I kinda of have a two part question. 1-Has anyone here just gotten better? 2-How do you know if ERP is working? My ocd goes through phases, and always has even before ERP. There are times where I just feel completely normal. Is ERP supposed to lengthen those times of feeling better? If I have times where I feel 100% normal, then why is OCD incurable? Something in my brain is going back and forth to think irrationally and then back to thinking rationally.

Omg I think about this all the time! I asked my therapist today about it and all he said was that people learn to "receive it" better when it comes, but you can't prevent it. That would be seen as recovered. Curable no... It will always come back, but I've seen that for some people it did lengthen the "normal" phase. But never gone completely.

I know people who have been recovered = symptom-free for more than 10 years. Some therapists even have told me this. I think the reason some tell us it is not curable is because part of the recovery process is acceptance of it. There also two different philosophies out there. One is that you are doomed to have OCD forever just learn to manage it + another that YOU can recover and keep it at bay successfully. Of course the latter is very difficult because you must literally rewrite the was you think. I have personally spoken to people who have recovered from OCD for decades. I wish I was one of them but that is what I am shooting for. Like you, I had a day when I was completely normal. What brought it back was my fear. I think fear has ALOT to do with it.

I’ve been recovered for thre years and all my therapy, including trauma and ERP therapy, took nearly 4 years to complete. ERP is to help lessen your OCD by reaching it what not to fear and to lessen your triggers. You can’t cure OCD, but you can successfully live with it. Just like how I’m successfully living with my PTSD, depression, GAD, and ADHD too.

I’d say I’ve been in full recovery about 3 days now. 3rd time in recovery. You know ERP is working if anxiety and or frequency/intensity of obsessions are reducing. You should feel some reduction after doing an exposure exercise if doing it correctly. And yes I would say I go longer periods of time without obsessions when I practice effective ERP. And it really just depends on what you mean by “curable.” I think generally people mean there is no magic pill that makes it go away. You have to do the work of ERP if you want recovery. However, I believe it is 100% possible to get fully better and fully recover, because I have had multiple times where I was doing very well with no obsessions for long periods of time.

I think that the true idea of ERP is you get better at resisting compulsions, and over time, the more you put in the work to use your new skills to resist compulsions, your obsessions fade. And triggers will bring obsessions back, but you’re better able to resist letting them consume you. I’m sure that s not the perfect approach for everyone but I think that’s the idea. That you need to be working at applying it every day, and that the way you can tell is working is if you’re better at resisting compulsions.