Danielle Thornton (anxiety and OCD recovery coach) presents a YouTube video listing six signs that indicate someone is in the recovery stage for OCD. The six signs are: (1) all compulsions identified and reduced to zero, (2) awareness of intrusive thoughts and triggers and applying ERP quickly, (3) acceptance of uncertainty and imperfect outcomes, (4) understanding ERP as an ongoing way of life, (5) acceptance that the future is unpredictable but having practiced exposures, and (6) confidence in applying ERP (often learned with a coach/therapist). The video emphasizes continuing to practice ERP to maintain recovery, normalizing ups and downs, and seeking support when needed.
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Welcome back. My name is Danielle Thornton. I'm an anxiety and OCD recovery coach who has personally recovered from multiple subsets of OCD and has helped. Has been helping others do the same since 2018. Today, we're going to talk about six signs that you are in that recovery stage. This can take some time for a lot of people. It took me a lot of time to get here. The journey was feeling better and better and better and better over time, with ups and downs, but generally learning and feeling better over time. But a lot of people ask, how do I know that I am in the recovery stage? Well, number one is that you have identified every single one of your compulsions and you have gotten them all to zero. I stay in the recovery stage by keeping my compulsions at zero, and I keep my compulsions at zero by continuing to apply ERP whenever it's needed. So sign number two is you are aware. You have an awareness of whenever thoughts show up. That might be something OCD wants to latch onto. So, for example, if you start having stressful times in your life, your brain might want to start focusing on what's not going right in your life, because again, OCD wants perfection. And when things aren't going our way, we can really start to focus on what's not going right and start to worry about that. But once you've learned exposure and response prevention, you learn that focusing on what's not going right and wanting things to be different are not helpful. In fact, it makes OCD worse. So allowing your life to have ups and downs, pros and cons, is really important. That's one way that we practice exposure and response prevention. But noticing that when things get stressful and applying ERP to the worries and thoughts that start to pop up in your head, you're going to keep yourself in the recovery stage and keep yourself from going back down that rabbit hole by essentially starting to do compulsions in response to the thoughts or the situations. It doesn't matter if it's a random thought or a real situation. This is how we stay in, get to and stay in the recovery stage. Compulsions have to get to zero. So you have to make sure that you've identified all of them. And then we stay in the recovery stage, essentially by keeping our compulsions at zero. So, number two, awareness is really important. Having the awareness of when your brain wants to start to worry about something, when your brain wants to attach to something that's not going perfectly in your relationship. When you experience something that might typically be a trigger, maybe it hasn't triggered you in a while. Maybe you have harm OCD and you see an accident in front of you or something, you know, really uncomfortable happens and it triggers you. It's important to understand that if you're in the recovery stage, it's probably not going to be as triggering as it was before, typically. But being aware of that and then applying your ERP skills immediately, that's how you stay in the recovery stage. Number three, you've gotten really good at recognizing your brain's need for things to be or go a certain way, and you've accepted that that's not how life is. So this is a big one. And again, OCD wants certainty and perfection. And when we recognize how our OCD shows up, it's usually when things aren't going our way, we start to get frustrated and we start to try to fix things, make them right, make them go our way. And again, it's usually very futile. So once we realize that, we can start to practice acceptance, which is a form of exposure. And the more acceptance we practice, the less we're going to go down, back down that rabbit hole or back into the OCD cycle. Number four, you fully understand that ERP is a way of life. It's not something we just do and then we stop and expect everything to just go away. This mental health is just like physical health. We can't go eat good one day and exercise for a week and expect our bodies to look good and stay healthy. We have to eat good consistently and exercise consistently if we want a healthy body. And if we stop, our body is going to go backwards. The same is true for our mental health. We have to learn how to keep our mental health good and apply those skills all the time. So you've accepted this and you understand that ERP isn't just something you do and that you quit. It's a way of life. And the really cool thing about this is once you've understood this and you make it a way of life, it's very easy. I mentioned that I do ERP all the time. And it's like seconds. It's quick, it's easy, there's no discomfort. I just respond with ERP real quick and it fades away. Number five, you also understand that you can't predict the future and you don't know if you're going to be able to keep yourself in the recovery stage pretty easily or if something is going to happen that might be a little bit more difficult to keep you in this recovery stage. So you've Practiced exposure with accepting that maybe OCD is going to come back, maybe it's going to get tougher one day. But you know, so you know it's a possibility. You've accepted it, but it doesn't scare you anymore because you've done enough erp. You just know that you know how to get yourself out of it. You've got the skills. And while it may not be comfortable, if it happens or none of us want to be uncomfortable, we're not focused on that. We're focused on the fact that maybe it'll happen, maybe it won't. I have no idea. I can't predict the future, but I have the tools and I have support from my OCD coaches and if I need it.
And lastly, you have that confidence in erp. You've worked with a coach or a therapist enough to learn it, and hopefully they're teaching you so that you can apply it anytime. But you've worked with somebody enough, you've applied it enough, and you have asked all the questions and worked through all the ups and downs of it that you feel confident that if an intrusive thought shows up again, if something happens, if you can apply ERP and you're going to be able to get yourself back to that recovery stage. So I hope this was really helpful today. Please comment below. Let me know where you're at in the recovery stage. Maybe you're here, maybe you're not, maybe you're just at the beginning of your recovery journey. But I promise you, it doesn't matter how old you are, how long you've had ocd, how bad your OCD is, you can get here and you can stay here. Again, I stay in the recovery stage. I'm confident that I can stay in the recovery stage. Even though I practice exposure, I don't know what the future holds. I'm confident that I'm going to be able to keep myself here or get myself back here if I need it. And it feels amazing. OCD isn't something that bothers me anymore. And you can get here too. It's just a matter of learning the right skills, putting them into practice and getting the right support until you feel like you are here. So check out the link in the description below if you would like my help getting there. Otherwise, we will talk to you in the next video.
