Danielle Thornton explains why anxiety sometimes spikes when it finally disappears. Your OCD might fade when you're busy or through ERP treatment, then you panic that it's gone for good. The fix: stop analyzing the absence and keep doing exposure work.
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Welcome back. My name is Danielle Thornton. I am an anxiety and OCD recovery coach. And today's video is for those of you who start to get really anxious or worried when your anxiety, your thoughts, or your feelings actually disappear. And oftentimes, you might start to wonder if you really have ocd. Now, this is really common in two different scenarios. The first scenario is you may not be getting any help with your ocd and you're just going through life. Sometimes things get busy and we aren't focused on our ocd. And then all of a sudden, you get that trigger. You're checking your feelings, you notice no thoughts or no anxiety, and you start to go down the rabbit hole of ruminating or analyzing the fact that there's no anxiety, which is the compulsion, right? You start to wonder, well, where are the thoughts? Where is the anxiety? Maybe I don't have OCD anymore. Maybe my fears are really true. Maybe they're not true. Maybe the OCD is gone. Maybe I never had it. All of those thoughts. There's probably a lot more that I am missing that you have had before. But this can happen. Essentially, you're kind of doing some ERP on your own. You don't even realize it. You're probably really focused on something else. You got busy with something. You weren't focused on the obsessions or intrusive thoughts that you're having, and you actually weren't doing any compulsions, which is why the anxiety and the thoughts actually went away, because you were doing naturally what you should be doing, which is not giving the OCD any attention. Again, this is part of the puzzle. When you first go through treatment, you have to learn how to do this systematically. But some people are doing it naturally, and they don't even realize it. So the OCD kind of went dormant naturally, and then it comes back, right? And this is normal because OCD is not curable. It's not going to go away forever and never come back. Everybody gets anxiety, everybody gets intrusive thoughts. Everybody worries about things. So if you have ocd, it's going to come and go. With the right treatment, you can get it to go away for longer periods of time. And when it comes back, it's not so bad because you know what to do with it. But either way, it is going to come and go. So that's why getting the proper treatment is so helpful. Now, the other scenario that happens with this, and I see it all the time with my clients, is that we are doing ERP together. I'm teaching them what's OCD and what's not. I'm teaching them what to do with those intrusive thoughts that they get. I'm teaching them what to do with the anxiety that they get. And it works. It's worked for every single one of my clients who's gone through my program. And so as it starts to work, the anxiety starts to go away, right? The thoughts, the intrusive thoughts start to go away because it's working. But a lot of people start to get really nervous because again, what happens is they might have the trigger of noticing that the anxiety is gone, noticing that the thoughts are gone, and then OCD will pick back up. At this point, a lot of people will start to let that trigger get to them and start doing the compulsion of overanalyzing or ruminating and trying to figure it out. And all of a sudden, you're back down in the rabbit hole of worrying and ruminating and analyzing and checking. Now, other people will start to try to bring back the anxiety. Some people do this, some people don't. But they'll try to bring back the thoughts. They'll try to bring back the anxiety either to prove that they have OCD or because it's more comfortable for them. And this is actually a compulsion as well. Now, as you can see, I've been talking a lot about obsessions, intrusive thoughts and compulsions. So. So all of this wrapped up in a package is called ocd. Okay? You get the intrusive thought, there may or may not be a trigger. You do a compulsion, and you're down the rabbit hole or back in the OCD cycle of doing, checking, comparing, analyzing all of those compulsions.
So what do you do about this? The short answer is, is that you work on acceptance. You work on exposure. Okay? Acceptance is essentially. Acceptance is essentially exposure, just in a different form. So you're going to accept whether the thoughts are there or not. You're going to accept whatever feelings are there or not, whether it's anxiety, discomfort, calm, happiness, okay? It doesn't matter what it is. You're going to accept what's there in that particular moment. You're going to be okay if you have anxiety, and you're going to be okay if you don't have anxiety. You're not going to try to get rid of anything that's there or push it away. You're also not going to try to bring it back if it's not there. Okay? You're not going to try to figure anything out. You're not going to try to solve anything. Again, what's essentially happened is you've had a trigger, you've got an intrusive thought, and you don't want to do the compulsions, okay? So the acceptance and letting things be there or not be there is the acceptance and exposure work.
No matter what the intrusive thought is, no matter what the fear is, no matter what the worry is. The longer answer to this is making sure that you get treatment for your ocd, no matter what subset you have. I help people get better every single day. So many people I see aren't taking that step to get the right help for their ocd, which is exposure and response prevention. I want to say this again, that a lot of people are afraid of the exposure part because they're afraid to face their fears. But let me tell you, the exposure exercises that I do with my clients are the one thing that brings their anxiety down in that moment. So they're very confidence building. They're not as scary as you think. We start wherever you're at. A good ERP specialist isn't going to do your worst fear with you. If you don't want to do it, it's not going to be effect anyway. So for those of you who are nervous to do erp, you're scared to do erp, definitely schedule a free call with me and let's talk about that, okay? Because I promise you, I have ocd. I've done it myself. I understand what it's like to be afraid of it, but it's absolutely nothing to be afraid of. It actually works and it makes you feel better. So I want to encourage everybody to check out the description box here on YouTube and set up a free call with me and let's talk about a recovery plan that can help you feeling better. I have been there myself. I've been there where you're at, and I've actually gotten to the recovery stage of ocd. And if I can do it, I know that you can do it too. And I'm here to help you. You can get better.
