I was fine for a few months and I feel my HARMOCD is coming back. It’s still the targeted thought to “kill mom” it’s bringing me alot of anxiety and it’s the only thought that is still around. What do I do?
My brain has repeated many things. Things that give me terrible anxiety and some that still persist. Do not try to calm yourself down from the thought. Unless it really feels completely unbearable and it’s urgent then yes do a technique. Desensitizing yourself to your thoughts does not work right away. The goal is to to be able to sit with the thoughts without immense anxiety. Not to get rid of them. Once your brain gets bored then they can go away. But again that’s not the goal. I know this is scary and I’m so sorry you’re experiencing this. I understand about money being tight, maybe look into grants or financial aid for erp.
Use ice on your chest and neck... Breathe.. do 5-4-3-2-1 grounding technique... If still feeling in danger, call for help
@hanysm@gmail.com Call for help? For what?
Are you in OCD therapy with a trained OCD therapists who uses ERP therapy?
@Steven55! No moneys tight
Be mindful that OCD attaches itself to who and what you value and what you fear. You can also be enjoying yourself and it will try to find a way to screw up your day.
It’s perfectly normal to have a thought like “kill your mom”. The problem is not with having the thought but with the meaning you attach to it. This means do everything you can not to answer the questions that come up after the thought such as “do I want to kill her?” “What if I lose control?” Am I a bad person for having these thoughts?”trying to answer these questions would be you doing a compulsion and will only make things worse and keep the initial intrusive thoughts stronger. Think of this as a math problem like 82x67, it would take you mental effort to try and figure this out, but you can choose whether you do it. Your ocds questions are the same except without an actual answer so don’t put in the effort to figure it out
I’m having a very bad evening with my intrusive thoughts. I was doing really good dealing with them but tonight one hit me hard. I’ve been having a lot of different intrusive thoughts but I’ll have one occasionally about hurting my mom or my dog who I love and they’re the only family I have in my life. They’re my world. I was helping my mom put away the dishes and I had the big kitchen knife in my hand and my intrusive thought was you could stab your mom. And then my brain said I had a twitch in my hand and that meant I wanted to do it. Let me just say that I wouldn’t hurt a fly. I actually caught a fly in a glass and put it outside instead of killing it this evening before this intrusive thought happened. I’m such a gentle and compassionate and caring person and these thoughts instantly cause me to have a panic attack. And I have no one to talk to them about. I know they’re hard for my mom to hear and I don’t want to be any more of a burden than I already am. I do desperately want to tell her and have her reassure me that I’m not crazy or a psycho. Then my thoughts wander to if your hand did flinch could you be a psychopath. Is hurting someone in you. I know it’s not but I feel like my mind is out to get me and hurt me. I’m working so hard and I thought I was doing so good but I need to know why I have these thoughts. They’re not ok. I need someone to help me make sense of why. I know we aren’t supposed to ruminate but I shouldn’t have thoughts like this about people I love and care about the most in the world.
I’ve been dealing with a really bad flare up the last 2 weeks and i’ve been dealing with ocd on and off for years. I was finally feeling better today, So of course my ocd decided to bring up an old intrusive thought that was really upsetting and now i’m stuck on it again. The reason why I struggle so much to conquer my ocd is because I developed ocd as postpartum so my ocd targets my kids, the ones that mean everything to me. The intrusive thoughts range from mild to really disturbing. While I know deep down the intrusive thoughts aren’t true or me, the ocd makes it feel SO real and true which makes me feel like I HAVE to disprove the thoughts and with confidence but the ocd won’t let me. It also makes me question analyze and judge everything I do. It’s an endless cycle of pain and I just want to be a mom without ocd telling me i’m a horrible person all day every day. 😪
This might contain triggering content, but I'm also wondering if others have dealt with this similar thought, and if so, how to deal with it? Overall, I've been doing so well these past few days. I'm able to eat again, which I hadn't been able to do because of how much anxiety I'd been experiencing. I'm spending time around loved ones and not just rotting in my room, and I've been able to wake up without immediately being bombarded by intrusive thoughts. When things first got really bad, I'd wake my mom up every night for reassurance, but I haven't done that in a while either. I'm really proud of myself, but there's still this nagging thought in my mind... While looking through others posts on here, hoping to find advice that'd fit my situation, I ended up making things worse. Someone mentioned how they had a fear that they'd purposely search for illegal content (related to POCD). I panicked, and "what ifs" flooded my thoughts. "What if the intrusive thoughts affect who I am as a person, and I do that?" I'm terrified that I'll search for those things, which I know means I wouldn't do it. But then, another person on here said they'd actually looked for those things, and that freaked me out even more. Does that mean it's possible for that to happen to me? I don't want to do that, but I keep having intrusive thoughts surrounding it. I've been doing so well these past few days. I'm just... stuck. I don't know what to do. I've spoken with other people who have the same fears, but how do I manage this? It's not something I've even thought about before seeing those posts. I've been practicing accepting the uncertainty, but I'm really struggling with this one. I hate this. This morning, I woke up, and the intrusive thoughts were back. It's just disheartening.
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