OCD and Compassion for Self and Other

There are variations on this story but they communicate the same message and are often used as a way of exploring OCD themes for OCD sufferers.

The story is narrated by a passenger who witnesses a fellow passenger doing something rather unusual…

‘I was sitting on the train and a man kept ripping up his notebook and throwing little pieces of paper out of the window.

“Why are you doing that?” I asked

“To stop the dragons from attacking the train.”

“But there aren’t any dragons!”

“Precisely!”’

The question then is to explore what’s needed to help this poor man who is so concerned with protecting the train from attack. How would we help him to drop his vigilance and associated fears?

One of the major challenges is to assist sufferers to move out of the double-bind, all or nothing frame,

“If I stop then I will be attacked by the ‘dragons’ and if I keep up the ‘protection against threat’ strategy I’m cursed to a life of slavery.”