When and if to seek individual therapy is a personal decision and often depends on multiple factors such as the availability of insurance coverage; your finances; familiarity and comfort with the process of therapy; and time constraints. However, these factors need to be weighed against one fundamental issue: How much emotional pain are you in? Following from this difficult question is another: To what degree is your troubled emotional state making it difficult for you to help your child in her treatment?

If you're in too much emotional pain, you're not an ineffective partner only in your child's recovery; your relationships with your spouse and other children will begin to deteriorate as well. Good communication within the family will be the first thing to go, followed soon by any sense of pulling together as a team to confront the OCD. If and when this comes to pass, as few as two or three individual therapy sessions can help enormously to put you back “on track.”

Your immediate goal in therapy or in working with emotional problems on your own will be to “reframe” the issues that are wearing you down by using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy techniques (such as those discussed above) to challenge such beliefs as “I'm a bad mother.” The role of a therapist is to help you do the necessary reframing and letting go of these false assumptions. A therapist can also help you experience difficult emotions such as sadness and anger, two emotions commonly felt by parents who are dealing with OCD in a child.

Very often, adults simply don't have the skills or haven't given themselves permission to feel their emotions, especially when under the enormous stress of parenting a child challenged by OCD. Learning to process your own emotions is essential to good parenting and especially important when dealing with a child with OCD, because you must continually separate your own issues from the child's in order to help him make progress in treatment.