Dear Midnight:

The effectiveness of your current therapy depends on your goal. If your goal continues to be what you mentioned that it is: a place to vent your feelings about your husband (ROCD) so that you can manage to stay with your husband and maintain a reasonable relationship- then your therapy has been effective so far.

If your goal is to heal from your ROCD, then your therapy is ineffective. An effective therapy for healing is not a wing-it kind of therapy, a place where you go to vent. A professional therapist, as I see it, is like the one I had. He was flexible enough to attend to what I brought up to each session but he also prepared from one session to the next. He set goals to my therapy, a strategy regarding meeting those goals; he responded to me via email and phone in between sessions (no extra charge!). He often emailed me a homework assignment via email after a session. He thought about me, as his patient/ client in between sessions. This is very unlike my other experiences with therapists who seemed to think about me only for the fifty minutes I was there, at best.

Did I mention to you that I too had ROCD? I no longer do following my therapy which I shared with you here.

Regarding the connection between your childhood experiences and ROCD and how to access childhood memories, this is what I learned from experience (and I mentioned this principle to you already):

You currently, in the present time, are feeling what you felt as a child. So you don’t need to go back but instead, notice what you are feeling now, “this feeling of dread, stress and distance”- that you are currently feeling IS the feeling you had as a child. So there is the access. Here is another thing you have access to in the present: your present relationships with your parents and older brother.

The goal of the ROCD is to focus on what is less distressing for you to focus on (your relationship with your husband, and before him, other boyfriends) instead of what is more distressing (your relationships with your parents and older brother).

Again: it is up to you what your goal is, if it is to maintain your relationship with your husband as is; manage the ROCD via venting so it doesn’t destroy your relationship with your husband, then your therapy is so far adequate. Unfortunately, you are likely to continue to be distressed throughout your relationship and otherwise.

If your goal is healing, so that you are no longer distressed- then your therapy has been inadequate.

anita