoid negative situations.
That is to say, he learned to live without true desires and the spontaneity that accompanies them in order to, trapped in fear, try to ensure that nothing bad would happen.
From this point of view, what we have to do, in short, is to give back to the person the freedom to be themselves by recovering their instincts (this is what makes us interact in our habitat in a more open way), their emotions and the connection with their true essence as people and, therefore, to overcome, I repeat, fear and guilt (an emotion attached in a great majority of cases).
My therapeutic work does not consist of teaching how to deal with obsessive thoughts or rituals. What I try to do is to make them disappear, and for this it is essential to considerably reduce the underlying anxiety by changing, in agreement with the patient, their lifestyle, as well as helping them to regain the connection with their most “primary” part through a series of activities, agreed, to be carried out in their daily life.
It is evident, on the other hand, that all psychological treatment is “personalised” and if I expressly mention this in the title of the article it is because I do not work with techniques or strategies of generalised use but with a series of actions and recommendations expressly developed for each of the patients.
Overcoming or significantly reducing OCD, however severe it may be, is possible in the vast majority of cases.