Damian Ruiz
A person suffering from an obsessive disorder is very likely to have gone through situations in childhood or adolescence that inhibited their spontaneity, part of their emotions, a healthy aggressiveness that allowed them to defend themselves and, of course, any kind of assertiveness.
And all of this was due to circumstances that made him repress and restrain himself, forcing him to ‘think about life’ instead of living it.
What could these experiences have been?
Strict, authoritarian or chaotic family environment (for example, an alcoholic or drug-addicted parent), psychological abuse, physical violence, sexual abuse, serious circumstances that occurred in the environment, death or illness of loved ones, and perhaps one of the most important, bullying at school, against which he chose not to defend himself and to go unnoticed.
All these situations generate a very high degree of inhibition which, beyond the possible genetic predisposition, when adulthood arrives and the normal stress factors appear, the person will not be prepared to face them and the basal anxiety will generate obsessive manifestations of a content that is never literal but symbolic or metaphorical. The contents of each OCD, sexual orientation, religion, pollution, etc. are always representations of unconscious aspects.
Trying to find out what these unconscious aspects are, such as overadaptation, submission, renunciation, sacrifice, difficulties or impossibility of developing one’s own personality, etc., is one of the tasks that the therapist must carry out in the course of the treatment.
The therapist should ask himself/herself and the patient the following questions:
What happened in your childhood, adolescence and early youth?
What situations did you experience as difficult or complex?
What did you have to give up?
The answers will be key to begin to understand what happened.
From there we can start the treatment consisting of reactivating and developing what the person ‘is’ and had to inhibit in order to survive.
The key lies in reconnecting with the desire and trying to materialise it or, at the very least, directing oneself towards it with the intention that this will serve as a liberating practice for everything that was repressed.
In reality, the treatment of obsessive disorder would consist, fundamentally, in returning the patient to his or her natural state, beyond, I insist that there may be a basic obsessive tendency that does not necessarily manifest itself in the form of a disorder, but rather as a simple predisposition of the personality.