3 Reasons Your OCD Isn’t Getting Better and How to Heal

Have you ever wondered why you’ve been treated for OCD for quite some time and still haven’t gotten better? Or, even worse, why you did the recommended therapy, exposure and response prevention (ERP), and you’re getting worse.

3 reasons your OCD isn’t improving

1. You are in talk therapy or traditional psychoanalytic treatment. You are in the wrong treatment (see here). Research has shown that cognitive behavioral therapy is the best treatment for OCD. CBT teaches the sufferer how to actively reduce the number of compulsions they engage in by helping the person face what they fear in a systemic way to overcome it. This is a behavioral process known as desensitization. Desensitizing a person to what they fear or avoid is a key component to overcoming OCD.

2. Even if you’re on the right therapy, you can engage in what OCD specialists call “insidious compulsions.” What is sneaky compulsion? A sneaky compulsion occurs when the OCD sufferer is so triggered during exposure – they end up feeling so frightened and overwhelmed that they feel a desperate need to perform compulsions during the session that their therapist cannot see.

Also, they cover it up by not telling the therapist what they are doing. The cover-up part is also considered a compulsion. The reason a sufferer covers up their therapist’s compulsion is because they are afraid that the therapist will pressure them not to perform the compulsion. Also, the client may not want to disappoint the therapist.

Patients get worse over time if they sneak up on compulsions during therapy. They train their brains to believe exposure is dangerous or deadly. In fact, performing a compulsion tricks anyone’s brain into believing that there is significant risk involved in what they are doing.

3. Finally, a person may not feel a strong sense of courage or bravery before beginning treatment. Oftentimes, a client will begin treatment but is not yet ready to address the OCD. They may be in a pre-contemplative phase where they feel like they don’t want to have OCD but aren’t fully committed to giving up OCD.

3 tips to overcome barriers to success

1. Always seek behavioral therapy from a trained, certified, and licensed therapist. Especially if you are receiving ERP therapy. You might also want to ask about a personal ERP. Therefore, your doctor will be next to you throughout the exposure.

2. If the idea of ​​being exposed as part of therapy is discouraging to you. You can try another CBT option. The treatment program I created – Rock Bottom, Interruption, Practice, and Replacement Therapy (RIP-R) – does not involve creating exposures for the OCD sufferer. Instead, the client learns all the strategies they need to resist compulsion. The actual exposure occurs constantly in the everyday life of the patient. So their job is to always resist compulsions by practicing and using the strategies/disruptors they practice during therapy. This eliminates the risk of insidious compulsions and allows the client to become desensitized to many different scenarios.

3. Regardless of the therapy you choose, see if you are ready to start. Do you ask yourself, what would my life be like if I had no compulsions? Determine if this is the best time to start treatment and if you’re ready to stop allowing OCD to make decisions for you. If you feel a strong sense of courage, then now is the time to conquer the compulsions.