Cognitive-Behavior and Narrative Therapy in Obsessive- Compulsive Disorder

Abstract

One of the most proved therapies is cognitive behavioral therapy. CBT has many strategies to treat OCD. The most used strategies are exposure with response prevention, but these are not applicable in all the patients, because they can provoke an increase of anxiety which could be unbearable. We propose in this revision to work with a narrative approach, putting the disorder in the frame of the patients’ lives, understanding how and when it has emerged, trying to find the sense of it, to give a new look to the disorder and constructing a new way to cope with the irrational or overemphasized ideas. There are not many evidences of constructive or narrative approach in treatment of OCD, but we think constructivism has an important role in OCD treatment. Understanding the beginning of the disorder and the role of it into patients’ lives improve the way the patients can face the symptomatology. This perspective helps the patients to re-explain the symptoms as a way to cope with a fearsome world which could be adaptative in a moment but these symptoms have lost their coping function when they have transformed themselves in a rigid way.