Therapy for identity OCD

The question is some version of: am I actually a good person? And underneath it, usually, a specific and unbearable candidate — that you are a narcissist, a manipulator, a fraud, secretly cruel, or that everything warm you have ever done was performed for the credit.

So you audit. You replay conversations to work out whether you were being kind or managing an impression. You catch yourself enjoying being thanked and file it as evidence. You examine whether you actually felt anything at the funeral, at the good news, when you said you loved them. You read about narcissism at one in the morning and recognise yourself in all nine criteria, and then recognise that recognising yourself is supposedly proof you are not one, and then wonder whether you only thought that to let yourself off.

It has a distinctive trap: every direction is incriminating. Feeling nothing proves you are cold. Feeling something proves you are performing. Worrying about it proves you are self-obsessed. Not worrying about it proves it has stopped bothering you, which is worse. There is no move available that counts as innocent, which is why you have been playing for years without ever winning a round.

This is an obsessional theme, and character is the perfect target for one — it is not a fact anybody can check. Nobody has ever verified their own goodness. Everyone else is simply not trying to.

We start with one or two assessment sessions to understand how the cycle runs and what you want back. A typical course runs 12–16 weekly sessions of 50 minutes, with practical work between them. Steps are planned together and paced by you.

Expect me to be fairly unhelpful, on purpose, about the central question. Telling you that you are a good person is free, lasts an afternoon, and makes the next round harder — so I will decline, out loud, and explain why rather than leaving you to interpret my silence.

Sessions run over secure video across the UK and worldwide, or in person at Sanctuary Therapy Centre in Prestwich and Hebden Bridge, in English or Spanish.

But what if I really am a bad person? Then the treatment still applies, because the reviewing has never once made you a better one. What changes people's conduct is what they do next, and rumination is not an action. In practice, people who spend years interrogating their own goodness are rarely the ones anybody else has concerns about.

I read about narcissism and recognised myself in all of it. Isn't that significant? Diagnostic criteria are written broadly and read personally — most people find themselves in them, which is why self-diagnosis at one in the morning is such reliably bad evidence. The recognising is a compulsion in its own right, and it is one of the first we take out.

Is this the same as imposter syndrome? They overlap and they are not the same. Imposter feelings tend to be situational, about competence, and they ease when the evidence piles up. This does not ease, it is about character rather than capability, and evidence in your favour tends to get re-examined until it stops counting.

Can you at least tell me whether I'm a narcissist? I can tell you that people with this theme ask, and that answering it is the single most tempting mistake available to a therapist here. What we can do properly is work out whether this is OCD, which is a question with a usable answer and a treatment attached.

Can sessions be in Spanish? Yes — I offer therapy in English and Spanish.