Dear Midnight:

I am thinking, from my experience with incompetent and one competent therapist that yours is not competent enough, not good enough, too vague, too not directive and well, so different than my own one good experience with a therapist. Mine started with a free session, followed a few he gave me a typed diagnosis as a starting point of therapy, with a list of objectives he intended to meet in our therapy and how to get there. I still have those papers. After a few months he revisited those and re-evaluated.

His sessions with me often went longer than any set time. I don’t remember there being a set time except when he had a session with another client right after.

He gave me homework from one session to the next, checked homework next. Part of the therapy was psycho-education. There was nothing mysterious, no vague suggestions; everything was clear. He gave me all he had, all the information, all his understanding. When my two years with him were over, I had the education and the tools to continue on my own.

He was honest, hard working and committed to my well being with no motivation or intent to prolong the process so he can guarantee his income from me.

Another point: I believe there are probably no earth shattering sexual abuse in your childhood- often this is what people try to find- the forgotten, repressed sexual abuse. What happens is that sexual experiences later in life are of the affected by injuries in childhood, but those injuries are most often not sexual.

Also, there may very well be no physical abuse or an earth shattering, movie-worthy revelation. The injuries in childhood, looking back as adults, don’t look “that bad”- but for a child, they were that bad! A child sees things from a very fresh perspective, a “beginner’s mind”, a perspective o a child whose brain is just beginning to be formed. What you see from here, as an adult, is not what you saw then.

You wrote: ” I have always had this feeling of dread, stress and distance from my partner in any long relationship”- what you think now that you need to uproot, hidden memories or feelings you felt as a child, those feelings never left you. You are still feeling “dread, stress and distance from..” This is what you felt then, as a child, and still feeling. As a matter of fact, you wrote “I have always”- and I agree, always as from a very early age.

So it is the dread, stress and distance that you experienced as a child, in your relationship with every care taker: both your parents, and your older brother, that I believe is the root for your ROCD.

anita