150. Five Reasons You’re Not Progressing in Your OCD Recovery

Episode 150. Have you ever wondered why you feel stuck? You feel like you can’t get ahead in your OCD recovery and you’re sitting there thinking to yourself, what is the problem? So I’m going to give you five reasons why today.

Hello and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD with Carrie Bock. I’m a Christ follower, wife and mother, licensed professional counselor who helps Christians struggling with OCD get to a deeper level of healing. When I couldn’t find resources for my clients with OCD, God called me to bring this podcast to you.

With practical tools for developing greater peace. We’re here to bust through the shame and stigma surrounding struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories of healing and helping you replace uncertainty with faith. I’m here to help you let go of the past and future to walk in the present abundant life God has for you.

So let’s dive right into today’s episode. Just so you know, we are going to be off for Thanksgiving next week. So we hope that you have an amazing Thanksgiving with your family. You won’t see an episode come out from us. What you will see is an amazing flash sale coming out via email. If you want to be a part of that and get the biggest discount you’re going to see on our January launch of Christians Learning ICBT, you can do that by signing up for our email list, carriebock.com/ocd. One thing that we know about OCD is that it’s a chronic condition that waxes and wanes, typically due to stress. People will tell me, I had years where I wasn’t severely bothered by OCD, or at least it was at some type of manageable level where I could handle it. Then, something hit me, I got triggered one day, next thing you know, I’m down the rabbit hole, and now it’s really hard for me to manage my symptoms.

Obviously, this is very frustrating, because you’re thinking, how did I go through this period of my life and I was doing okay, and then I get to this period and things feel completely unmanageable, and you may feel like, well, I should be able to handle this. If that’s you, just know you’re not the only person who’s felt that way.

Sometimes you need different tools for different seasons of your life. That’s reality. Maybe you’ve done a round of ERP before, and things were flowing really well. And then when you started to have more mental compulsions, you found that some of the things you were doing before with ERP, you weren’t able to apply to your present situation, or you’re struggling with knowing how to apply what you learned in the past to your current symptoms.

One reason you may not be progressing with OCD recovery is you feel hopeless. You may feel like, there’s no way I’m going to get any better. And when we tell ourselves that, it blocks our progress, it blocks our ability to open up our mind and think about potentials. Think about creativity with small ways we could make changes, different types of help or treatment that we could get if we are completely closed off saying, no, I’m just probably going to be this way my whole life.

I’m never going to get better. I’m just going to continue to suffer. And I guess I’ll just have to deal with it and figure it out. I would say if you are experiencing this, I don’t blame you because you probably have tried many different things in the past. It’s interesting since I’ve been doing these intensive therapy sessions, one thing that usually shows up in the very beginning of a multi-day intensive is hopelessness.

Even a one day intensive people will say, I am coming in. I’m nervous because I don’t know how this is gonna go, and I don’t know if it’s actually gonna work for me or not. I can almost predict that people are going to say something similar to that and I’ve just started letting people know that’s completely normal.

If you feel like you’ve tried a lot of things that haven’t worked and then I’m asking you to try something new, of course you’re going to be skeptical and maybe feeling hopeless that it might not work. The reality is that we are learning new ways of helping people and growing in clinical skills every day.

We have different options. You can get better. You can have a better relationship with your OCD than you do right now. Will it go away completely? I don’t know. Only God knows that. It may not go away completely, but you can learn tools to manage it differently. And I really hope that you will join me in January on that journey.

I’m a firm believer that if you are not dead, that God is not done working in your life. God is the author of all healing. Sometimes we look for complete healing and our idea of healing is not necessarily the same healing that God wants to give us. Let me explain. You may want to be healed of the disorder when God wants to remove the shame.

You may want to never have an intrusive thought again when what God wants for you is to learn perseverance and strength under trial. You may want to never have to wrestle with a compulsion again, and God may be calling you to a place of greater dependence and trust in Him. Through learning the twelve modules of ICBT, I would love to have you there as a student just soaking in information, working on homework worksheets, and applying those principles to your life.

The second reason you may not be progressing in your OCD recovery is that your stress isn’t managed well. Maybe you just have a lot going on, a lot of moving pieces, whether that’s work stress, whether that’s home or relationship stress. Whether that’s stress with your children, I don’t know what your particular stress is, but if you don’t have the tools or the boundaries or the ability to calm yourself down, to be able to relax and be able to decompress when you need to, you’re going to continue to struggle with OCD.

I had An entire episode on this talking about how your stress is going to make OCD worse every single time. Stress is important to manage regardless of what mental health issue you’re dealing with, but especially with OCD, you have to have skills and tools and a plan and boundaries and self care to manage your stress.

Otherwise, your symptoms are going to continue to be out of control. And look. Some things are completely outside of our control, related to our stress, there may be other people in your life that are making certain choices that are causing you stress, whether that’s a boss or whether that’s a sibling or whether that’s a coworker or a friend.

And the reality is we have to, in these situations, look at, evaluate, what’s actually in my control about this situation? What can I actually do? Can I evaluate my schedule and determine if I have too much on my plate and see if something needs to come off? Not everything is for this season, so it’s okay to say no, have boundaries, to say, hey, you know what?

I would love to help you in the church nursery, but I just know that I’m having to travel a lot of weekends for work, and so when I’m home, I would like to just be worshipping with my family. I am so sorry that I am not able to help you out in this season, but that may change in a different season. Part of stress management and healthy self care is taking care of your physical body.

You have to be able to make sure that you’re working on things like sleep, eating, exercise, movement. We cannot expect our mental health to be in a good space when our physical health isn’t in a good space. If you were eating junk food all the time or constantly running through the drive thru, that’s gonna affect your gut health, that’s where your serotonin is produced in your gut.

And even though I don’t have specific research to support it, because I’ve looked for that research related to diet and OCD, I have had several clients tell me that their diet makes an impact on their symptoms. Oops. I know when I don’t eat well, I feel lethargic, run down, lacking in energy. When I don’t feel well, that means I’m more impatient with my loved ones.

I’m more quick to anger. I’m not the person that I want to be when I don’t take care of myself. We want to make sure that we’re being good stewards of the body that God has given us. And if you have a lot to work on in this area, it’s okay. Start small. Take it one step at a time. One healthy change is going to lead to another healthy change, to another healthy change, and it’ll just be this beautiful ripple effect.

The third reason you might not be progressing in your OCD recovery is that trauma is in the way. Here’s the deal with trauma and OCD. I mean, I’ve talked about this before on the podcast. If OCD is fire, then trauma is the gasoline. When you take away the gasoline, there still may be some fire, but it’s not going to be raging as intently as it was before.

There are two modules that we look at in ICBT where trauma really shows up. One is the obsessional story of module three, where people will cite personal experience as being relevant to why their obsession is relevant. The second is module four, it’s what we call the feared self. It’s who OCD is telling you that you’re going to become if you don’t engage in these compulsions.

If it doesn’t come out at intake, a lot of times what I see with my clients when we go through modules three and four is that there’s something from the past that they’re stuck on. They may not identify it as like a major traumatic event, But it may have been an intense emotional experience that affected them or something that somebody said.

That really got stuck in their head that they can’t seem to get out. As we unpack those past experiences, it really helps people to have clarity, to be able to move forward. Even something as simple as recognizing I’m not stuck in that past time anymore. I can move forward. I am in a different space in my life.

I’m a different person than who I was in the past. Even just some of those simple things can help people. For situations where there was chronic childhood trauma or a traumatic event that seemed to trigger, OCD symptoms, that is where I will utilize EMDR with individuals to help them clear out that trauma and come to a place of resolution so that they can then jump back in and continue the ICBT work.

This is one of my major criticisms with ERP is that it’s not always trauma informed. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it’s completely not. Where I’ve seen situations where individuals have been been through ERP and had reported trauma that was never processed or dealt with in any specific way in treatment.

And sometimes going through ERP when people have not dealt with the trauma tends to exacerbate their trauma PTSD symptoms. Remember, we talked about this before, 25 percent of people who qualify for an OCD diagnosis also qualify for a PTSD diagnosis. That’s 1 in 4 people in OCD recovery. If we as the clinicians are not looking at trauma as part of this picture, we are doing you a serious disservice.

I also did a show a while back on being highly sensitive and how that impacts treatment. If you are highly sensitive, you are going to view more things as traumatic than the average person. That’s just the reality, because you’re more sensitive to your emotional experience and empathizing with others, taking things in.

That also has to be taken into consideration. Depending on your situation, if you have a lot of trauma, you may want to pursue trauma treatment prior to pursuing OCD treatment if the person that you’re seeing isn’t able to do both or incorporate those for you. I have to make clinical considerations about this all the time and usually I’ll talk with my clients and help them and we’ll talk through, hey, does this make sense as far as if we go down this pathway and we start with some EMDR, start with some trauma processing.

And then shift over into ICBT, how does that sound to you, or does it sound better to start some ICBT, get some skills under your belt, and then go into some trauma processing, like I said, when we get into modules three and four, it depends on each person’s, like, individual situations. Sometimes if you haven’t had a certain level of OCD treatment, it can get in the way of your ability to process trauma because you’re just going into your head and you don’t have those skills to really be able to sit with your emotional experiences.

If you’re not in touch with your body, you’re not going to be able to process the trauma fully. You may be able to process it from a mental cognitive level, but trauma processing needs to really be a whole body experience. Look at the book The Body Keeps the Score for more information about that. Trauma is really stored in the body.

Number four, you haven’t learned the right tools to manage obsessions and compulsions. This is for my friends who have been in talk therapy, really getting a lot of just reassurance seeking from their therapist, or maybe they’ve had some Christian counseling with someone who has given them the typical Christian tools, like, hey, you’ve got to take every thought captive, or you’ve got to pray about this, you’ve got to learn to let it go and give it to God, These might be some things that would be helpful for if someone doesn’t have OCD, but if you have OCD, you need a specific set of tools to be able to know how to manage obsessions and compulsions as they come up, how to respond to them instead of reacting in that same loop, same cycle over and over and over again.

Some people have tried therapy in the past and felt like it hasn’t worked for them, or Unfortunately, I’ve talked with people that have had negative experiences with therapy. And when you’ve had negative experiences, I feel like it’s about two times as hard to go back and get up and try again. I really want to encourage you, find a therapist you can have a consultation with, whether that’s a short phone call or email exchange or learning what you can about them online.

Reading a blog post, something that they’ve written. That’s one of the beautiful things about this podcast, is that so many people have felt more comfortable about being able to come and see me because they’ve heard my voice, they know how I talk, they know my style and approaches to treatment. I definitely can tell a difference when I’m sitting down with somebody who has listened to the podcast versus just someone that doesn’t have that context or doesn’t know that much about me.

If you don’t feel like you’ve learned the right tools to manage your obsessions and compulsions, please join us in January for Christians Learning ICBT. ICBT is an incredible tool that allows you to see your compulsions as irrelevant. It helps you to slow down your thinking and get in touch with your true identity, not who OCD is telling you you’re going to become.

And that’s the beautiful thing for Christians is that it integrates really well with Christianity. And the fifth reason that you may not be progressing in your OCD recovery is that you’re resistant to trying medication. This is true for many Christians that I’ve talked to, and look, I hear you. I know so many of you want to take a holistic route with your health and not have to be on medication.

I know so many of you feel like you don’t want to be on medication for long term, or you fear becoming dependent on it. I would say that over the past year, I have massively changed my approach to medication when it comes to OCD treatment. Whereas I used to just say, Oh, okay, it’s all right if you don’t want to take medication, let’s try therapy first, see how things go, and then you can reevaluate and determine if you want to get on medication or not.

And now what I’m doing is talking to people in the very first session. about what is your openness or willingness to try medication. Research shows us that people tend to have the best outcomes when they are utilizing medication and therapy together. Oftentimes I will see people who either have one part of the equation but not the other.

They’re willing to do therapy but they’re not sure about medication or they’ve been on medication for a while but they haven’t done therapy and so you need those pieces really to work together. Not to be a pill pusher or cause people to feel like they’re forced to do something, but I do really encourage people that it is so helpful when someone is more at a medically stable, medicated state to learn these skills, to grow, to utilize them, than if they’re constantly having to fight obsessions and compulsions.

And it somewhat depends on the severity, obviously, that someone is dealing with. As I started to see more and more people who were dealing with higher levels of severity, I started to having more conversations initially about medication. If someone comes in and they have more OCD tendencies or they have a mild case of OCD, maybe they’re only dealing with one theme and it’s not affecting their functioning level, then we can say, okay, maybe that person doesn’t necessarily need medication.

But if you’re spending hours a day on your OCD, it’s time to consider medication if you haven’t already, especially if you haven’t made progress in therapy. So keep that in mind. Certainly, talk to a medical provider, get all of your questions answered. Look into the medications that are specifically FDA approved for OCD.

Express your concerns, ask about side effects. It’s important to know that information if you are going to take something. But you also don’t want to let OCD or anxiety about taking medication to keep you from potentially feeling better. We did an episode much earlier on medication. You can always go to our website and search for specific episodes if you go to karybach.

com and under the podcast breakdown page there’s a search bar at the top so if you want to search for specific types of therapy Or you want to search for medication, you want to search sleep, you can pull up episodes via different topics that you search for. I’d love to have you guys utilize that because it’s a great feature that we have.

But just for a quick review, we’re going to go through the five reasons you’re not progressing in your OCD recovery. You feel hopeless, your stress isn’t managed well, trauma is in the way, You haven’t learned the right tools to manage obsessions and compulsions, or you’re resistant to trying medication.

Have an amazing Thanksgiving, and I’ll be back the first week in December to talk about three ways to be mindful this Christmas season. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you. Were you blessed by today’s episode? If so, I’d really appreciate it if you would go over to your iTunes account or Apple Podcasts app on your computer if you’re an Android person and leave us a review.

This really helps other OCD be able to find our show. Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By The Well Counseling. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area.