A young man was sent to me recently by Probation and Parole for treatment of his OCD. He was on Parole. That is, he had committed a serious enough crime to have been given a jail sentence and had since been paroled for it. An interesting combination I thought - OCD and the criminal system. the connection between the two was not completely obvious and no all that usual.
He had been convicted of crimes that involved obsessing about a woman. He had pursued her and then eventually hated her because she rejected him. He turned his attention to revenge on her. Not a comfortable development at all. He did not succeed in hurting her physically but relentlessly discredited and humiliated her publically and professionally. A prison sentence may well have been the circuit breaker that stopped a more unhappy outcome.
More interesting, perhaps, is the thought patterns beneath his very still surface. He does look unusual. He has very direct eye contact, no intonation in his speech and no emotion. He speaks as little as possible and never has physical contact. His condition at the moment manifests with compulsive washing of his feet. Many, many times per day. He is very bright.
He writes rather than speaks a lot in session. He writes about the hatred he harbours for the "Christians" that bullied him at school. He writes about the "eutherial slime" that he washes off. He washes off the contamination of people who are hateful and who have hated him in the past. It isn't germs in the conventional sense he is anxious about, it is the germs of the soul that he wants to avoid at all costs.
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