How Cognitive Therapy (CT) Relieves OCD

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Cognitive therapy (CT) is often recommended for the treatment of OCD, or obsessive compulsive disorder.

CT helps people examine how their thoughts about things affects their quality of life (e.g., mood, energy, concentration).

Researcher Sabine Willhelm and his colleagues at Harvard, wondered what specific measures of CT make it helpful to people with OCD. They discovered that cognitive therapy helps people alter their beliefs about perfection, certainty, and competency, leading to a reduction of OCD symptoms.

How CT Targets OCD

CT targets many types of thoughts, but Willhelm’s study shows the most important thoughts to address in OCD therapy are:

  1. Beliefs similar to, “I am not able to do well or manage things on my own.” (Beliefs related to self-competency.)
  2. Thoughts such as, “I should be 100 percent certain that things around me are safe.” (Thoughts related to certainty.)
  3. Thoughts such as, “No matter what I do, it will never be good enough.” (Thoughts related to perfection.)

It seems that when people alter their thinking about self-competency, they begin to feel more capable within the therapeutic setting. Eventually, this growing self-confidence allows people to face their fears outside their therapy sessions, and better manage their symptoms.

An OCD individual’s ideas about certainty must also be addressed since the need for certainty becomes a prison in an uncertain world. Functioning freely requires us to use common sense to be safe, and to live with the knowledge we cannot control everything.

Just as needing certainty can be a prison, so is expecting perfection. The need for perfection can drive us into a never-ending loop of compulsive behavior that will never make things, or ourself, perfect.

Breaking the Cycle

Behind the drive for perfection, certainty, and competence lays anxiety. We get anxious because we are mortal and life offers no guarantees. So, we try to reduce the anxiety by making sure we do things just right. It is this futile cycle of reducing anxiety via perfection and certainty that CT alters, and why it helps many people with OCD reduce or alleviate their symptoms.

Sources: Psychotherapy Research; Science Direct
Photo credity: / flickr creative commons

 
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