I have OCD. Some cognitive behavioral therapy techniques were totally wrong for me

clinical OCD is characterized by intrusive thoughts and feelings that dominate your life.

I found an extremely knowledgeable CBT therapist and saw him twice a week for two years. Over that time, I learned a lot about why my mind works the way it does.

As an analyst, I know that therapy can help solve problems, but it can also have the unintended consequence of perpetuating a person’s idea that there is something basically wrong with him

In the 1950s, an American psychoanalytic therapist severed his Freudian roots and turned to the Stoics to form a radically new form of therapy. Rather than plumbing the depths of the content of a problem and exploring how a stumbling block might relate to, say, one’s early psychosexual development, Albert Ellis argued that we should look at whateve

So you’ll notice that I refer to modern therapeutic ideas like “cognitive distancing,” which is the ability to distinguish our thoughts from external reality, and “functional analysis,” which is evaluating the consequences of different courses of action.

In my case, the intrusive thoughts and feelings (obsessions) centered on despair, emptiness, self-harm, and existential distress.