6 year old daughter therapy UPDATE

[Guest guest]

Today we had my our weekly session with my daughter's doctor. I

informed him that it had been a horrible week and that the repeating

of the thoughts was not helping and seemed to make things worse.

So he came up with a plan to start having " OCD free " times. So for

starting maybe five minutes at a time my dd goes without telling many

any of her OCD thoughts, no confessing at all. Since rewards have

seemed to work wonders we are adding those as well. I already had

purchased a huge roll of tickets like you get at a carnival. DD has

been getting a ticket a day for going to school without a fight and

maybe an extra here and there for doing an extra good job at

something. Then I set up this little prize store sort of similar to

what Chuck E Cheese has. You know where you redeem your tickets for

little trinkets? We have small prizes all the way up to big prizes.

This has worked well for us.

So we are going to start out with five minute intervals and go from

there. She'll begin with getting one ticket for every five minutes

she can do. The doctor said that the more we practice these OCD free

times the easier it will get for her to beat this.

I actually think this sounds like it makes way more sense than the

repeating of the thoughts. I think that was just a huge anxiety maker

for her. He also said that at first it's going to be very hard for

her to do this as well but that it will get easier. I think he's

right.

To give her more incentive at first I'm going to make the prizes a

bit bigger. When she was hysterical and couldn't go to school that's

what I did to get her back in. It felt wrong to give your child a

present to get them to go to school but it worked. For about one week

every morning she would get a wrapped prize that was usually between

ten and thirty dollars. I thought I'd go broke keeping that up.

Suprisingly though after the first week she got back into the swing

of school and we transitioned to using the ticket and prize store

system and it's been going great with that.

So I'm hoping if at first the prizes are bigger that will give her

more incentive to really really try to not confess.

I have to ask though is it natural as a parent to feel guilty for

telling your child they can't confess to you? The doctor said as she

gets better at keeping these things to herself then we'll add

consequences for her confessing. Nothing big but maybe a 30 second

time out to think over how she could better deal with it herself

without confessing. I don't know that seems a little harsh,

especially for a six year old. I mean not the time out itself but the

burden of her dealing with it on her own. The doctor told her today

that she's not supposed to confess anything anymore unless she or

someone else is in danger. Although I've told her this myself it

still seems so wrong as a parent to say that. I guess we've all been

told for so long to talk things out to make them better and with this

it just seems to make them worse.

So I'm hopeful that this will all help out. What do you all think

about this new plan?