Most of all, Jim McAndrew (not his real name) wants to give you hope and inspiration from his experience in overcoming decades of violent obsessions and OCD doubts:

I wish people could know how good you feel when you recover.  Most of the other things you read about OCD talk about how bad you feel when you are suffering with it, and how to put up with it.  But I’ve never read anything that says how good you feel, and I wonder if that would be a big help for people during the therapy process.

I can tell you right now it’s like Heaven!  People at work say things like  ‘We don’t know where he is getting his energy and ideas”.   Things have never been so good.

In the past, my wife would say ‘We’ve run out of some groceries, can you go and get some’, and I would have make an excuse so I didn’t have to go.  But now just going to the grocery store and being able to stay there, even if the OCD feelings may still come, it’s feels like I am free.  And it’s a very strange feeling!

But getting control of his OCD wasn’t always easy, and Mr. McAndrew  sometimes wondered if his family really understood what he was going through:

If they hadn’t pushed me and I had just stayed by myself in a corner then I may not have recovered. Overall I think everything would have been much worse if my family was not behind me.  One of my friends told me ‘If you don’t do these things (exposure assignments) you have to do eventually you won’t be able to get out of your room.’

But on the other hand I felt ‘Did they have to be so hard on me?  Was it really necessary?’  In the beginning there was a lot of compassion from my family, just like with any other sickness like heart disease.

But then I began to always worry about how they were feeling, how their life was being affected.  I realized that eventually people were having more sympathy for my family’s suffering than for me. I think it’s very hard for people to understand OCD because it’s a mental illness. I wish people could look at OCD just like they do with a physical illness like heart disease.

You can also read Mrs. McAndrew’s perspective as a spouse dealing OCD with in a separate story on this site.

Over the years I’ve seen hundreds of patients of all ages work successfully with their families to control their OCD. I’ve included many of these stories in my books ‘Getting Control’ and ‘The Imp of the Mind’.