Anyone else have ocd go away, almost completely, just to come back a month, year, or years later? And then you’re kinda stuck for a while again? I know recovery and it getting better is possible. I’ve done it so many times. It just sucks being in slumps like this!
it took me 10 years for it to come back. And i have better control of it now.
Dealing with it rn! It’s so frustrating because when it comes back it feels like the very first time. As scary as ever! I just give myself encouragement - not compulsive reassurance - that I will get through it again. I’m getting better at just living life while the storm rages in my head.
Dang your brave! My version of scary as ever is really freakin scary so I can’t imagine being in that dark place and having to crawl back out bc it took me years the first time but at least I know it can happen reading your experience
@Anonymous Thank you! As scary as ever doesn’t mean I’m back at square one. For some reason every panic attack feels like the end of the world or of your mind, but I know that fighting it and avoiding it will only make things worse.
@Anonymous If I can expand on your analogy, yes I will fall back in that dark place, but therapy gives you grappling hooks 😜
@Markap Haha “I’m Batman” that’s a good analogy though and it totally makes sense
It’s so very weird! I take medication so I think it kinda helps but sometimes I’m so much more stuck than others. I also have never actually done exposure response therapy so I hope it helps!
I usually notice this when I’m overwhelmed with school and work. Because my mind is so focused on the tasks piling up in front of me it feels like I’m not making room to block the OCD out and so it decides to pop back into my routine in little ways.
Amen to this
I notice the same thing, I think ocd ebbs and flow as we know it never completely goes away
This thread is both great and discouraging to read. Iv recently started my erp and made some progress but it’s a lot of work I wonder weather it will always be this hard. I feel like as soon as I recover it’s just a matter of time before I’ll be back at square one. Seems from this thread that at the very least you can recover again. Mine seems to get worse under stress also perhaps after recovery I’ll set a general self care and wellness plan to reduce my stress in the long term? So while I havnt experienced recovery and then relapse I have gone from severe to moderate just to go back to severe after all that work I’m hoping guided erp (doing it now) will help
There are good days and bad days but that’s life with and without OCD! Don’t be discouraged because that’ll keep the bad days around more than the good!
Don’t let it discourage you. I promise you that as we learn to not do compulsions, it gets better. It maybe continues to come back because we have unknowingly done some type of avoidance? Once we get to the root of it all we will have all the tools we will need do these slip ups don’t feel as scary anymore.
To the people who are in therapy and on their recovery journey when the ocd is tending to die down a bit is it normal for the ocd to keep switching themes until it fully dissipates? Has anyone experienced this?
I’ve been stuck in this cycle for the last month or two and am not sure how to get out of it. Basically, I will work on ignoring the thoughts and not responding or engaging plus limiting/completely eliminating compulsions. After a week or two of constant work, the amount of intrusive thoughts in a day goes down. The anxiety each thought causes also goes down with some, but not all, thoughts passing without notice like they would for a normal person. The thoughts that do stick cause anxiety and make me want to ruminate or do other compulsions but I make sure to limit them. After a bit, I’m in a pretty good head space. This is usually when it goes down hill. I’ll start to question if I even have ocd because some of the thoughts (once again not all) pass without notice. The difficulty resisting compulsions goes down and so does the anxiety, only increasing the questioning. I spend a while questioning if I’ve ever had ocd in the first place and then something sets me off or the questioning itself becomes a trigger and I get stuck back into the same ocd cycle with constant rumination, anxiety, and other compulsions. This lasts for a week or two before I know I need to stop and try and work hard to get back to ignoring the thoughts. And the cycle just restarts over and over again. Does anyone have any tips to stop this from happening? It’s really harming my recovery as every few weeks I dive back into the same negative place I was.
Im still searching about pure o ocd while I still look for a specialized therapist so that's why I'm asking the following thing lol Is normal to have months and/or years without an ocd episode? I noticed I had a considerable amount of episodes in all my living years but sometimes they took a year or a bit more than a year to appear, in worse scenarios I noticed the took just months to appear once again Is that normal? Im kinda feeling guilty about it because I notice some people live 24/7 with ocd since they are kids while my thing is more like, episodically, not 24/7 since I was born? My last episode started in August of last year and is still haunting me but I know people had it worsened since their earlier years of life
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