HELP!

Well, here we go again. For most of my late teenage years, I struggled with intrusive POCD thoughts. At one point, an extremely disturbing image came into my mind of me watching and getting off to child sexual abuse material. I eventually managed to move past it and understood that trying to work out whether it was a real memory or an OCD-created image was only making things worse. Recently, though, it has come back very strongly, and it feels incredibly real again. I avoid porn websites now because I’m terrified of accidentally coming across something disturbing. Social media can be difficult too, because I’ve previously been exposed to extremely graphic and disturbing videos without choosing to see them, including when I was younger, and those experiences have stayed with me. My OCD can even make me question whether I enjoyed seeing things that I know I found deeply upsetting. This current intrusive image has been causing me an enormous amount of distress. I feel ashamed and disgusted by it, even though the thought itself is completely unwanted. I’ve found myself thinking that I don’t deserve anything good because of it, and at my worst I’ve become suicidal because I couldn’t cope with the guilt and fear. I don’t want to go down that route again. I’m trying to remind myself that I don’t need to solve whether an intrusive image was a memory, an imagination, or something else. What matters is that I’m experiencing OCD and that I’m going to work on it rather than investigating it. Has anyone else experienced OCD turning an intrusive image into uncertainty about whether it was a memory? I’d really appreciate hearing about people’s experiences with dealing with the uncertainty and moving forward, rather than trying to establish whether a particular memory was real.