OCD can be a very lonely place, even when you are surrounded by people who care deeply for you trying their best to help. Sufferers feel cut off from those around them. Often you can see the pain of your loved ones as they try to cope with your obsessional rituals, but you still feel powerless to stop. OCD disrupts and derails your life and comes between you and those you want to hold close. Sometimes OCD makes it impossible even to be hugged and to hug back.

In this presentation, we will explain the way that OCD interferes with current and future relationships. Particularly important is the way in which the person with OCD feels compelled to involve other people in their rituals through repeated reassurance seeking, asking for others to check for them, assist with avoidance and so on. Sometimes, those around the person with OCD wrongly come to blame themselves for what is happening.

We will show how “giving in” to the OCD can, with the right help, become an alliance with the purpose of overcoming it, restoring the relationships of those with OCD and their loved ones and helping both to reclaim their lives. We will emphasise the importance of having the same (shared) understanding of how OCD works to enslave the sufferer, and then using that understanding to break free.

Professor Paul Salkovskis is Professor of Clinical Psychology and Applied Science and also a patron of the national charity, OCD-UK.

Paul Salkovskis qualified as a clinical psychologist in 1979 at the Institute of Psychiatry. He worked for six years in Yorkshire (in Huddersfield then Leeds) as a full time NHS clinical psychologist before moving to Oxford as a Research Clinical Psychologist. In Oxford he was promoted to Professor before moving to work at King’s College London Institute of Psychiatry as Professor of Clinical Psychology and Applied Science and Clinical Director in the Centre for Anxiety Disorders and Trauma in SLaM NHS Trust.

In 2010 he was appointed Programme Director for the Clinical Psychology Doctorate Programme at the University of Bath where Paul set up and ran a specialist OCD treatment Clinic.

He is regarded as an expert in the understanding and treatment of anxiety disorders in general, and more specifically in OCD, Panic and Agoraphobia and health anxiety, having contributed to the psychological understanding and treatment of these areas.

Paul is also currently Editor of the BABCP Journal, Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy, and is President of the BABCP.

In 2018 he moved to the University of Oxford to take up the roles of Director of Oxford Institute of Clinical Psychology Training and the Director of Oxford Cognitive Therapy Centre, where he will continue clinical work at the Oxford Health Specialist Psychological Intervention Centre (OHSPIC).