You are looking for someone who is a good fit with your personality. You want someone who can complement or balance your weaknesses. If you are cerebral, you might want somebody who has an appreciation of your nonverbal passion. If you are overly emotional, you want someone who can explain your emotions to you.
.. Be wary of anyone who insists on overly exploring the past, or blaming others, including your parents. Run from someone overly formal or aloof. Therapy can, and should, be fun.
Watch out for somebody who doesn’t answer direct questions—if they try to turn it around and talk about why you are asking. You should feel free to ask relevant questions and expect direct answers.
The Only Cure for OCD Is Expensive, Elusive, and Scary
People with OCD dwell on certain thoughts (obsessions) and engage in rituals (compulsions) to alleviate the anxiety the obsessions provoke. At its worst, OCD can compel people to spend hours each day rehearsing an intricate mental dance they feel powerless to end.
.. exposure and response prevention, or ERP, therapy is the gold-standard treatment for people with OCD. It is radically different from more traditional talk therapy, which excavates patients’ childhoods or past relationships for clues to their present-day problems. In ERP, none of that matters. Instead, a person is forced to confront their obsessive thoughts relentlessly. The goal is to make the sufferer so accustomed to their obsessions that they no longer feel tempted to engage in soothing compulsions.
.. ERP teaches people, “these thoughts are meaningless, you need to learn to ignore them.”
.. When families finally do obtain it, ERP can be life-changing. Janet Singer’s 17-year-old son realized he had OCD when he found himself trapped in strange mental grooves, like envisioning harm coming to his friends or feeling unable to stop counting to 1,000
Cognitive Therapy for the Country
The message of these attacks is powerful: You are not safe anywhere.
That, after all, is the whole point of terrorism: to subvert our sense of the normal, to make us afraid of improbable dangers and invite us, in our fear, to overreact in ways that are destructive to our lifestyle and that will not make us any safer.
.. Cognitive therapy identifies mistaken and distorted thoughts that generate distress, and then challenges and corrects them. What the president needs to say to all Americans — over and over — is that although terrible, unpredictable things have happened, the country is not in peril. Such attacks are incapable of destroying us or coming close to bringing down Western civilization.
.. There is no way to eradicate risk in a free society, even if we are willing to trade some of our liberty for safety. We delude ourselves to think otherwise.