Living Life with OCD: A Walk Through Treatment

Before treatment, the compulsions from OCD can be all-consuming. When most people walk into my therapy room, they describe a life built upon serving the needs of OCD living inside their mind. OCD torments people, from the moment they awake to the second they fall asleep, driving their every action and decision. A client can feel scared to wake up tomorrow—already resenting that they will need to do it all over again.

Effective treatment for OCD breaks the hold obsessions and compulsions have over your life. You gain control back. You get to choose your actions. You get to start living the life you want and achieving every goal you set out for yourself instead of letting anxiety stop you.

OCD is one of the most debilitating mental health disorders because of its hold over people’s ability to engage fully in life. But for every one person treated for a mental health disorder, at least three lives are changed. CalmOCD conducts 700 hours of OCD treatment each month, or 8,400 hours per year. That’s a lot of lives changing!

So let’s talk about how different life looks after treatment. For the purposes of this blog, I will walk you through one fictional example of a common person we encounter in our therapy rooms. The story is not based on any one person in particular, and I will not be revealing anything identifying about clients we serve here at CalmOCD. Instead, it is a chance for you to maybe see yourself in the lives of one of these characters and begin experiencing hope your life could change for the better just like theirs. I’m making up some names to go along with each of them too, so let’s meet Kate, David, and Christina. 

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Let’s Meet Kate and Her Parents

Kate is a high schooler in the valley. She is on the honor roll, plays volleyball, and wants to go to college to eventually become a physical therapist. Kate has always been described as a hard worker, someone who goes above and beyond, and tries to do it all. She also always feels anxiety. She wakes up to check her list of assignments again to ensure everything was completed. She tends to skip breakfast because of stomach aches before school which are incredibly common with this population. Kate is ready to go at least 10 minutes before she needs to leave the house, so she is never late to school. 

Once she is at school, she meticulously completes assignments often taking longer than others to re-check her work. She worries that others will think she is dumb if she asks a stupid question, so instead she avoids asking for help even if she needs it. At lunch, she checks the faces and body language of her friends to make sure they aren’t upset with her. After school, she seeks reassurance from her teammates that they think she is good enough to play in tomorrow’s game because she doesn’t want to let them down. Once she gets home, Kate spends hours replaying the day in her mind to see where she made mistakes and will confess to her mom, Christina, anything she thinks she did wrong. Christina, uncertain of what to do, provides reassurance that she didn’t do anything to make her friends, family, or teachers think differently of her. She provides rationalization that the little things Kate mentions won’t really make anyone dislike her and that it’s silly to think so. Kate spends over an hour tossing and turning in bed before she falls asleep thinking about the day tomorrow and planning out all the things she will do.

Her parents, David and Christina, feel like they are walking on ice around Kate. They don’t want to say anything that would make her more anxious or could upset her. They promise her that she is doing great in school and she doesn’t need to get all A’s. They will listen to her talk about her conversations with friends and tell her it doesn’t sound like she did anything wrong at all. They make sure to tell Kate anytime there is something coming up on the calendar, and they will repeat any answers to questions that she continues to ask.

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Kate, David, and Christina Start Treatment

Kate found her way to CalmOCD to start treatment. Kate has spent the last 4 years in therapy with half a dozen therapists learning strategies to relieve her anxiety to no avail. The therapists have given her coping skill after coping skill, from meditation to cognitive restructuring and everything in between.  Finally, she googled her symptoms and saw that it might be OCD.  When she came in for an intake assessment, she realized that there are millions of other people plagued by worries all day too. Kate started her first 3 sessions learning about the OCD cycle, created a fear structure analysis, learning skills to disengage from OCD and prepare for real-life events. She learned that obsessions are the intrusive, unwanted, repetitive fears and worries in her mind; she can’t control that they happen, and we don’t need to try to get rid of them. The anxiety she feels from the obsession is also uncontrollable, and all her efforts to relieve the anxiety are misguided. Kate has learned the true key to changing her life is to resist compulsions, which are all the things she does to try to relieve the anxiety that her obsessions cause. She learned from her therapist that we don’t have to create elaborate exposures—life already gives them to you! Quickly, Kate started seeing the confidence and bravery she feels using her OCD skills instead of completing her compulsions. She learned that engaging in compulsions is a choice, and she is way more in control of her life than she even knew possible.

David and Christina began meeting with Kate’s therapist to walk through SPACE (Supportive Parenting For Anxious Childhood Emotions). They learned that Christina tended to be a protective parent, while David was more of a demanding parent. Through learning about accommodations (and how doing things to help Kate avoid anxiety actually make it much worse), they became empowered to help Kate release the hold OCD had on her life. They started making announcement letters to Kate sharing how they love her so deeply that they would no longer be doing things to grow OCD; instead, they would start doing things that demonstrated their confidence in Kate’s ability to be brave and courageous. Through this process, David and Christina began to feel more united in their parenting of Kate, and grew closer to Kate in a whole new way.

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Successfully Completing Treatment

After engaging in exposure response prevention, Kate’s whole world looks different. Kate still experiences the fears caused by obsessions from OCD, but she has learned fears aren’t the problem. Her anxiety sometimes feels high, especially when she is worried about something important to her, but she has learned that anxiety is a human emotion that we don’t have to escape. Instead, she has learned she has the choice to decide what her life looks like. She no longer wakes up early just to make sure she is at school on time and embraces the uncertainty that it would suck if she arrived late. She asks questions in class when she is confused knowing that someone might, in fact, think she is dumb for asking the question. School is still very important to Kate, but she no longer lets her obsessions drive how she acts at school. She still does her homework, but she no longer spends time rechecking everything to ensure it was done perfectly. She doesn’t scan her friends to see if they are mad and instead knows that it’s possible they are, but she’s no longer going to have the fear of them being mad drive her friendship. She now has the time to grab dinner with her friends during the week or participate in family game night. Kate tells her mom about the fun parts of her day instead of all the places she could have made mistakes.

David and Christine no longer engage in the actions Kate desires for them to help her escape anxiety. Through SPACE education, David and Christine learned they had to face their own uncomfortable emotions to successfully support Kate. They will no longer rush out the door to make sure she is on time. They won’t promise she didn’t make any mistakes. They will say they can’t know for sure if she will get into her dream college. David and Christine feel in control of the tools needed to help Kate take control of her life again.

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There is Hope

This can be you. Evidence-based OCD treatment truly is effective and life changing. You can win your life back. It’s only a phone call away. CalmOCD diligently works to ensure we are providing excellent, effective treatment to help instill hope and guidance to change your life.

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