Recovery Overview

Recovery from OCD can mean different things, and the term is often used in more than one way. Some people think of recovery as reducing the anxiety and intrusive thoughts they’re dealing with right now, while others think of it as understanding and resolving the deeper patterns that create OCD in the first place. This page walks through the whole picture so you can see how OCD recovery actually works.

Most explanations of OCD focus on short-term relief from anxiety and intrusive thoughts, so the long-term issues that created OCD in the first place often aren’t talked about. This can make recovery feel incomplete or unclear. Seeing both the short-term and long-term sides of recovery makes everything much easier to understand.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is one of the main ways people work on the short-term side of recovery. It focuses on easing the anxiety and intrusive thoughts you’re dealing with right now by helping you respond to them in a different way. Many people find that this reduces the intensity of their current OCD cycle, sometimes within a few weeks.

CBT is usually offered through the NHS (the UK’s national public-health service) and by many private therapists. If you want to explore it in more detail, you can read more about how it works on the CBT page.

The long-term side of recovery is the work aimed at creating lasting, permanent change. This is about understanding and resolving the deeper patterns underneath your OCD, the ones that give rise to the thoughts and anxiety in the first place. Psychoanalysis is a type of therapy used for this deeper work.

You might be wondering why the long-term work doesn’t come first. To explore the deeper patterns that psychoanalysis focuses on, you need enough mental space to concentrate — and that’s very difficult when the anxiety from your current OCD cycle is still high. CBT helps bring the immediate symptoms down to a manageable level, which makes the deeper work of psychoanalysis possible. Once your anxiety is lower, psychoanalysis becomes the place where lasting, permanent change can begin.

This website explains how both CBT and psychoanalysis fit into OCD recovery and how each one supports a different part of the process.

The next page talks about CBT - please click the below button.