Obsessive Thinking (3)

Phillipson outlines a behaviour therapy approach to "Pure-O" along these lines: "crazy" thoughts pop into our minds from time to time but some people invest them with such significance that these thoughts are taken to represent action(s). Further, efforts are then made to avoid these thoughts occurring again.

Phillipson's behaviourist approach is based on classical conditioning procedures of "exposure and response prevention" (ERP), of learning to allow the crazy thoughts to occur as much as they want and not trying to run from them but just allow them to be what they are, just random thoughts (that have taken on a meaning far beyond their status). The goal is not to eliminate these thoughts ("spikes") but to practise non-avoidance of the spikes.

One technique mentioned by Phillipson is called the "Spike Hunt" in which the patient/client is instructed to purposely seek out spikes (instead of avoiding them). So a client who has the thought that he may get up in the night and violently assault his wife and child because he has secretly hidden a weapon in the house, is instructed to sleep with a kitchen knife beside his bed!! Phillipson reported that this patient gained 75% relief from this counterintuitive measure.

This particular technique sounds similar to Viktor Frankl's paradoxical intention wherein obsessive patients are asked to do the thing they most fear. Frankl has challenged patients to go to the shop window which they fear to go past because of the thought they have that they will throw a brick through the window. He told them to go there and throw a brick through the window! Of course, it never happens and the spell of the feared thought is broken.

(Frankl's existentialism is quite different from the behaviourism of Phillipson but nevertheless, on this small point of technique they seem agreed even though their rationales are antithetic!)