Transcript
A (0:00)
I'm Ali Graymond. I'm an expert in OCD recovery because for the last 19 years, I've been helping people fully recover from OCD. If you would like to do personal coaching with me, all the information is on younhubocd.com you can sign up from there.
B (0:14)
People often ask, will I be managing OCD forever? And the answer really is depending on what you do. If you are, let's say, for example, even you work down to very low amount of rumination, Very, very low amount of compulsions, but you're not pushing yourself to get further than that. Well, then you'll be stuck at this level for how long? Forever. As long as you maintain ocd, it will continue to flourish at the level that you maintain it. So it's the idea of me. I honestly, I hate when therapists talk about maintenance. They have no idea what they're talking about. And I think from listening to me and understanding the mechanics, you look at them too, and you're like, wow, really? The maintenance thing is not mandatory. You don't have to be in a situation where your OCD needs to be managed for the rest of your life or maintained or whatever. It only happens if you stop doing the work and maintain the same level of behaviors. So level of behaviors equals level of OCD. If you're maintaining 1% of behaviors, you're gonna continue to have 1% OCD. And then, you know, you can say, oh, but my OCD is chronic, sure, because you're. You're keeping it chronic. But if you get rid of that 1%, boom, done. But a lot of the times, also what happens is that people kind of, like, reduce importance to recovery once they get to a low number because they can live their lives, they're doing generally fine. And I always tell you guys, finish the job, because if you don't, what can happen is that, okay, you're at 1%, you feel fine, you don't feel the need to finish it. But what will happen under a stressful situation in life, and that 1% due to stress, life stress, it jumps up, and you're unaware, unprepared. You can't fall back into ocd. So as long as it's a little bit there, dormant, you have a chance of falling back into it. So again, when I talk about tracking, I tell you, when you track, bring it to zero and then track for a few months of zeros. Like, even in the screenshot you see here, we could see how many. Well, it's kind of hard to say. Kind of hard to see because it's so small, but you could see how many months the person was doing well and they're still tracking in the first screenshot. So it's really important that you cement the recovery. You got to zero anxiety. Great. Cement it and don't, don't be at the, you know, 1% anxiety, get to zero and then make sure that the progress sticks where the brain fully heals. And because there's a big difference from when you feel recovered to the when the brain fully heals, it's not at the same time and there's a there, there's a chance of falling back into it, especially in the beginning. So track be accountable even when you feel you don't need to be.