Recovery Overview

When it comes to OCD, the word recovery has two meanings.

The first is a short-term fix, and is primarily about reducing the anxiety you experience for the current set of OCD thoughts, so that you can function in life. The main treatment that is used for this short-term fix is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). The NHS mainly offers CBT, and a large number of private therapists also provide CBT.

CBT works by getting you to experience the anxiety (from the current set of OCD thoughts) on a regular basis. When you experience it regularly enough, the amount of anxiety you experience goes down. This sounds counter-intuitive, but it’s not, due to the following reasons.

The first reason is that when you experience the OCD thought and no danger arises from it, your brain learns that the OCD thought is false, and so eventually (which could be as little as a few weeks), the brain stops generating anxiety from that OCD thought.

The second reason is that the subconscious mind will reduce the number of OCD thoughts it produces if it thinks its message is being heard. Remember, an OCD thought is a message that an underlying issue needs fixing (e.g. trauma, stress etc). You don’t need to fix that underlying issue straight away, as it gives you a grace period, so all you have to do in that grace period is experience the anxiety, at which point the subconscious assumes you are going to fix the underlying issue in the near future, and so it eases up with the number of the OCD thoughts it generates in the grace period

With these short-term fixes, patients can improve significantly in a few months, and think they are almost fully recovered, but at some point in the future, the OCD will make a comeback. It makes a comeback because the root cause of OCD has not been dealt with.

If you are seeing a therapist/psychologist for your OCD, ask them if the goal of therapy they are administering is to cure the OCD, or merely reduce the symptoms (i.e. reduce the number of thoughts and associated anxieties). And, if you are up to it, you might also ask them what they make of the criticisms of CBT that I mention in the next page

The second meaning of recovery is the true meaning of the word. That is, there is a chance that the OCD goes away and never comes back. This is because you are dealing with the root cause of OCD, which could be things like trauma and stress. The therapy that is used to find what the root causes of OCD are is called Psychoanalysis

So, you are probably thinking ‘let’s go with psychoanalysis’. But psychoanalysis can take time to achieve results (possibly years), so it’s better to start off with CBT, as it does reduce your anxiety (from the current set of OCD thoughts) in a relatively quick time period, and once your anxiety is low enough (but not fully fixed), then you can start on psychoanalysis.

This website explains how both CBT and Psychoanalysis works for OCD

The next section talks about CBT - please click the below button