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- Yesterday
Recovery
When people recover from ocd is it gone for good?
When people recover from ocd is it gone for good?
No, but it doesn't really bother you anymore. I used to have very bad existential ocd, it was 4 years of constant rumination and fear around death and my life's meaning and now I'm completely recovered from that theme but that doesn't mean that I don't get thoughts sometimes. If I encounter a trigger I may get some thoughts but they usually don't make me feel anxious and I don't feel the urge to ruminate on them and if I do I can redirect my attention to something else with little to no effort. And sometimes they do make me feel anxious but if I simply accept the feelings they don't even last 5 minutes. In the (very) rare moments when I engage with the thoughts and actually ruminate on them my anxiety may get high and scary but again, I'm able to move my attention very easily. When you recover, the thoughts become very unimportant, almost irrelevant to you
Recovery is no longer feeling the need to do anything about your thoughts because you accept and understand uncertainty is apart of life and now you can tolerate and accept it, intrusive thoughts and feelings are normal and apart of life and nothing dangerous, it’s useless irrelevant noise. Your relationship with it all changes. These things are all apart of life, running from them, denying them and giving them meaning is what amplified it all and keeps you sick. It all becomes irrelevant. And if it does bother you again you now know your enemy, how to respond and can cope.
@danny02 thank you
Here is what I can't get past "accept uncertainty" In practice what does this actually Meaaaan? When I hear that, I interpret as "lie to yourself, destroy your own integrity, accept being delusional, etc." if it relates to things that are certain - real events OCD ... things that are factual / they happened - true things. I have like some - the impact of OCD. Is this anxiety uncertain? Is this tension headache everyday uncertain? Is how it's affecting my relationships - and I can see it in their eyes - uncertain? I don't get it. I'm missing something.
@Dude01 Anything is possible so how you goi g to cope. You could die tomorrow even though you Feel you won’t. There are only odds. How you going to surrender to the fact that odds are all we have. All you have is the present moment, the now. Nothing is 100 percent. We can only plan for the future, living in it is a fantasy. Accepting uncertainty is not a trick, it is a reality you need to learn to embrace. At the same time not every ocd problem is fueled by intolerance to uncertainty, some things are benign in nature and purely annoying fueled purely by jugdment. Things that have happened are fuelled by not letting go and learning to move on with whatever that may mean about you as a person. For example Maybe you were bad and did hurt that person back in the day, how are you going to learn to forgive yourself or move on. Ocd is somthing you do, not somthing you are. We have to learn to let it go, let it be.
It’s like diabetes. If you have insulin and keep up with it you live well. That’s not to say you won’t be scared every now and then, but I always say the ocd voice gets much quieter and much more distant. You will probably have anxiety levels at or below the average person generally (because ocd therapy teaches you how to be more mentally healthy all around too). It intensifies every now and then, but it doesn’t feel like a part of your anymore even when it intensifies. OCD turns from a giant grizzly bear to a fly.
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