I am OK with Taking Medication for OCD

When I started my OCD journey, I ended up freaking myself out over the possibility of taking medication. Well, now that I am about 2 years into my journey of healing, I am finally coming to accept it even though my initial reaction was tough.

I started taking Zoloft right when I had a major panic attack at work. This terrified me so bad that I wanted to make sure it wouldn’t happen again. My doctor did not explain to me that this stuff takes quite a while to begin to work and that I would need to be patient.

The next few weeks of taking my Zoloft, I began to feel much worse. At this point my OCD began to show its ugly face. My anxiety rose more because of this and I finally took myself to the hospital. Well, they explained it more that these medications need to be taken for quite a while and feeling worse before you are better is normal.

My previous doctor also did not diagnose me with OCD at that point so my dosage was extremely low to treat OCD. Dosages for treatment of OCD symptoms is in the upper range, my new doctor maxed me out on Zoloft. This is when I began to feel much better and started to believe that I could get better.

Medication worked wonders for me but, I had work to do. I still had this nag in the back of my mind that I would eventually revert back to bad OCD or that my intrusive thoughts were going to spike. Essentially, I was ruminating that I had OCD. This is a compulsion that I had no idea I was performing.

The medication and therapy have been a game changer. In my experience of living with OCD, the toughness of therapy, and taking medications for the rest of my life is totally worth it. I refuse to let myself go back to that place and the tools from ERP have been a god send that I will use forever.