Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) is a mental health condition where a person has obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviours. It can affect men, women and children. Some people start having symptoms early, often around puberty, but it usually starts during early adulthood. OCD can be distressing and significantly interfere with your life. Whilst there is not a cure for OCD, recovery is possible. If you have OCD, you’ll usually experience frequent obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviours.

An obsession is an unwanted and unpleasant thought, image or urge that repeatedly enters your mind, causing feelings of anxiety, guilt or unease.

A compulsion is a repetitive behaviour or mental act that you feel you need to do to temporarily relieve the unpleasant feelings brought on by the obsessive thought. For example, someone with an obsessive fear of being burgled may feel they need to check all the windows and doors are locked several times before they leave their house.

It’s common for parents to have OCD during the mother’s pregnancy or after their baby is born. Obsessions may include worrying about harming the baby or not sterilising feeding bottles properly. Compulsions could be things such as repeatedly checking the baby is breathing or avoiding situations that trigger intrusive harm thoughts such as bath time or walking down the stairs carrying their baby.

Recovery is an individual journey. For some it may take months for others a few years but in the scheme of the length of a life this isn’t as scary as we imagine. Most of us have stayed stuck for years feeling hopeless and not knowing in which direction we are going meeting many dead ends.

We are lucky that our disorder is one which we can recover from. I usually say in the first few weeks you will usually notice a significant change in insight and the months that follow a decrease in anxiety but this will go up and down until you achieve a good understanding of unconditional self and life acceptance (a key component in recovery), setbacks and spikes will occur. Many people say at around a year into their recovery journey they notice significant change or reach full recovery – often this is achieved in months but can also take longer than a year. Recovery is the absence of chronic anxiety and intrusive thoughts lose their intrusiveness.

Ultimately, when provided with the tools, the more you focus and put determination on achieving your recovery goals the more chance you have of recovering sooner than later. It’s normal to have set backs and so it really is dependant person to person on the length of time it takes to recover.

Some clients I have worked with have adopted all the tools, read the reading list over and over and committed to practicing unconditional self and life acceptance as well as continuing to cut out compulsions, reassurance and not avoiding triggering situations while facing challenging exposures – these individuals do tend to achieve recovery within a shorter time frame than others who dip in and out.

CBT therapy alone usually doesn’t get under the core fears that OCD latches to as tends to focus on the idea of “thoughts are just thoughts” which takes the edge off but often doesn’t go far enough in many cases of OCD, where the sufferer is very scared of the subject of their intrusive thoughts. Albert Ellis who founded the first form of CBT (REBT) provided the main tools for recovery through unconditional self and life acceptance, which is ground-breaking in achieving OCD recovery. Recovery involves both these principles and a thorough understanding of how OCD operates, as well as learning to not be caught up in the mechanism of OCD. It’s likely that if you have received CBT therapy with an OCD specialist and are feeling much better than before, but OCD is still latching and you feel a sense of “background anxiety”, that the additional components of recovery including rational thinking and unconditional self and life acceptance are needed to really get under your fears.

You can’t just leave thoughts there as OCD tends to cling more deeply not giving much breathing space. This is why you experience chronic guilt and anxiety, often locked on in the background even when you leave it there in most cases. An example I give about how OCD can feel is like trying to enjoy a hot bubble bath when you know someone has broken in downstairs! If we are very scared of something our brain won’t simply leave it alone. This is a good strategy as it is good to ensure we don’t engage in our thoughts and try to work them out. However, what’s needed to get truly under it, and unlatch OCD once and for all, is unconditional self and life acceptance and breaking down our fears to see that they’re not in reality as terrifying as we imagine.

Physical symptoms will keep changing because anxiety operates in the nervous system which is all around the body and as the nerves are sensitised you’ll notice changing sensations. The more we want the physical sensations to go away the more we are bringing them on. So often they’ll intensify the more attention they’re given.

OCD is always looking for another thing to grip to hence why we work towards unconditional self, life and other acceptance as well as getting comfortable with uncertainty so OCD has nothing to grip to. It is really common to feel that once we have exposed ourselves and mastered one theme or fear that OCD morphs to a new one, whether entirely different or a slight shift, this is because it latches to what we fear. When we work on realising there is nothing in reality to fear, we can handle anything life puts our way, even if inconvenient or extremely challenging. This is what unconditional self and life acceptance helps us to realise.

I truly believe that unless you have OCD, it’s not easy to see where it slips through the gaps and the extensive amount of areas it gets in to. The disorder is still relatively unknown and new to most people’s understanding despite being around a very long time.

I’ve never met a so-called ‘treatment resistant’ person. What’s commonly seen however are people stuck who’ve gone from therapist to therapist without complete relief yet. What they tend to have in common is that while the therapy they’ve received has helped them to reduce their anxiety (often a great deal), without an understanding of how the fear cycle is being fuelled through their irrational beliefs, they often feel that is as far as they can get. This leads them to believe they’re ‘treatment resistant’ when there’s still a feeling of background or even chronic anxiety locked on.

Medication takes the edge off OCD but won’t cure it. Medication works in varying degrees for us, some reducing symptoms significantly enough so we can function well in order to receive therapy and work towards recovery. On the other hand, others can end up feeling exactly the same or worse, which can lead to working with a doctor to trial different medications or deciding against medication altogether. It really is individual to every person and you must consult your doctor. Medication is a good route to explore with your doctor if you are really struggling to function and would like to have help alongside working on recovery.

Medication can be taken long term but if you can come off it when more balanced then that is the aim with your doctor’s guidance. Many OCD sufferers fear being stuck on medication for life which is part of the fear cycle they are often experiencing relating to this question.

OCD can’t be cured. But recovery is where you can barely tell the difference, so doesn’t really make a difference if you’re cured or not. OCD is most likely biological although the science is still out on this one. A common myth is that meds fix the chemical imbalance where in fact they lighten the load as mentioned above but it is getting in to our thinking and changing our irrational beliefs that fuel the anxiety cycle that really gets under it.

Recovery means the absence of chronic anxiety and intrusive thoughts have lost their intrusiveness. Recovery is a journey a gradual fading of anxiety and intrusiveness which is a bumpy road with many peaks and troughs along the way.

Recovery involves many setbacks, but setbacks are not going back to square one, although it can feel like that at times! On difficult days it can feel like we haven’t improved at all, but this is all part of the process and once we welcome in the challenging days as good – meaning we know we are working hard on recovery which is leading to inevitable spikes in anxiety. When we experience the discomfort we have been working so hard to move away from, we can easily become convinced we are back at square one but what we are learning is paving the way for the long term goal, the short term feels bumpy until we start to see things level out over time. That is when we can look back at the journey and appreciate just how far we have come! So, yes relapses during recovery are possible but in general they lessen in intrusiveness and in how they affect us to more we are moving towards recovery. Once recovered, we accept the possibility without fear of future relapses however I, as a person recovered from OCD, have not relapsed ever, this is because I no longer fear anything that OCD used to latch to.

OCD can start at any age but usually becomes more chronic in our teenage years or early adulthood. Regardless of when OCD started for you or how long you have suffered, recovery is possible.

Stressful situations can increase OCD symptoms as well as bring on the beginning of OCD but I imagine the biological components were in place for this to occur.

From a personal predictive view, I imagine there’ll be a cure in the future but we’re not at this point yet. I hold good hope that Elon Musk will make significant advances with Neuralink in the next decade. For more info on this please watch our videos on YouTube on the Future of OCD. Let me highlight that the tools are there to recover, where you can’t tell the difference between having OCD or not. So whether a cure comes along or not isn’t significant to your quality of life, you have the tools to change how you are currently feeling. For example if there were to be a cure for OCD that I had access to right now, it wouldn’t change my life in any significant way since OCD no longer impacts my life.