OCD Fear - How Overcoming Fearful Thoughts Helped OCD Sufferers

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is a chronic disease -- at present, there are means to control it and recover from it, but there is no cure to it, or a vaccine to prevent it from ever occurring.
If you have had OCD, it may be possible for you to keep it in the background, but there is no way that you can remove it from your life.
The risks involve to your OCD ritual will eventually relapse if you do not manage to effectively control your compulsions throughout your life.
Sadly, if you have had OCD and you recovered from it through therapy or medication, you will have to continue with your treatment for the rest of your life, or else, the OCD fear will wake up again.
OCD is characterized in three levels: first, the biochemical generation of the obsessive thoughts and second, the compulsion to perform the thought and third, giving in to the compulsion and actually performing the obsessive thought.
The first level is uncontrollable; however, levels two and three can be downplayed by therapy and medications.
The truth about OCD is, while OCD sufferers may be able to resist performing the compulsion, they cannot control their neurotransmitter from sending information to their brain forcing them to think of the obsessive thought.
Recent studies have shown that as humans suppress a thought, the more he will be thinking about it.
It is better then for an OCD sufferer to think about his obsession more.
Rhetorically speaking, "When you want to think about it less, think about it more!" Or simply, when the sufferer is not afraid of the thought anymore, the easier for him to comprehend that the thought is synthetic, that it is not actually his own thoughts, but a biochemical glitch resulting to false neurotransmitter signal.
OCD fear starts in the mind, and the first step to recovering from OCD is to accept that the fear is inescapable.
For example, for an OCD sufferer who is obsessed with thoroughly "cleaning" (so that means, every time he makes contact or even to the point of thinning the surface of these "publicly held" things) door knobs, telephone handles, light switches or faucet handles out of fear that not doing so will definitely make him susceptible to deadly diseases, he must confront this fear in order to get through the first stage of recovering.
He should make up his mind to choose confronting the fear head on through neutralizing activities, rather than performing the compulsion.
Eventually, the sufferer will realize that his fears are unjustified and that the compulsion need not be necessarily performed.
Neutralizing activities are generally taught in Cognitive/Behavioral Therapies.
So far, experts agree that CBT is the most effective way to treat OCD though more than half the cases, sufferers still need OCD medications in order to fully control their obsessions.
In the end, the only thing that matters most in the journey of an OCD sufferer to recovery is to acknowledge the fact that he has OCD.