Many parents of children with anxiety tend to engage in varying levels of family accommodation (FA) in order to alleviate anxiety symptoms. This can exacerbate anxiety symptoms and have adverse effects for psychological treatments. A small number of general and specific interventions have been developed for FA but treatment research is at a nascent stage. Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) may be an effective treatment for FA. This article reviews the potential advantages and uses of ACT and how ACT’s six core processes can help target particular features of FA. The theoretical support for ACT is reviewed relevant to FA. The article concludes by conjecturing how ACT may be a useful and adaptive treatment in targeting FA.

Family accommodation in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) refers to a condition in which a family member assists or facilitates the patient with OCD in performing the compulsion, or provides assurance to minimize or reduce the anxiety level. This condition can be significantly disabling to the individual as well as to the family dynamic. In this case report, a mother of a 14-year-old female patient carried out almost all the compulsive behaviours and rituals for her child. Family-based cognitive behavioural therapy was offered to this case over a 4-month period with a successful treatment outcome. This result provides initial evidence that this type of intervention is suitable for patients from Saudi Arabia, a non-Western culture.

The purpose of the present study was to explore the experience of being asked for reassurance from the perspective of carers of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) sufferers, and to examine its relationship to sufferers’ reassurance seeking by a direct comparison with data obtained from the person they normally offer reassurance to. Forty-two individuals with OCD and their carers completed alternate versions of the Reassurance Seeking Questionnaire. Result suggest that carers report most commonly providing reassurance when asked to do so, and the frequency of their reassurance provision is associated with how carefully sufferers seek reassurance, rather than their OCD symptom severity. The carer's perspectives on the impact of reassurance provision was accurate; both sufferers and carers perceive that reassurance works only temporarily, but even if the anxiety-relieving effect of reassurance decreases in the medium term, it is likely to be perceived as beneficial because carers accurately perceived that sufferers would feel much worse if they refused to provide reassurance. The present study is the first to quantitatively investigate carer's experiences of reassurance provision, and elucidate why carers feel the need to provide it.