Obsessive compulsive disorder so chronic
hand washing for example is classified as
an anxiety disorder, but there is an anxiety component to it
but I don´t believe that that´s an accurate classification
I think that excessive compulsive disorder is actually a disorder
of disgust, because all of the behaviors including hyper grooming
people sometimes have Trichotillomania-- they'll pull out
the hairs on their body the grooming behaviours in that sort
of thing seem to be more associated with the operation of the disgust system
and almost everything about obsessive
compulsive disorder has a disgust basis and so
one of the things that people who are
who have OCD obsess about is that
I got a client once who was this poor woman by the time,
her OCD was done with her she built the equivalent of
an airlock on her house like not technically
proficient or anything like that and her husband and her children
had to go through an elaborate decontamination process
before they were allowed to step foot in the house and one of the things she
was very concerned about was that she would go out to a supermarket
and touch a piece of fruit and become contaminated
and then come home and touch her children and then
they would become contaminated and so, well, she ended up in the
hospital and she was divorced and it just did in her life.
you know, and so people who have obsessive
compulsive disorder, you know, they'll wash their hands
until the soap is gone
like a whole bar of soap, right?
and you can often tell who they are because their hands are shiny
from washing too much and they'll shower-- they can't get out
of the shower, they'll shower until the hot water is completely gone
and, you know, so their self-cleaning mechanisms,
so to speak, have gone seriously astray
and they way you treat them is by exposing them to things that
are disgusting and contaminating, um..
I had a, heh, client with OCD once, he was quite
the character and um, I, one of the
things I had him to was we would look for things on the
internet, pictures of things that disgusted him
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
