Top Three Ways that Anxiety Therapy and OCD Treatment Differ
Many professionals misdiagnose Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) as GAD, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and treat it accordingly. Unfortunately, these two disorders may need drastically different treatment plans and countless clients find themselves stymied in unproductive treatment cycles.
If you love your therapist, but treatment is plateaued, this may be why.
In my experience, these are the top three strategic differences in therapists trained in OCD versus those without such expertise.
Your OCD treatment will be far more challenging and less soothing.
While you may occasionally find that your OCD therapist is comforting, most commonly their function is to stretch you out of your safe zone. In OCD treatment we purposefully guide our clients to face their fears and worries, because in this challenge area lies growth.
When we are soothing our clients, we are robbing them of an opportunity to sit with uncertainty and distress.
OCD is essentially complex self-soothing behavior, and as OCD therapists, we cannot participate in this process. Similarly, in the realm of OCD, the growth lies in the challenge. We lean into the amygdala response in order to rewire our brains to have less reactivity to problematic stimuli. The more we challenge ourselves in session, the closer we are to completing our treatment goals.
For this reason, a client may leave a traditional psychotherapist feeling better, but complete a session with an OCD therapist feeling a bit rattled but with a sense of accomplishment.
Anxiety therapy can involve long periods of “letting out steam” in a session, where a therapist simply listens and helps you process your stressor. OCD therapy cuts these off.
Sometimes our anxiety spirals just tumble out of our mouths with the first good listener to sit down next to us. Psychotherapists who primarily work with anxiety will welcome these monologues, as they usually give the client some modicum of relief. However, for OCD therapists, the sharing of all these anxieties is only useful up to a point. Once a client starts repeating themselves (or if the therapist has already heard and recorded this particular anxiety in a previous session), the conversation stops being productive.
An OCD therapist needs to be very mindful of time in a session, and does not want to get sucked into their clients well-worn anxiety spirals.
Empathetically but firmly, an OCD practitioner will redirect their client to the challenges outlined in the treatment plan. A client in OCD treatment must have faith that their week to week anxiety suffering will also be abated by conquering their more universal obsessions and compulsions.
Anxiety therapy is ongoing, as needed, whereas OCD therapy has set goals, markers of success, and discharge.
OCD therapy is meant to be intense, short-term, and goal-oriented. While anxiety therapy can meander down many different paths, jump to childhood trauma and wind through every meaningful relationship, OCD therapy stays mostly in the here and now. We have a concrete goal to manage and extinguish problematic behaviors, and the OCD therapist is in charge of checking in periodically with assessments to make sure change is being accomplished.
Treatment goals are incredibly important to OCD therapy and create the concrete framework that allows discharge to be on the order of months rather than years.
At Kairos Wellness Collective, we can help you distinguish the difference between GAD and OCD, and treat accordingly to help you find relief and wellness!