Actually it has been 2 years and 4 months. I am still not on medication. I haven’t seen a psychiatrist for very long time. I still see a psychologist though but we mostly talk about other things besides OCD. OCD is so infrequent now that I don’t have much to say to the doctor.
It is too bad that I spent all those years wasted on OCD. 17 years. I have to play catch up now. But I have no regrets getting over OCD late in my life. Better late than never. My view of the world is still clear as glass without the OCD. It is a great experience. Better than all the years in the past. In a way, I would not want to be 27 again with the OCD. I would rather be 46 without OCD.
Somebody put a comment that I should tell others about how to get over OCD.
This is a tough request because it is frustrating even for me now, a long-time suffer, telling another sufferer how to get over OCD. Most sufferers know I had it because I would describe what I used to do and I would try talk to them in a way that they understand. Sufferer to sufferer talk. But even then I get this sense that there is this extreme psychological barrier on their part that makes it difficult for them to believe what I telling them.
The following statements are my own opinions and are based on my own experiences. They are glimpses of what to expect. I am not a doctor or a researcher. However, I used to be an OCD sufferer for 17 years.
YOU have to do the homework.
The medication isn’t going to cure you. They’ll help you manage the anxiety. I know of two instances of temporary relief. One person took a non-SSRI and he said that his pure-O thoughts stopped. I later saw him again and his thoughts came back. I took Celexa and my OCD thoughts stopped…for two weeks. During those two weeks, I could not produce an OCD even if I tried. It was fantastic. Unfortunately, it did not last. The OCD thoughts came back. Even though I continued taking Celexa, that mental bliss never came back.
I am not saying that medication is totally worthless. There were times they did help. One time my anxiety was out of control (I had to quit my job, because if I didn’t I would have been fired). I was prescribed Klonopin and my anxiety dropped. Unfortunately, Klonopin is addictive so the medication provided short term relief.
The psychologist isn’t going to cure you either. They’ll tell you what you have to do to get over your fears. However, they cannot talk you into health. And this makes sense, because if you see a doctor for anything, he’ll prescribe you something, but you have to take the prescription and sometimes you have make adjustments to your lifestyle. In the end, you have to make the effort to get healthy.
For these two reasons, YOU have to do the homework. You have to make the adjustments. If you’re not changing, then don’t expect things around you to change either.
There is no total cure for OCD
I hate to burst your bubble, but don’t expect to be totally cured. I still have feelings of OCD now and then. However, the feelings are so infrequent, like once every 2 to 3 weeks, that I’ll take the once per 2-3 weeks, than every waking moment every day for 17 years.
When I do get the OCD feelings, I know what NOT to do. After 17 years of OCD, I know what OCD feels like and I know when the feeling starts to build, but I also know what not do because if I do respond to the OCD than I run the risk of regressing.
On a side note, many people do OCD-ish things sometimes, meaning non-sufferers do OCD-like things. It is just they don’t suffer from it.
When you’re cured, you are barely going to manage anxiety
I know I just said that there is no cure but there is difference between absolute, or total, cure versus practical cure. An absolute cure is unrealistic, but there is a degree of a cure that for practical purposes it’s a cure. When you’re cured, you are barely going to experience anxiety hopefully for the rest of your life. The reason –all the things you fear, you not going to think about them anymore because they don’t scare you anymore.
I remember talking to a sufferer who believed that she would have to settle managing her anxiety for the rest of her life. I told her that if she gets to where I am at, she doesn’t have to manage her anxiety because she isn’t going to have anxiety anymore.
When you’re cured, you will not think like what you did when you had OCD. You will think different.
When you’re cured and you look back to what you were with OCD, don’t be surprised that you’ll say to yourself, “What the hell was I thinking?”
This goes back to what I said before that you have to do the homework. When you do the homework, you’re forcibly changing yourself. You’re changing your lifestyle. You’re changing the way you think!
When you seek a cure, you will have to let go of some of what you believe. You cannot take your personality with you.
This resistance to change one’s ways is not uncommon. Almost everybody is reluctant to change their normal routine and beliefs. Telling someone to go cold turkey on the morning coffee is a tough sell. Or telling someone to go from liberal to conservative or vice versa is well…next to impossible. People have a mental inertia. They are reluctant to change.
Well, like everybody else, OCD sufferers are reluctant to change too. If they break their OCD routine, they fear that something bad is going to happen. That’s why they don’t break their routine.
That’s it for now
I hope this helps in what to expect. I don’t expect everybody to benefit from what I just wrote because OCD is a spectrum of mental disorders and I just had a subset of them. I just hope that what I wrote helps somebody out there.