ICBT Has OCD Half Right
Feeling is the Missing Piece
ICBT says OCD results from an overactive imagination and is merely an illusion. There’s no real threat behind the what-ifs, you’re just not allowed to come to your senses and see reality. It’s a magic trick, and you’re being deceived.
I agree in part.
OCD does throw you off the trail and distracts with ruminations and compulsions. But it is also trying to focus you and tell you something valuable, if you’d only listen and understand the other side of its magic: its hidden creativity as a messenger.
“It has never worked for me to just ignore my OCD. I’ve always thought there was something in it that was a valid feeling,” a client recently confessed.
He’s right on target at making sense of OCD’s true magic. OCD is both a deceiver and an illuminator. That’s what’s missing in ICBT.
OCD doesn’t just torture us because it wants us to suffer, it’s trying to express—in concealed form— the most difficult feelings we’ve got without any relational support to make emotional heads or tails of them. It’s trying to share pivotal stuff that’s complex and challenging but is the most liberating of all. This is the true magic missed by ICBT.
Let me put it more simply. OCD has something to tell you that you already know but to which nobody is listening. Even—sigh!—the OCD community itself!
There is a complete lack of attention or study of the feelings behind OCD and the exquisite creativity found within the OCD heart. There is hardly any air time given to the importance of these issues at OCD conferences, in research, and even in some of the most integrative practices. To me, this is a heartbreaking error that can—and hopefully one day—will be witnessed and honored.
OCD treatment ignores and minimizes feeling. It claims that your OCD symptoms have no basis in any ‘reality’ and is worthless. While it’s not intended as such, at best, this approach to OCD wrongfully minimizes and closes an extremely important part of the OCD experience, and at worst, it’s an unintended form of gaslighting.
Your feelings don’t matter and aren’t relevant.
To me, this recreates the traumatic experience that so many people with OCD have felt at the hands of family, friends, and partners who don’t ‘get' it’ from the inside-out.
A great example comes from the 2015 film Joy starring Jennifer Lawrence. Joy Mangano is a highly sensitive woman who is constantly emotionally cleaning up the messes of her family, from her divorced mother and father to her ex-husband currently living in her basement. She is often recruited by family members to help them regulate, to use her sensitivity and empathy to make it better for them. Unfortunately, hardly anybody ever mirrors back what she truly needs and how challenging it is to be a woman living with such sensitivity.
In one pivotal scene, Joy is cleaning up shards of a broken champagne bottle and cuts up her hands, and realizes how unfair this all is. A magical thing happens when her interest in design and innovation comes up with a self-cleaning mop.
If you have OCD, you have the capacity for this kind of creativity and resourcefulness, and it’s only by noticing the depth and power of this feeling can you truly heal. Even better, it’s only with feeling that you’ll be able to thrive with your special confidence, brilliance, and power. Your own special magic.
Interested in a post about how to specifically work with feeling to make the link? Let me know in the comments, and I’ll work on one next to answer any questions you have about this and more. :-)