Exposure response prevention may help her to cope with her anxiety and learn that she doesn’t need to respond to intrusive thoughts
My daughter is 15 and has lived with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) for some time. Her compulsions change – counting, repetitive actions such as flicking light switches a certain number of times, showering/brushing her teeth in a particular order, placing things in her bedroom in a certain way …
She has had two courses of private therapy, but neither seemed to help. Both focused on the compulsions – for example, they’d encourage her to tackle one ritual at a time and try to eliminate it. It felt as though they were addressing the symptoms rather than the cause – new rituals can come to her in the moment and if one ritual is eliminated, it will quickly be replaced.
It is interfering with her life more and more. She was an avid reader, but now can’t get through a book without compulsively rereading lines, and so has abandoned reading for pleasure, which makes me so sad. She’s often late for school because her morning rituals delay her. School lessons involving note-taking are difficult as she has to scrub out and rewrite words over and over. And she’s becoming more anxious – issues such as war, climate change and the rise of Reform affect her more than they should.
