Rose Cartwright, wrote this article for the Guardian on defining OCD. She is also the author of her memoir, Pure, and the show of the same name is based on her life and experience of pure OCD. In talking about defining OCD, she says,
What I didn’t want to do with Pure was replace one reductive definition with another. OCD is no more about sex than it is about tidiness. The object of the obsessions is actually irrelevant when defining the mechanics of the condition and how it affects your brain.
She also describes a shift in her relationship to her thoughts that ACT treatment also promotes:
When the Channel 4 series was commissioned, I left London to do 10 days’ silent meditation. I wanted to stare down the contents of my thoughts before viewers did. Gradually, I began to witness something I’d only ever known on an intellectual level – that thoughts enter and leave the mind of their own accord, passing through consciousness like weather through the sky, or images on TV. I was not the author of them, I was the observer. For someone once so convinced they’d perpetrated their thoughts that they wanted to die to stop them, this was no small thing.
Watch the TV show for free on Channel 4 here.
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