What Is Recovery Like?

[taurean]

I wanted to post this topic to encourage those people wanting to recover, but fearful of the process, exposures to triggers and facing up to anxiety. 

If we are anxious anyway, and our lives are restricted by OCD rules, then taking action to in due course reclaim our control and reduce anxiety is surely a beneficial thing to do? 

How long recovery takes, and through what experience, is individually subjective and dependent on a number of things. 

But the process needed will be the same and whatever the theme or manifestation, however vile or disgusting our intrusions, it's still the same old OCD, functioning in the same way. 

Although there are common themes, unusual themes abound since we can obsess, and carry out compulsions, about anything. So our OCD experience might be of a more unusual manifestation, or resilience to worry will vary, and we may have other anxiety-inducing cognitive thinking distortions, such as black-and-white thinking, emotional reasoning, personalisation, minimising the positive - all treatable using other - than OCD - CBT challenging methods. 

To start, we need commitment to learn and make changes. 

We need to find out how OCD works, how the false or exaggerated core beliefs of OCD create triggers leading to an emotional anxiety reaction and catastrophising. And how changing our response to triggers, learning to undertake structured  exposure and response prevention exercises targeting individual OCD triggers, and using refocusing and distraction will take us through the recovery process from OCD. 

It's a marathon not a sprint. We need to accept setbacks, but treat them as mere blips not disasters. 

The time recovery takes is the time recovery takes. If we set targets, they are unhelpful and add pressure. 

I am doing well. What were triggers all around me I don't notice now, they don't register because my brain no longer interprets them as threats. 

I can do things now that amaze my wife, I no longer am practising avoidance. 

This is the prize at the end of the treatment trail. 

Recovery is possible and becomes very probable to those making a real commitment to engaging with CBT therapy. 

Edited June 21, 2018 by taurean

[worriedjohn]

Thank you for a very nice thread Roy. Wish I could also see what is recovery actually. Can you write something more on how OCD works and plays with our core beliefs. That will be very interesting for we sufferers who are still trying to progress.

[taurean]

Thanks John. 

I will see what I can do