The Most Taboo Words in OCD Treatment

And How You Can Find New Words (If You Need Them)

You’re not supposed to make MEANING out of your OCD or trouble yourself with CONTENT. Bad. Wrong. That’s old school hocus pocus.

But hold on a second, let me show you what you’re missing and offer some new words until meaning and content are deemed okay.

I get it, making meaning and focusing on content runs the risk of falling down the rabbit hole. You’re correct, rumination is a professional hazard of OCD, and we need to be discerning about how we engage meaning and content, so let me offer two new words to help you do this: coherence and context.

Coherence Brings Your Story Together

Coherence comes from the Latin and means to stick together, and it refers not just to the physical but also to a narrative. It means that your story makes sense and has a throughline that explains how you moved from one part to the next.

OCD treatment without understanding coherence leads to symptoms continually popping up. Why? Because there’s no sense of how it fits together with your unique personal story. There’s little connection between how the feelings and thoughts that are manifesting through OCD are trying to tell you something.

It could be telling you that it’s difficult to feel such an intense mixture of love and hate, that it’s hard to maintain your own boundaries while caring deeply for others, or some other secretly conflicted aspect of self that isn’t easy to put into words. A sensitive relationship that helps us discover and create these words, to echo Donald Winnicott, is how we cohere. Techniques alone can’t do the trick.

Context Helps You Claim Your Story Again

Content is the big bad wolf of OCD treatment because it threatens to eat you up in rumination, doubt, and dislocation. But context, if you prefer it, is a bit different.

Context says, I wonder what else was going on in my emotional and relationship world and my circumstances that might help me explain why all of a sudden my OCD is flaring up. Context honors and supports the fuller story of you, and doesn’t just keep OCD as an impersonal nuisance, it opens it up as a creative personal power.

Stop Making Sense

The reason conventional treatments miss the importance of coherence and context is because they don’t get that the sense underlying OCD is a poetic one. It requires the capacity to see to multiple meanings and truths that get at the fuller story, one that has range, depth, and power.

It might not seem to make sense now to those clinicians and researchers who view OCD from a traditional two-dimensional perspective, but it will soon enough. Taking the road less travelled—led by context and coherence- will set you free to live in three dimensions again. And that, to echo Robert Frost, can make all the difference.