ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some techniques that have proven useful for restructuring, at least in part, first and second order evaluations. Restructuring first order evaluations entails reducing the probability and the gravity attributed to the feared event and combatting the idea that the patient’s own behaviours are crucial to preventing it and mainly responsible for it. The restructuring intervention on the second evaluation aims to reduce the dysfunctional attempted solutions which obsessive patients often put into action to contain their symptoms, which paradoxically turn out to be counterproductive, and thus also add to the costs of the disorder itself. Metaphors can be a useful technique to help the patient frame his disorder in a different way than what happens spontaneously with the second evaluation. The metaphor invites the patient to treat the obsessive threat as though it were a threat from a bully who is trying to give orders and who becomes even meaner when his orders are not obeyed.
