- Date posted
- 1y
It’s been like this for a year
I saw someone on here say they dealt with POCD for only 3 months and they just got better…I’ve been dealing with the same theme every day for the past year now. What does that mean?
I saw someone on here say they dealt with POCD for only 3 months and they just got better…I’ve been dealing with the same theme every day for the past year now. What does that mean?
It wholly depends on the person’s life experiences and how far deep in the OCD rabbit hole you’re in. You post a lot of reassurance seeking posts, which just makes OCD worse. That’s why therapists say to not seek reassurance, check, ruminate, etc. because it prolongs symptoms and OCD issues overall. Most likely, that person stopped doing compulsions completely, even though it’s really hard, and threw themselves into ERP with their therapist. And they could’ve just have developed OCD and got help nearly immediately, so there’s not years of bad habits built up and lots of issues connected to OCD due to compulsions and rituals. It took me 6 years to fully recover. It’s going to be different person to person. Comparison is a killer of hope.
Youre afraid that because youve dealt with it longer it might mean something deeper? Youre looking for certainty but trust me when i say that ocd wont let you have that certainty. Its like a monster that eats certainty and gets hungrier the more you feed it. How do you kill it? Starve it. Stop looking for certainty and remember that youre not alone! I believe in you!
My last and almost life long theme/sub-theme largely subsided recently and my ocd felt like it wasn’t even an issue. Then I went on winter break from uni and being alone made my mind come up with a whole new topic to obsess over. TLDR on my fears, my advisor wouldn’t email me back for a while about signing up for classes so my mind started to worry “what if he doesn’t in time and you can’t enroll this semester and you lose this whole life you just built and all these new friends” So when that issue was resolved my mind found other scarier ways I could be uprooted from my current life and friends that I’ve grown so attached to. Then my mind remembered back when I was struggling with false memories and scrupulosity and I essentially made a post on a forum 2 and a half years ago saying I did something or was convinced I did something that I never actually did. Now I’ve been spiraling about someone finding it reporting me and I either get seen as a horrible person or arrested or something over something I never actually did but “admitted” to out of fear of going to hell. My mind won’t let it go and keeps finding new reasons for it to be “valid” “logical” or even inevitable. I feel like it’s just hanging over my head and I can never rest easy. Especially when I try to focus on my daily tasks or plan for the future I get this horrible flair up of “why plan for the future when this could come back in that future and you get uprooted from all of it” my mind won’t rest without certainty being uprooted won’t happen but certainty doesn’t exist, at least not with ocd. This sucks and I miss being care free.
People who went from a really bad time with OCD to a better time now. Is it really possible? What was your theme? Did you take medication?
Okay so I’ve dealt with harm OCD from the beginning. Started off with harming my kids, going to jail and then harming myself. The harm to myself stuck around for a long time. Then it went away and other themes picked up but it keeps coming back. This is like the third time it’s come back and every single time it comes back it feels worse. It feels like this is the time something is going to happen. Has anyone ever dealt with this? With old themes constantly coming back and feeling more real? Please any advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks
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