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Areas › Worry and anxiety › Obsessions and compulsions
Once a parent hears the details they will nearly always try to help by answering, and answering is the thing that feeds it. A label gives them something else to do: sit with you, put the kettle on, remind you of what you both agreed. It turns the person most likely to keep it going into the person best placed to help.
Obsessive thoughts and compulsions respond well to a specific kind of therapy. What is here is for understanding them, not for treating them by yourself.
Lord, I take refuge with You from the goadings of the evil ones (Quran 23:97). Having a short phrase ready for the moment of goading is an old idea, and having it ready is half the work.
المؤمنون
وَقُل رَّبِّ أَعُوذُ بِكَ مِنۡ هَمَزَٰتِ ٱلشَّيَٰطِينِ
and say, ‘Lord, I take refuge with You from the goadings of the evil ones
Qur’an 23:97read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A meta-analysis of fifteen studies found that bringing a partner or family member into treatment for adults with obsessive-compulsive disorder improved symptom outcomes. The evidence base is small but it points consistently one way. Those studies brought family into structured treatment rather than testing an agreed phrase at home, so the phrase is one way of doing something that has support in general.
Stewart KE, Sumantry D, Malivoire BL. (2020). Family and couple integrated cognitive-behavioural therapy for adults with OCD: A meta-analysis.. Journal of affective disorders doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A parent who is never given the content has no reassurance to supply.
What the thought is about matters far less than what happens next. Germs, illness, something too silly to say aloud: the machinery running underneath is the same in each case.
Notice how when one worry is finally settled, another takes its place. That pattern is the thing you are actually dealing with, more than whichever worry is currently in the chair.
If stopping the ritual is out of reach for now, do it differently every time. Different order, different hand, different room, as long as it is never the same twice.