Anxiety coach Danielle Jhiani explains why untreated OCD worsens and shifts themes over time. ERP (Exposure and Response Prevention) is the evidence-based treatment. She walks through her recovery method and what to expect when new themes emerge during healing.
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Welcome back. My name is Danielle Thornton Gianni. I'm an anxiety and OCD recovery coach. Helping people recover from anxiety, OCD and insecure attachment, just like I have, so you can have an amazing life and happy, healthy relationships. Today we're going to talk about how OCD can change over time. Now, if you are not getting treatment, likely OCD will get worse over time and you're likely to develop different themes or experience anxiety with more types of events and situations in life. Because by not responding properly to these situations and thoughts, you are actually training your brain's anxiety response for more fear. And so it is quite common for OCD to get worse, for anxiety to get worse over time as it goes untreated. I'll say it again, proper treatment is exposure and response prevention. And my method, called the Real Method for Recovery, goes even beyond that to help you get to that lifetime recovery stage, like I am now. Let's say you are getting treatment. OCD can still shift. I have had other themes try to come in, but luckily I know what to do, so nothing has really stuck, which is amazing. Another reason why it's really important to know how to respond. But if you are getting help, what can often happen is if you've got different themes, OCD will start to let go of one theme because you're learning to respond differently and it quiets down. You may find that another theme comes in. That's okay, because the point of recovery is to retrain your brain around all of the different themes, fears and uncertainties that you have in life. And once you tackle each one of those, you can quiet them all. And so if you have different OCD subsets, the more you can expect each one to come up and tackle each one, they will quiet down and go away, which is pretty awesome. Now, a very common thing that happens with people, a lot of my clients and people that I work with in my memberships is they will be going through recovery and they start to feel better and then they start to panic about why they don't have anxiety anymore. It's actually a good thing. Most of us would see that this is a good thing, but as OCD and anxiety can attach to anything, it attaches to change, it attaches to uncertainty, it attaches to doubt. And a lot of people doubt a lot of things in life. Super common. You just need to apply ERP to that intrusive thought as well. Getting proper treatment again is so important so that you can quiet the anxiety, quiet the ocd, become secure in relationships, and the wonderful thing is, you can get to the lifetime recovery stage where OCD no longer bothers you. And outside of ocd, you know what to do with doubt, uncertainty, fear, discomfort, because that's part of life for all of us. Once you know what to do with these things, you're not going to be developing anxiety and OCD around certain things, because you'll learn how. When fear and uncertainty show up, you can tame them very quickly and they fade away and you're not experiencing that anxiety and discomfort. If you want help with this, please check out my website and stay tuned for more videos just like this. If this was helpful, please subscribe and comment. We'll talk to you very soon.
