ACT for OCD: Immediate vs Delayed Consequences
Key Points
- Validate and normalize the client’s behavior by highlighting the behavioral principles.
- Immediate consequences have a bigger impact on behavior than delayed consequences.
- Compulsions are behaviors that have immediate consequences that relieve distress.
- Compulsions can have a negative long-term effect.
- Elicit the client’s ideas on how to proceed after the new information.
Materials Downloads
ACT for OCD Online Training
Expand your therapeutic skills for treating OCD beyond traditional exposure-based therapies.
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Transcript
Clients may start to feel frustrated, or feel hopeless, or embarrassed, or sad at the end of this creative hopelessness exercise.
And they may say things like, “I’ve been trying so hard at this. And it’s just really sad to see that it’s not changing at all, and it’s actually getting worse.”
Ainslie, G. (1975). Specious reward: A behavioral theory of impulsiveness and impulse control. Psychological Bulletin, 82(4), 463–496.
And so, at this point, one of the things I really work toward doing is validating and normalizing the decisions that they’re making—that they are really logical decisions based on behavioral principles. And so I walk through that a bit with my clients. So I share with them the consequences that occur immediately after behavior. Those have a larger impact on the behavior than the ones that are delayed.
Ainslie, G. (1975). Specious reward: A behavioral theory of impulsiveness and impulse control. Psychological Bulletin, 82(4), 463–496.