1. Clarity About What You Want Your Life to Look Like

The people who do well in OCD recovery tend to be clear, or working toward clarity, about what they want their life to look like. Not “I want my OCD to go away,” but something more specific: I want to go back to school. I want to drive again. I want to cook without being afraid of the knives in my kitchen. I want to take the family vacations we keep putting off.

Recovery isn’t the absence of intrusive thoughts or the disappearance of anxiety. It’s the ability to live the life you want even when those thoughts and feelings show up. Getting specific about what that life looks like gives your recovery work a direction. Without that, “doing the work” can start to feel abstract.

2. Willingness to Bring Discomfort Along With You

The plan isn’t “get better, then go live my life.” It’s reverse engineered. You start living the parts of your life that matter to you now, and you let your OCD, your intrusive thoughts, your anxious feelings and urges, come along for the ride.

That might mean returning to cooking while you’re still anxious about the knives. It might mean driving up and down your own driveway before you ever get back on the highway. The size of the step matters less than your willingness to feel uncomfortable while you take it. This is the core of exposure and response prevention (ERP), the gold-standard treatment for OCD. Discomfort is part of the process, not a sign that something has gone wrong.

3. Doing It Kindly

Kim put it well: most of the work in OCD recovery is learning to be uncomfortable kindly.

In practice, that means noticing when you’re being harsh with yourself (“everyone else can do this, what’s wrong with you”) and choosing not to pile that on top of the discomfort you’re already feeling. It means acknowledging the physical sensations, the racing heart, the nausea, the depersonalization, without treating them as evidence that you’re failing. Some people describe this as “sitting with” the discomfort. Kim prefers “sitting beside” it, building a relationship with it rather than wrestling with it. Either way, the goal is the same: you can learn to experience difficult thoughts and sensations without making them mean something about you as a person.

When you’re three minutes into a panic spiral and every skill you know has gone out the window, that’s part of the process too. The moment you notice and can soften back toward the discomfort, you’re back in it.

4. Attention Training

Attention training is your ability to direct your focus to something specific even while everything around you, or inside you, feels chaotic.

Intrusive thoughts and the doubt that comes with OCD can feel automatic, like they sweep you away. Attention training is the skill of noticing that you have some agency over where your attention goes, even in that moment. It doesn’t have to be meditative or peaceful. It can be your kid’s voice, the sound of dinner cooking, a landmark you’re walking toward. What you focus on matters less than practicing the choosing itself.

Like any skill, this builds with repetition, not with one heroic effort. You can’t do it once and call yourself done, the same way you can’t do a thousand push-ups in a day and call yourself strong for the month.

5. Response Prevention First, Consistency Over Intensity

If she had to prioritize between exposure and response prevention, Kim would pick response prevention. She’d rather flip the acronym to RP/E.

Response prevention means identifying and gradually reducing the compulsions and safety behaviors that give you temporary relief but keep OCD running the show. That starts with an honest inventory of what those compulsions actually are, which can be uncomfortable to look at directly. It’s the piece that creates lasting change.

Consistency beats intensity. Small, steady practice most days will get you further than occasional all-out efforts followed by burnout. Progress in OCD recovery often looks like planting seeds, not flipping a switch. Some days your willingness, your kindness, your attention, all of it will be running low. The work is in returning to it, not in never faltering.

These Are Ingredients, Not Steps

Clarity, willingness, self-compassion, attention training, and response prevention aren’t a checklist you complete in order. They’re ingredients that show up together, in different amounts, depending on what’s happening in your life on a given day. You don’t need all five running at full strength at once, and a dip in one of them for a while doesn’t mean OCD recovery has stalled.

Get clear on what you want, be willing to feel discomfort while you go after it, do that kindly, practice directing your attention, and focus on reducing compulsions over engineering the perfect exposure. Keep going. Tiny steps add up.

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Links Of Interest

• Want to discuss this episode with me and others that share your experiences?
• Disordered – With Josh Fletcher
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• Find my “Practical Mindfulness for Anxiety Recovery” Groups
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• The Books I’ve Written on Anxiety and Recovery
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Disclaimer: The Anxious Truth is not therapy or a replacement for therapy. Listening to The Anxious Truth does not create a therapeutic relationship between you and the host or guests of the podcast. Information here is provided for psychoeducational purposes. As always, when you have questions about your own well-being, please consult your mental health and/or medical care providers. If you are having a mental health crisis, always reach out immediately for in-person help.